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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

I fear that it may be as simple as that. Because if that's the cause, I'm not sure we can fix it.

Pi-hole blocking Instagram works pretty well for me, although not perfectly.

We can also treat this like smoking and opioids and lawsuit/tax excessively instagram and use it to pay for public mental health services.

It seems like there will be a clear evidence trail that Instagram knowingly marketed and permitted use of their app by children under 13. So that’s some future administration/state AG payday, I think.

You are right. I should not be defeatist. If social media is truly ruining our mental health (it's not really an "if" anymore, is it?) then it is both reasonable and necessary to start doing something along those lines.

This is like people reading research in the 50s that smoking causes lung cancer. Even if true what are we going to do? Everybody smokes so lets just keep smoking instead of trying to quit.

The Clean Air Act provided a legal framework to fix air pollution. We need a similar approach to fix mind pollution. I don’t think this is impossible because Zuckerberg has managed to piss off apparently everyone across the political spectrum. If it was someone like Steve Jobs I would say the problem would be much harder.

I see regulation as a last resort. Bigger government is rarely the answer. Social media is certainly exacerbating the mental health crisis, but I believe the smarter play is to better prepare our children for social dynamics, healthy communication, and emotional intelligence. I prefer to improve the people than to restrict their freedoms.

I think somewhat “bigger government” is a perfectly appropriate response to vastly bigger corporations. Three years ago there were no companies worth $1 trillion and now there are three companies worth $2 trillion.

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