that it's a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on "social media addiction" was well decided. (in the section "How Governments Are Regulating Social Media")
that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section "How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned")

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it's possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn't have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 11 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I disagree. I think that you can have both.

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own. Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T, and so they should be given a longer leash. Governments also do not have the resources to chase down every Tom, Dick, and Harry running a Lemmy server (well, they do, but they shouldn't.)

Whether reality will play out this way is uncertain.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 2 points 20 hours ago

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted.

I’d go a step further and say that if big tech must control the internet it would be better to not have an internet at all (and that’s coming from someone who remembers life without it well and currently uses it a lot). But given the current situation I would hand back any true productivity gains, casual enjoyment, etc to take away the global narrative control that a tiny handful of companies have.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 22 hours ago

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don't agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

[–] Spiregarden@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

In my opinion, social media is not the biggest threat to kids - algorithms are. I fully support the SoMe restrictions on kids, but could possibly accept a fediverse partition if the server would be maintained by the community, school or some trustworthy non-profit.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 22 hours ago

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you're following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet's original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach...

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.