But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
And the social media companies don't want to manipulate you for power and profit?
The conspiratorial angles to these bans sounds an awful lot like the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
Governments produced far more disinformation about vaccines than social media, like claiming the covid vaccines reduced transmission when the studies behind them never claimed that and the actual data showed that clearly wasn't the case.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.
"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.
But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.