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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

No, getting content shoved into your face without human review is definitely a new problem. At least before recommendation algorithms, you were either looking up something you specifically sought out, or someone took on the publishing liability to recommend you something.

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You're still abdicating personal responsibility. Why is it Facebook's responsibility to keep YOU from becoming more extreme? I'm just playing devil's advocate here because the easy position right now is to blame social media.

It’s same as asking why should government control abuse of meth and heroin. These drugs along with social media, exploit certain nature of how our brain works to make us addicted and alter our state of mind.

Moreover, at a certain point we can either hope and dream that humanity becomes endowed with super-human personal responsibility or we can accept that this isn’t going to happen and look at our available options.

Yet we're seeing decriminalization of drugs, needle exchanges, etc that counter your argument. The world is becoming more liberal to drugs because criminalization has created a larger problem (black markets, impure drugs, etc).

I get your point is to have some more regulation, however the argument is much more nuanced than "Ban All Social Media" which is what I'm trying to portray.

Who is arguing for "banning all social media" in this comment chain? You're attacking a strawman.

We need high regulation of recommended content, probably by moving recommendations out of the scope of section 230. Pointing to a not banned but extremely highly regulated decriminalized sector kind of speaks for itself. It's not like I could go on a San Francisco street corner tomorrow and start selling pot like a paperboy.

The parent comment (the original one I responded to) said that if we can't find an equitable solution to "regulate them out of existence". That's what I was arguing against.

I actually agree with decriminalizing drugs, but I think they should be controlled like any other prescriptions or like weed is currently controlled. Specifically portion controlled so that drug does not destroy person's life. I have experimented meth and many other drugs. Mind that if you haven't done meth and you try to compare it to some other drug like alcohol then you are just ignorant. I have to say that it's easy to get lost in meth and a lot of people don't have mental will(or maybe capacity) to get out of the drug and hence I have to say that this type of thing does need to be controlled in some manner.

> You're still abdicating personal responsibility

No. Blame isn't indivisible. It's not even a zero-sum allocation.

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