> It is not wrong to regulate social media

Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.

It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.

Hopefully Nepal is not going this far.

> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want

"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.

I recently created YouTube algo booster (open source) that allows to take this control back a little bit: https://github.com/ro31337/youtube-algo-booster

I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation

"Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want."

It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.

As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.

If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.

Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).

By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.

The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.

The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.

> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want.

And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.

[1] Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...

[2] Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...

Ruling is all about balance and drawing lines. Why is alcohol and tobacco banned for people under 18? Why are heroine and cocaine banned? Aren't these two cases examples of liberties that the government is cutting?

The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.

Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.

A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.

The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.

There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.

Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)

When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.

When those foreign companies are from [western] countries where massive unequal exchange against them happens, the moral focus should be on that. Universal individualized liberalism isn’t inherently good.

Facebook and X are whatever. Nobody cares if they get blocked.

But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.