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Comment on The inarguable case for banning social media for teens

This is the newest think of the children panic.

Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It’s not social media that’s the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not “safety”, it’s damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids can access.

We didn’t solve smoking adverts by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.

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phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I disagree, as you said it yourself: companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful. That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful

Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.

First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.

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- t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.
  
  Every panic has reasons. Whether they are valid reasons, proportional reasons, or reasons that matter, is up for interpretation.
  
  First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.
  
  Yes, then we can talk about banning systems that remain harmful despite corporate influence being removed. You’re still just arguing (by analogy) to ban kids from places where smoking adverts are until we fix the adverts.
  
  companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful
  
  No, companies didn’t make social media harmful, they made specific aspects of social media harmful. You need to actually approach this with nuance and precision if you want to fix the root cause. If, on the other hand, your actual goal is just to ban social media because you’ve decided that is your ideological goal, you need to be upfront about that.
  
  That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful
  
  Every reason that’s been cited in studies for social media being harmful (algorithmic steering towards harmful content, influencer impact on self-image in kids, etc) is a result of serving profits. There are other harms as well, such as astroturfing campaigns, which are non-unique to social media, and can’t be protected against by banning it.
  
  Let me ask you upfront, do you believe that children should not have access to the internet in general?
  
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