> (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.

It's partly because of the kids.

It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat.

It's also because social media has a long history of manipulation for their own gain, against the users' interests, dark patterns, tracking, they fail to back down from and even file lawsuits to continue tracking when tracking itself required (under GDPR etc.) permission that e.g. Meta did not have: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti...

For "about the kids", consider: given kids have no direct purchasing power, what adverts can they possibly respond to in a way that actually provides gain for the buyer of the advertising slot? They cannot. Therefore, by fighting for the right to keep kids on their sites (despite the huge extra effort that needs to exist to keep them safe on their sites given the inherent ambient hostility that comes with giving everyone direct access to, in Facebook's case, a few billion other humans), at least one of two things must be true: (a) they think they can get kids hooked, and be able to convert them to profitability as adults, and/or (b) they are scamming the people who buy advertising slots, knowing full well the kids who see the ads cannot possibly buy anything. If a third option exists, I cannot guess it.

▲

lovelearning 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I find the coordination between nations suspicious.

But what you said - "It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat." - strikes me as the most plausible driver behind it, given how chummy Trump and the techbros have become.

I agree with your other observations about SM. But they've all been true from many years. That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.

	▲	ben_w 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I find the coordination between nations suspicious. You shouldn't. I mean, they talk to each other continuously. Them coordinating things is normal. The EU nations will be doing even more coordination, because the EU is a body for the coordination of those nations. > That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least. We're not all that diverse, really. Ironically, social media may have brought us all together against social media. And it's not really all that sudden, this has been building for many years now. Similar things due to Trump trying to bully everyone, but specifically NATO, the EU, and the Americas (and all the international stuff DOGE cut) will have a lot more stuff like this, some of which will be coordinated, some of which will be everyone spontaneously making similar decisions. That too will take years… well, unless Trump actually picks a kinetic fight with a NATO country, then political years pass in a few weeks.