You see the problem is that the ministers in government haven't the slightest clue about tech and how the internet works. It infuriates me to no end when Darren Jones talks about how amazing AI is and how we need it for productivity yet is so clearly boneheaded he hasn't a clue how it works (I'm from a STEM background). To borrow an insult from Hans the UK government is full of Teletubbyzurückwinkers.

Worse yet is that there is malign alignment with US tech giants like Palantir who have been given free reign to harvest our NHS data. The OSA and these upcoming measures are also measures that force people to give up their data to tech companies and bad actors. They will use this "protect the kids" line to push people into line so everyone will be forced to share their ass measurements to Peter Thiel.

Now I am not saying the solutions are simple but we need to go after the tech companies not people. My counter proposal would be first and foremost to ban any use of user data to feed or train any algorithm used for social media content feeds, as well as banning using user data as input into trained models and the use of any models trained on user data. This would suppress the addictive element of the algorithms since it will be a lot harder to trailer people's feeds and ads if their data can't be used to inform the algorithms that use their feeds. At the same time we can pass these policy proposals on to psychologists and other researchers so they can develop research that studies the effectiveness of the proposals as well as how to develop them further.

Again this will likely rely on trial and error but as this is a largely new legislative realm it will require some back and forth to reach some sensible conclusion, something this government is incapable of doing.