alt Hacker NewsI'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
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A society without rules is not really a society.
It is easy to say that we shouldn't limit what a person is allowed to do. That a person should be allowed to use their free will. That sounds nice because nobody want to be controlled by anyone else. But let's turn it upside down and instead say that we disallow companies from doing certain things.
- Instead of saying that a person may not install unsafe wall sockets, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell unsafe wall sockets. - Instead of saying that a person may not take any job they like, we can say that companies must provide workplace safety. - Instead of saying that people are not allowed to smoke or use social media, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell addictive products.
So it is a question of perspective where both viewpoints are valid.
And of course addictive is a scale from nicotine to deep fried chicken to infinite scroll. And then it is a question about the customer's ability to see through and make rational choices which of course depend on age, knowledge, existing alternatives etc. It is not that easy for a teenager to resist the works of thousands of engineers and data statisticians who are working on increasing retention.
So just saying that it should be allowed because of Free Will is to ignore all the complexities around it.
You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.