Re:Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban soc...
by somenameforme on Monday January 29, 2024 @10:54AM
(#39177712)
I'm almost invariably anti-regulation, but in this case - absolutely!
There's extensive evidence that social media is exceptionally harmful to people, especially children. And in this case there's also a major network effect. People want to be on social media because their friends are. It's like peer pressure, but bumped up by orders of magnitude, and in a completely socially acceptable way. When it's illegal that pressure will still be there because of course plenty of kids will still use it, but it'll be greatly mitigated and more like normal vices such as alcohol/smoking/drugs/etc. It'll also shove usage out of sight which will again help to reduce the peer pressure effects.
This will also motivate the creation/spread/usage of means of organizing/chatting/etc outside of social media. This just seems like a massive win-win scenario where basically nothing of value is being lost.
There's extensive evidence that social media is exceptionally harmful to people, especially children. And in this case there's also a major network effect. People want to be on social media because their friends are. It's like peer pressure, but bumped up by orders of magnitude, and in a completely socially acceptable way. When it's illegal that pressure will still be there because of course plenty of kids will still use it, but it'll be greatly mitigated and more like normal vices such as alcohol/smoking/drugs/etc. It'll also shove usage out of sight which will again help to reduce the peer pressure effects.
This will also motivate the creation/spread/usage of means of organizing/chatting/etc outside of social media. This just seems like a massive win-win scenario where basically nothing of value is being lost.