Four senators published a statement about the need to further regulate social media. Their arguments about screen time are severely misleading and flawed.
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
(Mic drop)