There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.
The majority of people don't feel victim to addiction, it's a minority of people who are prone to it. Everyone shouldn't have their freedoms restricted just to cater to the more weak-minded.
Personally, I hope we come to protect the vulnerable regardless of their age.
Laws are there to protect powerful people (in many cases), to protect the majority (hopefully most cases) and to protect the vulnerable, sometimes from themselves (in a decent number of cases).
You cannot make people anything without limiting their freedom. How do you make people stronger? If you have an idea, there is a centralised point of control/failure. Bad actors will be more strong and free as well.
There's plenty of examples of successful measures to reduce harm by controlling the "environment" see: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, being old enough to drive on public roads, being old enough to take on debt, child labour, etc.
It's weird to use the words "environment" and "hazard" on one hand and "people" on the other. The discussion is about hazards designed, created and maintained by people. The environment to manipulate is people, organisations, and law.
Do I expect that some social media companies are really going to struggle to continue to operate at their current scale because of these changes? Yes I 100% expect it and I think it's great. It may lead to a smaller and more personal web. Your business model has no inherent right to exist if it harms people. Maybe, for example, you will need to hire more humans to handle moderation so that you stop killing people, and if humans don't scale, well, too bad, you're going to get smaller. We regulate gambling, tobacco etc. to limit the harm they do, I don't see any difference with social media.
To have the biggest impact without stifling innovation we can start by applying this rule to platforms which are above a certain revenue level. There is likely a combination of legislative and judicial action here in that there may already be crimes on the books which these platforms are committing, but the judiciary has not traditionally thought of a corporation being the person who committed that crime, certainly not at scale against thousands of victims. In other cases we may need to amend laws to make it clear that just because you used an algorithm to harm people at scale, doesn't make you immune to consequences from the harm you caused.
A common thread through all human history is people being misled on-mass. Before social media we were slaves to the tabloid headlines. Before widespread papers we were slaves to the pulpit. Etc.
For the last 10 years social media has been the tabloid but personalised. Outrage = engagement so the algorithms have pushed outrage, and personalized in the sense that they have searched for the thing that outrages each of us individually.
I fear that the next 10 years of social media is very basic generative stuff (LLMs don't need to get better; social media companies just have to apply what the current art), turning them into tabloid with intimacy. By turning into your friend in how they communicate with you, they get engagement x10.
The way to change someones mind is through intimacy.
And humans are suckers for it. We can't strengthen the masses against outrage, and we can't strengthen the individual against intimacy.
Sorry for being so pessimistic.
How is that inherently preferable to the addressing the harm itself? By what principle do you conclude that we should prefer one over the other whenever possible?
Is that what you prefer?
On the other hand, if everyone around you was a black belt in jiu jitsu and you knew that there was a good chance that they’d break your arm if you tried to sneak up and punch them, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, would you?
A much worse solution than e.g. jailing me. It's not everyone who is the problem, neither in my scenario nor in the case of a handful of gigantic social networks exploiting insecurities and addictive tendencies in children.
> On the other hand, if everyone around you was a black belt in jiu jitsu and you knew that there was a good chance that they’d break your arm if you tried to sneak up and punch them, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, would you?
Is that a better solution than jailing me?
Seems we've ended up with three different potential solutions and your principle already isn't holding any water IMO. To bring us back to the problem at hand I can think of an analogous set of three solutions:
1. Make everyone announce their age when they use a social media website so that they know not to exploit children, which is kind of like making everyone wear a loudspeaker. 2. "Harden" the children, which is like teaching everyone jiu jitsu 3. Remove the profit incentive to exploitation of children or otherwise by banning ad funded social networks. This is like jailing the culprit.
For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.
What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.