Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).

Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.

What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.

Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).

There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.

For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.

> This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).

No it doesn’t. I can easily go to any number of local shops and buy a knife without any hassle.

The U.K. doesn’t ban knives. It has an age limit to buy them, and bans carrying them in public without a lawful excuse.

> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).

This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.

I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.

I now believe that guiding technology use comes down to leadership. "with the exact same technological advances, on one side of the world we created modern america, while on the other side we created the soviet union"