The stupids are at it again. We’re a couple of weeks away from getting a new Prime Minister and some tool in this rudderless lame duck Government has come up with this enormously vacuous idea. Yes, that’s right, a mandatory curfew for 16-18yo tech users. This policy has been announced almost a full year before the total social media ban comes into force, and three years after the Online Safety Act was introduced. You remember the Online Safety Act? Introduced to stop accessing any/inappropriate (delete as you see fit) content on the Internet? That one? Once again the Government is looking at introducing half-arsed, poorly thought-out legislation which will not treat the cause of the problem, it will only treat a symptom. The cause is, of course, the big tech billionaires and their social media products. But the Government is scared of taking them on and frightened of legislating against the likes of Zuck and Musk.
So here it is, here’s my hard, logical, dispassionate look at the situation we’re all facing. Blaming teenagers for consuming toxic social media, instead of penalising the people who create and distribute toxic social media, is like blaming you for walking along a street covered in dog turds, instead of doing something about the problem of dog turds. We have regulators for social media who seem to do very little regulating. If the problem is social media, the solution is to fix social media. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
The problem with fixing social media is that it will make it less… social.
Probably.
Just like a curfew.
But, I still think it’s also the responsibility of the parents to limit access to such things.
Of course, I speak as someone who has never done social media and whose kids are now adults, so it’s not something that really affects me.
I enjoyed the TED Talk though.
One of the things that became obvious when I ran screaming from Xitter (pronounced ‘shitter’) is that the worst thing that can happen to any platform is for *people* to show up. The toxicity of any platform is roughly proportional to the number of people there. Generally speaking, that is. If you put a man-child like Musk or Zuck at the helm, they will actively poison the well. But Twitter had a problem before Musk arrived. The problem was people. It’s why I love Mastodon. It’s a much smaller community. Not a pool of people, but a *community* of people, who go there for a reason. Not just because everyone is there.