Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.

I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.

People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.

You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.

Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.

Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.

Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.

To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.

It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.

Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before.

If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.

“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”

Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?

I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.

I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.

I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.

There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.

I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.