> So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this?
The naive solution is to place blame on the people who are influenced by the most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans. Kinda like how the plastic producers will push recycling, knowing they can shift blame for the pollution away from their production of the pollution, because people love blaming. You'll see commenters here telling us that the answer is for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get out, get involved in their communities under their own willpower. These ideas are doomed from the outset.
The real solution is already being enacted in a number of US states and countries[1]: legally restricting access to the poison, rather than blaming the people who are at the mercy of finely honed instruments of behavior modification when they're unable to stop drinking it under their own willpower.
I don't see how the control and enforcement of "social media age verification" solves for the "people who are unable to stop... under their own willpower." My grandparents are more addicted to the phone than I am. Taking the superlative stance of social media being the "most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans" wouldn't the correct regulation be some sort of threshold of consumption (screen time limits per application), or rehabilitation for those that have crossed a line into psychological addiction? I imagine the easiest, assuming you see "the algorithm" as the problem, would be to ban selective algorithms and force timeline-based feeds or the like.
Laws and regulations are also ”advanced behaviour modification”. That is how they work. Tobacco is clear example of this, almost everybody used to smoke back in the 90’s and 00’s (including me) whereas after years of laws regulatios, taxation, public education, and providing healthcare for addiction, we are at the point where smokin makes you a loser rather than some cool Marlboro dude/dudette. There is very little society can do for grandparents addicted to fb, but we can prevent the same happening to the future elderly.
Limiting at which age you can use the product is just one part of the puzzle. You could also hit a big tax on ad revenue gained via social media to veer people off from ruining their brains. There is a host of others tools as well and I think we will see them implemented more and more. The tech billionaires fight back and rather fund a fascist dictator to power than lose a single cent, but there you go. But I think the Musk’s and the like have constantly stepped over boundaries to the extent that the tide has changed.
The problems occurred when online interaction got mediated by corporations with profit motives that use dark patterns, automated systems and algorithms to extract more revenue from its users.
Most of my real-life friends are people I've first met online, or as a consequence of having met someone online. Those online sites have mostly been run by enthusiasts, driven by some hobby, fandom or other interest. A couple of them have risen highly in popularity and attracted many thousands of users, and also served news and allowed vendors to use their site for interactions with customers.
Those communities that have thrived have made sure that discourse does not get poisoned. They have had active, strong but fair moderators. Many have strict rules against discussing politics or religion, but people have a need to discuss that too sometimes — and being identifiable e.g. between subreddits could put people off from doing that.
Also, where do you draw the line to what is an online community and what is "social media"?
I've avoided Facebook and X-twitter, but I know genuine communities exist there too.
This rings untrue. Hacker News is about the most "social media" type of site I use, and I still feel the shift towards isolation others described.
Also, the naive view is to place all the blame for a broad cultural shift on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok and pretend people can't choose to limit their use. Someone pretending there can only be a single factor to blame for a problem is usually a biased person with a bone to pick. The rhetoric supports your cause, but the US is not going to ban social media for adults any time soon and telling people they're helpless until the government bans social media is unhelpful at best.
But making children (and adults, because how else can you tell without checking) give their biometrics to companies (and by extension the highest bidder (palantir, paramilitaries, and police)) that helped create and then exacerbated this crisis is like asking the drug dealer association to help folks quit by giving them new exotic chemicals heretofore undiscovered.
You 'win' the war on pollution by making companies actually pay for their externalities, repeat offenders cease to exist, their assets seized, and their executives are jailed, rather than just 'paying fines' for the thousand of corpses they leave in their wake.
Likewise, if social media companies produce informational or social 'pollution' so defined, we can do likewise and insist they defray the cost of the damage. If they are no longer profitable when the cost is not paid by society, then they'll have to learn to innovate again.
the “real solution” wouldn’t involve isolating children in already marginalised minorities, making them lose one of the only sources of community they feel safe in.
But that's the problem: they're NOT safe in those communities.
We've created these unhealthy gardens where young people feel safe, removing any reason for them to engage in the real world. They don't thrive in these places, they slowly withdraw.
If you parents are your abusers, then their 'real world' will be unyieldingly bad no matter what social controls the internet employs.
You have said that 'feeling safe' is 'unhealthy' because it's not 'real'. But constantly feeling and being unsafe, even if it is warranted by circumstance, is worse in every way.
We, as a society, do not support the agency to children to escape horrific circumstances. These online communities are a stop-gap against this active failure.
Ideally, they wouldn't need to escape at all, but that's not the conversation we're having.
No, I have the feeling that “feeling safe” is “unhealthy” because these online communities children get access to are full of predators who wish them harm.
The online communities in question do more damage than good. They encourage isolation and spread social contagion.
We should do more as a society, absolutely! But these places are not “stop gaps” because they’re NOT helping.
Taking something away by force is not the way to encourage someone to do something else. This is carrot or stick mentality. The city added benches and chairs in all the parks to improve the quality of our third spaces, as an example of social infrastructure.
The naive solution is to place blame on the people who are influenced by the most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans. Kinda like how the plastic producers will push recycling, knowing they can shift blame for the pollution away from their production of the pollution, because people love blaming. You'll see commenters here telling us that the answer is for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get out, get involved in their communities under their own willpower. These ideas are doomed from the outset.
The real solution is already being enacted in a number of US states and countries[1]: legally restricting access to the poison, rather than blaming the people who are at the mercy of finely honed instruments of behavior modification when they're unable to stop drinking it under their own willpower.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...