Facebook is a massive part of social media. Billions of users. It is apart of society in its sheer size. A society decided “we want to make this better” and acted appropriately. I think it’s a noble pursuit for a society to attempt to reduce the clearly negative aspects of social media.
There is no real freedom of choice. The network effect cements big players positions. Try telling an 80 year old grandma with a 20 year old laptop to use mastodon. Likely no one she knows is on it.
Finally, individuals make essentially no difference when choosing to not use FB. But when choosing to not go to a local bar, that may be 0.03% loss of their monthly revenue. The only actor that can reasonably bargain with huge organizations is other huge organizations.
but there is? simply choose to not use facebook.
The only way you can exist on the modern world is to accept the TOS and crap that a small number of companies are in control over. Saying “just don’t use major tech services” makes people revert back to older methods like snail mail, which is just silly, not a real choice.
The consequences of “simply choosing no” matters. If that means you can’t interact in modern society, that means that service is essential, and should be tested as such.
Try selling moonshine you brewed under the counter, and you'll quickly learn how much regulation there is.
That sounds like as good a metaphor for addictive and unhealthy social media feeds as any! :-)
So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.