I'd rather just a full blanket ban on social media, but I guess it's something.
Social media is basically what cigarettes were in the 50s: everyone uses it, and seemingly no one is aware of how it is almost entirely bad.
Social media is basically what cigarettes were in the 50s: everyone uses it, and seemingly no one is aware of how it is almost entirely bad.
Are forums social media? What about reddit? What about YouTube?
I think what we really need is a ban on algorithmic recommendations that seek to encourage engagement or total time spent on the app.
Is it a site that hosts user generated content and makes that content available to others in any 1-n fashion? Great, you have social media.
My hope is that such a law would heavily bias sites towards simple, less manipulative algorithms.
If you forced, for example, TikTok to do this right now, they would presumably add a page to their app with their recommender algorithm. Then what? Meta or other competitors might be interested in copying aspects of it, but normal users would likely ignore it and continue being addicted to TikTok.
Banning targeted ads will greatly reduce the benefit of ads (to the social media company) since they are rendered less effective. This will tip the scales of the cost-benefit tradeoff that the company makes. In this case, the cost of the ad is that it's annoying to the user. Every ad company chooses a tradeoff. If you made the benefit smaller, then they would have to reduce the cost too, which would lead to lower ad volume, which would reduce the incentive for engagement.
Any other way to reduce the effectiveness of ads also works. I'm sure the method I suggested(banning targeting) is not bulletproof, but they key thing that needs to be done is artificially reducing the effectiveness/relevance/quality of ads.
Banning algorithmic recommendations would need to ban search engines.
Social media is ultimately just a website. Anything I can think of quickly gets down the road of banning the web browser and/or banning email.
The only solution is people have to have the freedom to use these stupid platforms or not. People have to have the freedom to be stupid on stupid platforms.
Brazil is going in a much different direction.
> Things like banning the sale of personal information would be a step in the right direction.