It is funny to see all countries afraid of doing what should be done: fine and block the social media companies that don't fix their brainrot algorithms.

Adults are not better at handling them than kids.

They just complain about the algorithms but they use also the same tool for propaganda / marketing. The only thing they literally agree on is "online hatred" because sometimes it goes against them, so they need to keep the system running.

For example, the previous German government was paying influencers for sponsoring heat pumps. All these "content creators" must be paid by someone - left, right, center, oil, nuclear, gas companies, it's like watching TV for its advertisements. Crazy what it has become.

So, that will most likely never change, although that's probably in the top 3 reasons why social media is unusable.

For me it's funny to see the discussion is completely black-white, like everyone is hooked.

I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.

For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!

My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.

It’s changing and the sentiment towards this crap is adjusting fast. Whoever is running the focus groups on the pushback campaigns aren’t finding good vehicles yet either.

The UK considered blocking X over the generating of CSAM and the US responded by saying any such move would face retaliation. Literally today Trump has been attacking the UK for discussing a possible tax on digital services like Meta, and saying point blank he will implement massive tariffs if they do anything.

I feel like the response of the tech community in the US overlooks the fact other countries don't have many options, nor power to actually make these companies change their ways.

I don't want to see age verification either, but I have limited sympathy for these companies given they've spent the best part of two decades ignoring every attempt at getting them to change and do something themselves.

We've been seeing age verification stuff roll out for a couple of years now and still none of the major companies have done anything to clean their act up (and some, like X, have got way worse) so it's not like they're really helping make a case against these policies.

Came here to say something similar. Adults are just as hooked to their addiction feeds as kids.

These are uber-personalized feeds optimized to keep you scrolling to the next item (story / video / post) so companies can show more ads.

"Social media" is a textbook example of a euphemism. We should be calling this what it is: "addiction feeds".

how do you plan the governments should decide what algorithms are brainrot, and what are not?

Because they don't actually care about social media use, it's just a pretext to force everyone to implement mandatory id checks.