I absolutely see the point, but I also see how politically negligent the world has been in regulating social media. The companies that run the platforms are well aware of the risks and psychological harm their product causes, but will never ever do anything that is driven by those worries instead of profit. Hence, we need regulations. Unfortunately it is quite hard to impose anything within the legal framework that would help with the main issue. ID requests are a wrong answer to a real problem.

I am a longtime proposer of a big tobacco style set of policies. The banning and sanctioning of a harmful digital product is unfortunately exponentially harder than regulating a physical one like cigarettes. Nonetheless, the imposition of health advice, labels, and mandatory limits on usage to be built in the apps should be viable, just like imposing pictures of cancer patients and “smoking kills” on cigarette packages.

One thing I don't understand about aggressive anti-regulation arguments is they don't actually provide a solution. Supposedly the negative outcomes from social media are to be ignored because of privacy? Like you can ignore any societal issue with this blanket argument of privacy... Ok, shall we have no laws because fundamentally we should be free to do anything? Why is it acceptable for the government to stop me pouring crude oil into Sydney Harbour, but not to stop current status quo "acceptable" (but probably very harmful) behaviours like social media?

>I also see how politically negligent the world has been in regulating social media. The companies that run the platforms are well aware of the risks and psychological harm their product causes, but will never ever do anything that is driven by those worries instead of profit. Hence, we need regulations.

I'm sorry, how about some evidence? I'd like to see clear, causal, measured and well structured evidence of all this supposed massive social harm, in excess of the social harm that often happens to adolescents for just being hormone-loaded adolescents. HN is (ironically given the employment status of many readers here) loaded with breathless harping about the psychological evils of social media, but I see little concrete data being presented.

Your tobacco example is about a product for which evidence fulfills all of the above I mentioned. It's a known, very dangerous quality that's measurable and replicable.

Where is the same for social media? I see a lot of hand-wringing hysteria about regulating social networks without any specific and concrete examples of why.

I dislike many aspects of today's social media companies, most notably their disgusting treatment of users as a vast data trove to be goaded via dark patterns and squeezed for as many bits of personal info as possible. But, the solution to this is in regulating the companies themselves, and setting much harder data privacy regulations.

It does not need to be with government instead regulating average people condescendingly to force certain types of behavior about personal digital choices, particularly not via bills that screamingly imply de-anonymization.

At least anecdotally, of the nearly dozen adolescent family members of mine with who i'm close enough to somewhat gauge mental health, I see no real signs that their access to TikTok, Facebook (barely used by adolescents in my country anyhow) or other social platforms is anything close to a major cause of problems in their lives, at least not in terms of anything they do while using it.

The problems I do see existing are those of all those photos, text posts and videos of them being stored, and possibly used in the future to judge their character. However again, as I said above, this is a thing for regulations against these fucking companies' practices, by a government that doesn't do it because it also loves so much data. The regulations are entirely misguided being applied against kids and their parents, especially in such invasive ways.