Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.

I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!

Socialising != Social media. Teens can still use messenger, WhatsApp, phonecalls, text or even....face to face!

I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.

Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.

I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.

The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.

I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted.

Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.

My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.

It's crazy that social media is banned but kids are still subject to gambling ads prior to or after watching the footy on free to air TV.

The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.

I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.

Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.

How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.

I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.

I do agree that banning advertising would be good (though not the only problem). However, you don't need social media to socialize online (text messaging, messaging groups, etc. all still exist).

Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy

A lot of exploitation is not even about money. Some of these platforms don't even make profit. It is about politics.

I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.

Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.

Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.

Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.

I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue.

But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).

Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.

Oh, alright, I guess we just need to overthrow capitalism and install a different economic system

Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!