Why not restrict the addictive design of the algorithms instead? No need to blanket ban social media access if the social media cannot optimize to steal every last inch of their attention. Anything on the feed becomes opt-in only and no engagement data coming from the user or from the outside can be used to optimize it, thats it. Control is back in the hands of the content consumer, parental restrictions become trivial, no black box algorithm deciding what bubbles up and what gets buried deep down.

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sunshine-o an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Sure but we still face the same problem: define "social media" or "addictive design of the algorithms"

HN has almost all of the features of a "social media" and a good algorithm. If you visit HN every day it is by definition addictive.

So the EU could ask for it to be age gated or blocked. This is not a simple problem and we are opening the Pandora box here.

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movedx01 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

> "addictive design of the algorithms"

Any self improving loop where the user is not in control, thats it.

If I subscribe to A and get more of A - thats fine.

If the algorithm detects that I spend 0.5 second longer on average looking at content with feature A and so decides to show me more of A - thats bad. At most it might be allowed to ask me if I want to subscribe to more of things with explicitly defined feature A, but even that assumes we are fine with collection of behavioural data like this in the first place and so it is a stretch already.

Transparency and control is what makes the difference here in my opinion.

	▲	sunshine-o 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I agree. Now that would be interesting because it should actually impact the algorithms used by platforms such as Amazon...

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emsign 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because Meta lobbyied massively for this version of the law. So they keep their addictive apps as they are.