I agree with everything you’re saying up until this point:
> What's necessary is clear rules that align the behavior of companies with social ends. If they can't square making money with keeping public discourse healthy or not making teens mentally ill they need to be culled, it's that simple.
I don’t think it’s that simple, or simple in the way you may imagine. It’s impossible to come up with rules that even a plurality agree with. Just scroll the comment threads here when social media “censorship” comes up, which may not be directly what you’re talking about but is surely related in part if not in whole to the very real mental health issues you are describing.
The auto regulation and leaded drinking water analogies, however, incidentally hint at what the real answer is. We banned those things. If social media is the lead in our water, we don’t need better filters (or whatever) we need to get rid of it.
I think what is needed is some kind of reactive and iterative restrictions. As well as analytics. Just like how companies measure addiction as a stat to optimise, this data should become public and used as a way to measure the effectiveness of new restrictions.
An idea I had is to set some kind of guideline like “users should on average spend no more than 1 hour on the platform per day” and then if the average user starts going over that, the company gets penalised until they bring the number lower.
This way you let the companies use whatever measure they find works best to keep addiction under control.
We have nutritional labels on food. We need nutritional labels for websites/apps/services. And then maybe a small popup "You've reached your daily serving of social media use. You may continue, but know that you'll be in unhealthy territory."
And then we treat "social media addiction" as an additional insurance cost factor, just like obesity. More than 2h of facebook per day => let's double your mental health premiums.
That way, we (the society) can accurately measure and allocate the damage and resulting costs caused by social media companies.
>Just scroll the comment threads here when social media “censorship” comes up,
I mean some of the controversy here may be of the 'difficult to make someone understand something their income depends on them not understanding' variety.
> What's necessary is clear rules that align the behavior of companies with social ends. If they can't square making money with keeping public discourse healthy or not making teens mentally ill they need to be culled, it's that simple.
I don’t think it’s that simple, or simple in the way you may imagine. It’s impossible to come up with rules that even a plurality agree with. Just scroll the comment threads here when social media “censorship” comes up, which may not be directly what you’re talking about but is surely related in part if not in whole to the very real mental health issues you are describing.
The auto regulation and leaded drinking water analogies, however, incidentally hint at what the real answer is. We banned those things. If social media is the lead in our water, we don’t need better filters (or whatever) we need to get rid of it.