There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.
AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
Like they have in the UK--police arresting people for content. The police don't work for Facebook, I'm sure you realize.
Because unlike the US, where there are effectively no real consequences for companies that skirt the law, in China, the companies wouldn't dare try to skirt the law - executives in China know they can't bribe their way out of deliberately pissing off The Party when it comes to education.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims.
1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)).
This seems BS.
2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently.
This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
Your attention span is quite short.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people.
Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.