Large groups of people just don't know how to solve these sorts of problems. A government will never say "facebook should either not exist or should radically modify its product so that it is no longer successful" At best, they will push for identity verification or age verification.

These are not the only two possible courses, but these will be the choices put in front of us. Get used to reading books and going on walks. The internet is almost dead.

The obvious answer to this mess is probably a simple engagement tax.

Companies like Facebook and Tiktok are incentivized to behaviorally modify their users in a way that's harmful to society: they make more money the longer everyone in society has their face glued to a phone. They'd be thrilled and printing money as society collapsed into every person staring into a slab of glass 20 plus hours per day.

Tax that time directly so it's no longer profitable to glue everyone to their phone.

I was going to ask "at what point do people who work for Google and Meta ask themselves "Are we the baddies?"" But who am I kidding, as long as you're all making the big bucks for sitting at a computer, you'll continue to see this as harmless behavior that people are just upset about for no particular reason.

As someone who grew up as OG (original geek), it's now amazing to look around and see that technology seems to be having an ever more negative impact on my everyday life.

These are the types of cases that shed light on the desire for age verification.

This is an area where we really could use case law to protect kids from the Zuckerberg's of the world. It's important for the future. We're not going to "self-regulate" our way out of this.

Addiction has a lot of definitions one can split hairs over but I note the following

The feeds are and have been for years highly random (at least one anecdote of two people who were 'married' - relationship status - on FB yet none saw the others' posts)

If you don't go on FB they really don't like it and they spam you to death

Can Zuck meaningfully claim they're not in the business of addiction, whatever else? No. His life philosophy is "dumb fucks"

Edit: Oh, and People You May know. Now everyone can friend you and you have 2000 friends... none of whose posts you'll ever see. And the psychological baggage. Is the cute girl I like looking at my profile and that's why they're on there, or is it shamelessly pulled from geolocation data?

[dead]

Seriously losing confidence in the American judicial system with rulings like this. Facebook is already blocking children below age 13 and now with social media bans in place in many states the cut off is now 16. So frankly rulings like this just seem like the government seeing dollar signs and asking for hand outs. And all because people apparently can't accept any personal responsibility.

Disclaimer: I do not have a FB account.

This actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research.

There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.