>> How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!!

Lol. Tell me you weren't around for the D&D panic without saying you weren't around for the D&D panic.

This was precisely the argument used. "These kids should be out, running around, climbing trees! They're missing their childhoods! Here's Becky, age 15, to tell us how much happier she is now that she's hanging out with her girlfriends at the park, instead of summoning demons in her parents' basement."

And everyone bought it in exactly the same way that they buy the social media teen panic now. There were developmental psychologists on TV to explain how harmful D&D was to the kids' sensitive developing brains, how it was a gateway drug to all sorts of destructive self-behaviours, how parents were just so gosh dang powerless to do anything about it (all their friends are doing it!), and how the state needed to step in NOW! Sound familiar?

Honestly, you've seen it once, you've seen all there is to see. The social media panic has all the characteristics of any other moral panic. Some unpopular thing is alleged to be hurting children, and if you support it, then you're probably some kind of child abuser. Because we're all so perfectly rational, we all know our suspicions are 'directionally correct', to borrow your beautifully Orwellian turn of phrase. Certainly nothing to do with the ceaseless drum of narratives directed against social media that we imbibe from every external conduit - films, TV, newspapers - and live and breathe and occupy as though it were reality. Hey did you see that Netflix show Adolescence, about the harms of social media? It's fiction, but it really <strike>creates</strike>captures the moment. It's just so directionally correct, you know?

Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop. No need to build up any defenses against that sort of thing. Grab those pitchforks.

In not sure who you’re arguing against, but you’re arguing against the opposite point I made, the satanic panic of the eighties is like a special interest of mine. Also lol @directionallly correct.

And I’m not asking anyone to ban social media, maybe just regulate some of the behaviors by companies who are creating products 60% of users say that wish were less addictive. The key distinction is insiders. If people playing DND overwhelmingly reported they thought it was harmful, I would say we should ban that too, but they don’t. With DND the only people worried about the harm were outsiders.

https://www.stagwellglobal.com/what-the-data-say-60-of-gen-z...

Maybe just the ever so slightly tiniest bit of friction to the experience, nothing that prevents those from loving the products to continue using them.

Als, I think I would liken my objection to social media less as a moral panic and more in Marx’s “opiate of the masses” framework. But I’m also maybe a bit contrarian here. I think medium-centered moral panics (as opposed to content-centered) were mostly correct. That is to say, going as far back tot he Greeks worrying that the written word would have a negative impact on memory, the fears around television reducing social ties were largely correct.

But here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: with all the previous moral panics you mentioned, the distinction was usually generation. Older generations didn’t understand the new thing and feared it and as the younger generations grew older it was more integrated into their culture.

But social media doesn’t have that pattern, the younger generations seem to hate it as much or more than the older generations. So what is going to change in twenty years to show social media is not that bad, if young people see the harms, maybe even more than older people.