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Comment by MarkMarine | Hacker News Reader

I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.

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I think playing a ton of games as a kid has helped me.

I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.

I feel the same way. In a sense, our parents had it easier in terms of the damage external world could do emotionally, because there was typically a simple way to prevent most of it. Now, it is not nearly as simple. Not to search very far, our kid has a media diet that some consider strict ( 30 minutes a day of pre-selected items if kid meets some criteria, which I still consider too high ). But then some kids already have cellphones, ipads ( some completely unlocked too ! ). I only recently gave my kid lappy with gcompris installed ( locked down lappy; no net access ). Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.

I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.

> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.

On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.

Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.

How would we effectively regulate social media? Being the regulator could be a very powerful political tool and used to capture or maintain political power.

Regulating is already being done by the “private” companies that own them, heck it’s the plot of a bond movie (sub in newspapers for social media) with a real life Larry, Elon or Mark as the villain.

As a society we choose what to allow or not allow together, collectively, through politics (ideally) and when things damage our collective health we regulate or ban them. All regulations probably seem impossible before they happen. Australia regulated guns, China regulated social media, plenty of countries regulate alcohol, drugs, gambling. It’s all possible, just have to weigh the positives and negatives and find a balance, but the status quo is broken.

Deciding what we want as a society is fine. Vehemently disagreeing over what and how things should be regulated is fine too. In general, trying to do anything in good faith is more or less fine.

What is not fine is proposing to make regulations that purport to do things that are near-universally supported, but in reality further agendas that are widely opposed, agendas that work against the interests of the American people and would never pass otherwise.

That is very clearly what is happening here, and we know that because it happens all the time, using the same tried-and-true formula. In particular, anything claiming to "protect the children" is almost certainly an obfuscated attempt to erode civil rights protections like free speech or privacy, and should be treated with extreme prejudice.

*edit* Also, anything Rahm Emmanuel says, believe the exact opposite.

I agree with the sentiment, but the rights of Americans are being eroded at a comical rate with no positives like protecting children (be that an allusion to protecting them or actually doing it)

Look at the TikTok “ban” for example. Congress passed a law to ban it because they didn’t have control over what the population was seeing, specifically around the genocide in Gaza. Now US ownership has passed to Larry Ellison, a republican connected pro-Zionist that will make sure the objectionable content that shows Palestinian's suffering does not bubble up in the algorithm. Never mind that you see 10 year old girls practicing TikTok dances when they are standing in line, waiting for the bus, etc. That problem persists, and no one in leadership cares because now the right people are getting rich and censoring the actual content the rulers cared about.

I’m with you on Rahm, but I’m not going to let him trying to hook his wagon to a policy that I support ruin my support of it.

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