But that gap would just be filled by someone else. You can’t really stop technology and human greed.

I think that one company should be legally prohibited from occupying a gap that large. It happened with AT&T back and the day, and it feels like we are overdue today. Facebook shouldn't have been able to buy WhatsApp and Instagram.

Large industries with the ability to cause far-reaching harm have been regulated many times before.

Not to sound pessimistic but... have they been really regulated?

The most common example of this is the tobacco industry and it's pretty much still there. Smaller, sure.

But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day? Or the car industries destroying the environment, cities and people? Oil industry perhaps?

There are many other examples of these. They are "regulated" in the strict sense, but in reality, they control governments and keep doing whatever they want.

I don't think anything will ever change in this scenario. After all, capitalism is the answer to every problem, right? /s

There is plenty of reason to see it as a bit grim, but a lot of good has been done. I was specifically thinking of the industrial revolution and the abysmal human rights records, pollution and desperate mill towns which ground people to death. It’s a low bar, but things have got better.

>But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day?

Hyperbole much? Only 150,000 people die each day worldwide from all causes.

If an industry was committing a literal holocaust every few weeks I think we would notice.

So social media is like the tobacco industry? And what weas users knowingly, purposely share online should be regulated? And by which government? Companies like Facebook are global.

Probably a lot worse than the tobacco industry in the long term. With a lot more unknown effects and problems.

Again, the problem is not sharing. The problem is that they knowingly manipulate the sharing. How they do that is their problem.

I have no idea how to go about enforcing this. But it's impossible for me to look at it and say "just let it run it's natural course".

And smokers still knowingly smoke, causing themselves and others harm. Because of this (and also arguably for revenue) the behaviour of the multinational tobacco companies is regulated by the governments in the countries they operate in.

Regarding what should be regulated, I’d say that assisting genocide should be blocked for a start.

That might have saved Google+. Of course it's questionable whether Google would have handled it any better.

I'm really hoping we're headed towards decentralised federated social networks. With more control in the hands of the users. Like email + usenet on steroids. Not that those were perfect, but in that kind of environment, everybody can curate their own little corner, rather than putting all that in the hands of a single company.

Sure you can, you can at least reign it in. We do it all the time. Every time I read sentences like "you cannot stop technology xy" what you actually seem to mean is "I don't want to".

We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world?

And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.

The problem is that the thing you're really trying to control here is technologically-enabled gossip. You don't need a behemoth the size of Facebook for that. Stuff like Myanmar, that could happen just as well with simple text messages (1 guy sends to 2, each of those sends to 2 as well, and it goes exponential).

we've had popular and commercial peer or group based messaging for more than two/three decades now, but nothing has rivaled the virality and speed of Facebook, twitter and so forth. There's a difference between propagation in a private network of a handful of people at a time, and the sort of mass agitation of public social news feeds.

If twitter would only allow direct sharing between say, a personal circle of friends, I'd bet you a lot of money that we'd see very different outcomes.

In Myanmar, it was the private network of individuals, resharing posts on WhatsApp. Everyone only shares to their direct friends - but then those friends share with their friends etc. And I don't see how you can restrict that technologically - I mean, you could block share-of-share, but then people will just reshare screenshots (it's already common enough as it is).