Should Social Media Be Tightly Regulated

[bilby]

Free speech is when you are on public property.

A store is aprivately owned public place but you do not have a right to campaogn in the store without permission.

Social media is a private busyness and they can regulate speech. Free speech does ot mean you can say whatever you like anywhere any time.

That depends on whether you choose to treat free speech as a legal technicality, which would make it ultimately meaningless, or as a pervasive cultural norm that guides how we think and act.

People that engage interrorism or harassment against people they disagree with are really acting antithetically to that cultural norm. That is a better argument.

Indeed. And we have some laws to prevent this, and arguably need more such laws. But they ought to be platform neutral - If saying something harmful to or about someone is to be illegal, then it should be illegal whether it’s in the street, in a newspaper, or on social media.

Social media is the medium, not the message. The message may need regulation, but to regulate the medium is pointless - it will just move the problem elsewhere, rather than addressing it.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Free speech is when you are on public property.

A store is aprivately owned public place but you do not have a right to campaogn in the store without permission.

Social media is a private busyness and they can regulate speech. Free speech does ot mean you can say whatever you like anywhere any time.

That depends on whether you choose to treat free speech as a legal technicality, which would make it ultimately meaningless, or as a pervasive cultural norm that guides how we think and act.

People that engage interrorism or harassment against people they disagree with are really acting antithetically to that cultural norm. That is a better argument.

Indeed. And we have some laws to prevent this, and arguably need more such laws. But they ought to be platform neutral - If saying something harmful to or about someone is to be illegal, then it should be illegal whether it’s in the street, in a newspaper, or on social media.

Social media is the medium, not the message. The message may need regulation, but to regulate the medium is pointless - it will just move the problem elsewhere, rather than addressing it.

I am not really sure about using the government directly at all.

Like I said, I am not sure that I would be enthusiastic about putting an intervention in the hands of some FBI clodpoll or the cops. I realize that those agencies can be necessary as a last resort, but in America, we are in the habit of turning to them too often, which has led to us having an inordinately high incarceration rate. We are really the most authoritarian countries in the world if you judge by the incarceration rate.

However, I am a strong believer in the power of the education system. I think we can use the education system to teach young people an idea of free speech that is not just a legal technicality but just how we live. We could grow up knowing that if you use divisive racist speech, that leads to you silencing or devaluing someone else's voice, and maybe that someone does not even disagree with you on the essentials. We could grow up knowing that if you refuse to support someone's gender identity, you could really be interfering in that person's freedom of self-expression. We could recognize that an important part of free speech is believing that it is safe to speak and to be heard. Rather than seeing it as something to be enforced by law, we could see it as something to be enforced by custom, aesthetics, and just a generally accepted idea of what is right. We could grow up with an understanding of free speech, in its many subtle dimensions, not simply as a legal right but as just what is right and part of what defines us as a people.

I think that this would ultimately be stronger than sending goons after people and putting more money into the prison-industrial complex.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.

In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.

Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.

In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?

Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.

This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.

Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.

And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.

It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.

 

[Jarhyn]

I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.

In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.

Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.

In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?

Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.

This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.

Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.

And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.

It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.

The issue with this that I see is that social media is a drug, and it is a toxic one.

Between the desire to be seen, the fact that everyone has this desire, and the fact that any person only has so much time and interest in seeing others...

The platform itself, as a private system, has two goals in curation of content: to make the user generate content by making them feel unseen; to make the user engage with content and generate more by directing the user to the things others are posting which they apparently want to be seen.

This is only disrupted when you rip away the platform's filter bubble, allow people to see content without only being presented "the best, since your last click", and the indoctrination can only be prevented by allowing folks to be able to see stuff that is not being directed.

We need to outlaw black-box content filters, from black box ad models to black box sorting algorithms, and make all such processes opt-in only.

Does it throw a wrench into the ad model?

Lol, don't care.

 

[rousseau]

Social media is giving political parties an avenue for mass, finely targeted propaganda.. so I'd say yes, it should be tightly regulated.

Politicians don't even understand how Facebook makes revenue, though, so I'm not hopeful.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Something being illegal is one thing. Addressing a wide open venue for crime is another.

And how do you propose making it not useful for criminals while remaining of any value to others?

The only mitigation to it, which isn't a solution, would be to end the anonymity and people need eID to interact on the web. But ultimately, that probably just opens things up to making Identity Theft easier.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Could someone explain exactly how the government could have stopped the situation in the OP?

Treat social media like the harmful substance it is.

That's a pretty non-specific answer to "exactly".

But I think it is the right answer. Social media is a drug of sorts and we need to teach people how to use it and how to not become a victim of it.

This wouldn't mean monitoring or speech limits. It'd mean a new type of "stranger danger" (for kids and adults) and for teens, "what goes on the web is forever on the web".

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.

In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.

Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.

In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?

Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.

This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.

Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.

And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.

It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.

The issue with this that I see is that social media is a drug, and it is a toxic one.

Between the desire to be seen, the fact that everyone has this desire, and the fact that any person only has so much time and interest in seeing others...

The platform itself, as a private system, has two goals in curation of content: to make the user generate content by making them feel unseen; to make the user engage with content and generate more by directing the user to the things others are posting which they apparently want to be seen.

This is only disrupted when you rip away the platform's filter bubble, allow people to see content without only being presented "the best, since your last click", and the indoctrination can only be prevented by allowing folks to be able to see stuff that is not being directed.

