Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: I don’t think that banning teens from social media is the solution to any problem. ...
I don’t think that banning teens from social media is the solution to any problem.
Just like a law that banned teens from watching TV, amid risks of exposing them to violence or explicit content, would have been ridicolously ineffective 20/30 years ago.
These laws also risk missing the real problems with the current social media landscape:
If major social media platforms leverage unsustainable and unethical business models to thrive (continuous dopamine shots to trigger addiction, exposure to enraging content to foster engagement, indiscriminate scooping up and selling of personal information to anyone who has money to pay for it, lack of human moderation or fact-checking, and moat-digging strategies to entrench their monopolies and keep competitors out of reach), then it sounds to me like they are as dangerous to adults (and society as a whole) as their are to teens. I’m not sure how much you gain by only keeping teenagers out of them, while allowing them to turn their parents into shallow and ignorant enraged zombies constantly scrolling on their screens. But of course it’s easier to say “those under the age of 16 can’t use Facebook” than it is to address the more structural issues that underpin today’s social giants (and, more importantly, flip the current system of incentives on its head).
An exception should be made only for YouTube because it has a lot of educational content for kids in school’s age? Ok, but can someone explain how a single platform could be allowed to grow to the point where it hosts 90% of all the videos ever created by humans, to the point that even if it enshittifies, or starts shoveling outrageous amounts of ads whenever it feels like its revenue is going below an arbitrary bar, or deliberately kills human moderation, or start pursuing all kind of dark patterns to keep folks attached to their screens and keep watching, or actively tries to kill tools like AdBlock or yt-dlp that allow kids to either download their school videos or watch them without distractions, we still can’t keep our kids away from it because they have no alternatives? Maybe the problem to solve isn’t much whether YouTube should be allowed for teens despite blanket bans on other social media platforms, but how we can create alternative, open and accountable platforms with human-curated content for kids? This is the kind of stuff that BBC used to produce in the UK until some time ago. Or RAI Educational used to produce in Italy. Open technologies to achieve this exist as well - how much would it cost a government to spin up a Peertube instance with educational videos curated by teachers and pedagogists and suited to the subjects studied in the national schools? Probably much less than it used to cost to run BBC/RAI educational channels two decades ago. If governments have completely given up on their duties of producing high-quality content for kids in school age, preferably through open protocols and open source in order to foster public participation and enhance accessibility, and they instead surrendered to a late ultra-capitalist system where an American private company has an absolute monopoly over what people watch, then we should probably have a different kind of discussion.
I don’t want to keep only teens from major social media platforms.
I want to keep everyone away from them.
I want the likes of Meta, YouTube, X and TikTok all dead and permanently banned from Europe. And replaced by open platforms with open protocols based on sustainable business models.
And I want governments to step up more when it comes to providing those services that aren’t necessarily profitable (like free educational content for kids), rather than delegating them to giant private corporations and let those guys figure out immoral ways of monetizing what should have been public.
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-03-tech-giants-youtube-dodge-australian.html
Just like a law that banned teens from watching TV, amid risks of exposing them to violence or explicit content, would have been ridicolously ineffective 20/30 years ago.
These laws also risk missing the real problems with the current social media landscape:
If major social media platforms leverage unsustainable and unethical business models to thrive (continuous dopamine shots to trigger addiction, exposure to enraging content to foster engagement, indiscriminate scooping up and selling of personal information to anyone who has money to pay for it, lack of human moderation or fact-checking, and moat-digging strategies to entrench their monopolies and keep competitors out of reach), then it sounds to me like they are as dangerous to adults (and society as a whole) as their are to teens. I’m not sure how much you gain by only keeping teenagers out of them, while allowing them to turn their parents into shallow and ignorant enraged zombies constantly scrolling on their screens. But of course it’s easier to say “those under the age of 16 can’t use Facebook” than it is to address the more structural issues that underpin today’s social giants (and, more importantly, flip the current system of incentives on its head).
An exception should be made only for YouTube because it has a lot of educational content for kids in school’s age? Ok, but can someone explain how a single platform could be allowed to grow to the point where it hosts 90% of all the videos ever created by humans, to the point that even if it enshittifies, or starts shoveling outrageous amounts of ads whenever it feels like its revenue is going below an arbitrary bar, or deliberately kills human moderation, or start pursuing all kind of dark patterns to keep folks attached to their screens and keep watching, or actively tries to kill tools like AdBlock or yt-dlp that allow kids to either download their school videos or watch them without distractions, we still can’t keep our kids away from it because they have no alternatives? Maybe the problem to solve isn’t much whether YouTube should be allowed for teens despite blanket bans on other social media platforms, but how we can create alternative, open and accountable platforms with human-curated content for kids? This is the kind of stuff that BBC used to produce in the UK until some time ago. Or RAI Educational used to produce in Italy. Open technologies to achieve this exist as well - how much would it cost a government to spin up a Peertube instance with educational videos curated by teachers and pedagogists and suited to the subjects studied in the national schools? Probably much less than it used to cost to run BBC/RAI educational channels two decades ago. If governments have completely given up on their duties of producing high-quality content for kids in school age, preferably through open protocols and open source in order to foster public participation and enhance accessibility, and they instead surrendered to a late ultra-capitalist system where an American private company has an absolute monopoly over what people watch, then we should probably have a different kind of discussion.
I don’t want to keep only teens from major social media platforms.
I want to keep everyone away from them.
I want the likes of Meta, YouTube, X and TikTok all dead and permanently banned from Europe. And replaced by open platforms with open protocols based on sustainable business models.
And I want governments to step up more when it comes to providing those services that aren’t necessarily profitable (like free educational content for kids), rather than delegating them to giant private corporations and let those guys figure out immoral ways of monetizing what should have been public.
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-03-tech-giants-youtube-dodge-australian.html