> Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment. The activist movement cham

> Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment. The activist movement championing the age limit are explicitly framing the issue (as Haidt does) as social media use directly leading to worse mental health markers in children and teens, and arguing that this harm is so great that any proposal claiming to fix it should be implemented, consequences be damned - exactly the kind of "think of the children" argument that gets people to argue against end-to-end encryption. > We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms. > (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.) I argue that the problem is that advertisement and VC funding are fundamentally antithetical to making good spaces for discussion. Making a good space requires moderators who are invested in participating themselves while being conscious of their role - the kind of work where the workload scales linearly with users, but the expected accuracy and severity of screwing up grows more rapidly. However, your investors want more users and eyeballs on ads as fast as possible, while making moderation work as cheap as possible. Social sites don't have to be "always-on Skinner boxes", but it comes down to technical and organizational decisions and whether you are willing to treat discussion spaces as a common good which don't need to run with billions in profits