I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
