Summary
A YouGov poll revealed that 77% of Germans support banning social media for those under 16, similar to a new Australian law.
The survey found that 82% believe social media harms young people, citing harmful content and addiction.
In Australia, the law fines platforms up to AUD 49.5 million (€30.5M) for allowing under-16s to create accounts, with enforcement trials set before implementation next year. Critics
There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.
So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.
Begin with the “cherry-picking”:
Disinformation gets cut out.
Fact-checking is protected-speech, not immediately-auto-deleted-because-it-harms-profitable-disinformation.
Ideological-prejudice gets cut out.
The major racisms: sex/gender racism, skin racism, class racism, & national racism, get stomped.
Correct & true journalism ( going to require independent ratings for individuals & organizations & for sub-branches-of-organizations ) gets automatically & consistently boosted.
You put those in-place, & MASSIVE improvement is inescapable.
The Problem™??
Big Tech WON’T TOLERATE anything interfering with their highjacking of the world, with their asserting their claim to monarchic/polyarchic world rule.
EVER.
Try linking a Wikipedia article, to fact-check something, on yt…
Autodeleted!
Rabies is their means-of-gaining-possession-of-the-world, & NOTHING can be tolerated to interfere with their rabies/means.
No matter how many humans die, in which circumstances their platforms helped enforce.
For-profit-corporations are psychopaths, by default…
So long as we continue maintaining-otherwise, they continue winning…
until it’s too late.
( & we don’t get told when it is too late, either: that’s movie-fantasy plot-point, not reality )
_ /\ _