Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).