alt Hacker NewsNope.
in more detail: Largely no.
Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.
This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.
The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.
A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.
It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.
Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.
Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.
Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.
> This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.
They do not want to give you the best digital experience you can have, they want to give you the most addictive and exploitative digital experience they can legally get away with because they value the money that brings in more than they value anything else. They'll be content to see you hurt or killed if it makes them more money. They've knowingly been hurting and killing people, including children, for money. Meta, and the corporations like it, have leveraged all of their vast resources against the average person and the average person is always going to lose in that situation.