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Comment by 0x5FC3 | Hacker News Reader

I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.

Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.

My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.

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Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Just note in this case I think the precedent should not be private company can ignore public demand. If they can unilaterally ignore the demands of the Saudi government then why not any liberal government? If you operate in a country you should have to follow their rules. If the rules themselves are bad that is a different question.

The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.

The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.

The export control angle is interesting. I was treating addiction, radicalization, capitulation to authoritarian govts, abetting human rights violations, productivity loss, etc., as the symptom of a common cause: the hyper-optimized engagement model and curbing it with a policy. You're right that some of these harms might warrant categorical exclusions rather than pricing the whole business model out.

I may have had an overly optimistic ideal of people running small federated mastodon servers for friends and family for free/donations being the only type of "social media".

I appreciate your optimism actually. Someone (it's me) can also share your ideal for social media while also having slightly different takes on what makes the prevailing model wrong exactly.

Thanks for the back and forth.

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