Like it or not some entity or group need to be responsible for handling illegal and dangerous content.
As to the article, yeah NPR receives money from a lot of places. Is anyone asking about the motivation of NYT, WSJ, etc? Just trying to remain open minded about motives on all sides!
That being said, this doesn’t mean that Facebook doesn’t have harmful effects. Facebook can lead to negative effects on users, but you have to take content by media platforms notoriously publicly opposed to it with a grain of salt
IMO there's not much you can do here. If all her friends are using Insta and she wants to too, she'll have one whether you like it or not.
The only difference is whether you'll know about it, but even that is up for question because many teens create secondary Insta accounts explicitly for the purpose of avoiding their parents' watchful eyes.
I also remeber everything being bad for my well being as a teen. Magazines and photoshop were the big thing, now it's just Instagram I guess. There's no shortage of ways to mess with a kids self esteem. Why single out tech and social media? What about sats and college admissions, and sports?
Of course this will never happens.
Only thing that is not my choice are ads, though those are relatively benign (but I actively hide uninteresting ads or ads I don't want to see).
Public opinion is important to various interests. Don't you think they'd try to manipulate it? Don't you think that astroturf campaigns on social media would be effective in driving narratives? Tons and tons and tons of internet sentiment these days is one influence op or another, and it's immediately obvious when you find a community where sentiment is organic: the difference is night and day, like between Bud Light and a great craft beer.
My daughter is getting to the age where some of her friends are starting to get smartphones, so I'm trying to sort out what will actually be best for her long-term development. I don't want her to be socially stunted, but I also don't want her to expose her to something that could be detrimental to her mental well-being.
In an ideal world, these kinds of networks would be based on open, federated platforms a la Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. As it stands I don't feel comfortable trusting the advertising industry to determine how these things should be run.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812310
Edit: As pointed out by another poster, FB pays NPR, even further muddling the waters. Aaaaaggggghhhhh