I'm trying to be pragmatic when I propose to curb the use of algorithm driven feeds and limit businesses to gather massive amounts of highly personal data thats is used to train algorithms to become even more effective attention grabbers.
There has to be limits to what a government can regulate or ban. Being social online should not be banned. Allowing companies to inject themselfs and interfere in our social interactions, gather almost unlimited data and use it to exploit our psychological quirks and weaknesses should be.
EDIT: And I agree that for the user, the ads are not the main problem. However, ads are the main incentive for businesses to do whatever they can to grab your attention, and this is a big problem.
Every commercial social media platform that I know of earns money primarily by selling and displaying personalized and targeted ads – so that is where we should start. The 'targeted' part can be addressed by strengthening privacy regulations and enforcing them vigorously, and the 'ads' part can be attenuated by banning ads made for and shown to kids and young people.
Generally speaking, the law is quite clear: Ads specifically target towards children is illegal. Ads than are meant for grown ups, but is likely to be seen by children also has to adhere to certain limits.
I have to say I'm really happy with these laws. The same goes for the law that prohibits ads for alcohol containing beverages.
We can't outright ban social media (for a lot of different reasons), but we can regulate away the most harmfull aspects.
One of the fundemental underlying problems is the lack of good privacy laws. As long as companies can gather whatever they want and use it against us to show us personalized ads and posts to hold on to our attention as long as possible, we will not be able to curb the worst aspects of social media.