That passive-voice "social media couldn't exist anymore" implies an Orwellian bureaucracy that meticulously controls who is allowed to talk to whom. Someone has to enforce it.
No one is forcing Facebook to harm people like this. They choose to, in order to make money. We choose to allow the creation of jobs that are guaranteed to cause that kind of harm. My objection is to framing this as work that "has" to be done, as if there's no choice.
> Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void.
Right. We have Email and messaging apps. Websites would still exist and are dirt-cheap to start up, if someone wants to write for the public. Possibly social media could survive somehow, IDK, but they're (and their supporters) the ones saying they "have to" work this way. If so, maybe they should "have to" stop being in business.
There's a lot of variety in human brains. What will traumatize one person is comedy for another. There are (or at least used to be) websites you can seek out to look at pictures of grizzly death. It's simply not the case that everyone is damaged by looking at terrible things, and - to cut off that line of thought - the people who aren't are not monsters or sociopaths. They're just made of different stuff. I can't comment on whether Facebook et al are careful enough in their hiring practices, but I'm certain that there are plenty of people in the world that can do this job.
Email lists were popular before Facebook took over that niche. Nobody more than I would rather see the comeback of mailing lists, but that doesn't solve the problem. You can assume that if mailing lists got the kind of uptake that Facebook has, gmail/hotmail/etc would have the same content curation issues.
I'm still not sure exactly what you are proposing. Facebook gives me a way to communicate with my friends. It sounds like you want to take that away.
I want us to stop allowing that business models that rely on harming workers must exist. We may choose to allow it, but it's a choice. They do not "have to" do it, and we do not "have to" let them do it.
I hate discussion of harm to these workers that frames it as "well, it sucks, but we have to". We. Do. Not. Have. To. We may choose to, but we don't have to. We don't even have to if we want efficient mass communication. We have to if we want a few publishers to be able to corner and monetize the attention economy.
I'm sure the Linux kernel mailing list gets tons of vile things sent to it all the time which are filtered out.
I don't see why we have to involve business models at all. Any large all to all communication medium is going to have this issue and the only way to prevent it is to devolve back to the cable tv/newspaper era where people only consume content.
Obviously though a competitor with even less scruples will rise up and gobble up their marketshare if they did something that drastic. So the net result makes no difference.
To actually prevent child pornography from getting shared would require a dictatorship censoring the entire internet. Sure it would be the government instead of multiple big private companies, but that seems even worse than the current situation?
And if you go the other way and have millions of little networks, how do you plan on stopping all the bad stuff from being shared without an even more powerful and centralized dictatorship deciding who can form networks or not?
If you mean to get rid of all censorship and let free sharing of child pornography, etc., that will not pass any democratic legislature, at least in the West, since the vast majority of people want to limit that.
So in the end all alternatives would lead to even less freedom. Have you actually thought through any of this?
Facebook's a magazine publisher at massive scale, that relies on worst-in-class submission and acceptance processes to make money. They're not in the file storage business.
I managed a web forum dedicated to one particular hobby. It was quite popular. Yet simply from spam management we disallowed auto activation of new account. We asked people to reply to a few questions in order to know a bit more about them and their intents. Yes we probably lost a large number of potential users but we actually got the users that were really motivated and not thousands of shadow accounts waiting for activations by bots as before.
I guess it wouldn't be out of question for a platform that allow anyone to put content to ask for a mandatory copy of the ID of the user as well as a receipt for a electrical bill or something proving where they live in order to be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. All these measures can be defeated but the amount of content to moderate would be in a much lower scale than when you allow accounts with random names and no validation.