We need to outlaw black-box content filters, from black box ad models to black box sorting algorithms, and make all such processes opt-in only.

Does it throw a wrench into the ad model?

Lol, don't care.

If social media is a drug, then we should legalize other drugs and thereby provide competition.

 

[Gun Nut]

I'm not sure what we're meant to be discussing here. What exactly are we expecting the government to do?

Tear up any Interstate highway that has been used by criminals.

Apparently.

Your analogy is terrible. You use your finger to pull triggers. You use your finger to point... therefore, pointing is the same as murder. This is identical to your "not a slippery slope at all" argument. The internet is like a road as the flow of electricity is like a pipe of water - they are similar in a uselessly general way... like how something "the public" uses is identical to everything the public uses.
The quality of your analogy would be better if it was the case that if a thief gets on the road, every single car crashes on every road everywhere. Then being concerned with who gets on the road can be a thing.

 

[Jarhyn]

I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.

In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.

Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.

In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?

Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.

This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.

Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.

And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.

It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.

The issue with this that I see is that social media is a drug, and it is a toxic one.

Between the desire to be seen, the fact that everyone has this desire, and the fact that any person only has so much time and interest in seeing others...

The platform itself, as a private system, has two goals in curation of content: to make the user generate content by making them feel unseen; to make the user engage with content and generate more by directing the user to the things others are posting which they apparently want to be seen.

This is only disrupted when you rip away the platform's filter bubble, allow people to see content without only being presented "the best, since your last click", and the indoctrination can only be prevented by allowing folks to be able to see stuff that is not being directed.

We need to outlaw black-box content filters, from black box ad models to black box sorting algorithms, and make all such processes opt-in only.

Does it throw a wrench into the ad model?

Lol, don't care.

If social media is a drug, then we should legalize other drugs and thereby provide competition.

Rather, I am arguing that... How do I put this...

Think about the difference between an apple and an apple flavored apple-sized lump of sugar.

One is clearly not as terrible for you as the other, generally.

Social media is like.. if the grocery store replaced all their apples with those confectionary monstrosities. Or all their fruits.

People would still want the taste, but now their only model for it is to take an addictive, fairly toxic drug to get it at all.

In some ways this ends up that the damage, the harm is in the refinement of all the negative qualities for the sake of generating addiction, at the expense of all the other complexities of social communications.

So instead of my family members on the cusp of adulthood seeing Facebook feed that discusses the realities of drug use, the complexities of the need to vote, or the realities of how to be safe online...

Instead they saw the occasional political meme, or more likely didn't see my content at all!

The reality here is that the content filtration and sorting model, being inescapable, is ubiquitously turning the platform into a propaganda engine.

And it is inescapable: there is no platform which allows users to simply exist among the raw feed of social messages... Other than places like this...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Most people online haven't committed suicide or been victim of fraud. So the analogy is a bit tighter.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.

In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.

Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.

In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?

Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.

This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.

Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.

And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.

It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.

The issue with this that I see is that social media is a drug, and it is a toxic one.

Between the desire to be seen, the fact that everyone has this desire, and the fact that any person only has so much time and interest in seeing others...

The platform itself, as a private system, has two goals in curation of content: to make the user generate content by making them feel unseen; to make the user engage with content and generate more by directing the user to the things others are posting which they apparently want to be seen.

This is only disrupted when you rip away the platform's filter bubble, allow people to see content without only being presented "the best, since your last click", and the indoctrination can only be prevented by allowing folks to be able to see stuff that is not being directed.

We need to outlaw black-box content filters, from black box ad models to black box sorting algorithms, and make all such processes opt-in only.

Does it throw a wrench into the ad model?

Lol, don't care.

If social media is a drug, then we should legalize other drugs and thereby provide competition.

Rather, I am arguing that... How do I put this...

Think about the difference between an apple and an apple flavored apple-sized lump of sugar.

One is clearly not as terrible for you as the other, generally.

Social media is like.. if the grocery store replaced all their apples with those confectionary monstrosities. Or all their fruits.

People would still want the taste, but now their only model for it is to take an addictive, fairly toxic drug to get it at all.

In some ways this ends up that the damage, the harm is in the refinement of all the negative qualities for the sake of generating addiction, at the expense of all the other complexities of social communications.

So instead of my family members on the cusp of adulthood seeing Facebook feed that discusses the realities of drug use, the complexities of the need to vote, or the realities of how to be safe online...

Instead they saw the occasional political meme, or more likely didn't see my content at all!

The reality here is that the content filtration and sorting model, being inescapable, is ubiquitously turning the platform into a propaganda engine.

And it is inescapable: there is no platform which allows users to simply exist among the raw feed of social messages... Other than places like this...

I think we ought to legalize the use of cocaine and then spend however much money we need to on treating the addiction whenever it becomes a problem. If people want to have their experience at getting hooked on a dumb drug, then they can, for all that I care, but I also think that the government would spend less money, in the long-run, on cleaning them out than it would spend on keeping them in prisons where they would just get exposed to a greater variety and quantity of drugs.

As for how to pay for it, I dunno, make the rich pay for it. I'm tapped-out.

We could treat social media addiction in the same way. Tax it, and give people therapy to recover from the addiction. If the social media companies get tired of paying taxes, then they can get smarter about preventing people from getting addicted, to begin with.

The strategy has worked wonders for reining in tobacco.