We need more granular language to talk about these issues. Anyone with moderate proficiency in online communities know that there are major differences between

We need more granular language to talk about these issues. Anyone with moderate proficiency in online communities know that there are major differences between eg instagram and a private discord chat to play Minecraft with your friends. Perhaps we should look at online media as games, with different rules and incentives, and find out which rules are good for us and which ones aren’t. Public people oriented social media (instagram & Twitter being canonical examples) clearly stand out to me as the most problematic. Worse, the content promotion algorithms are opaque and not customizable, which makes it very difficult to research their influence. Upstream, >99% of these companies’ revenue come from advertisers, it’s likely that they constitute the largest stakeholder in our children’s online experiences (and our own, of course).