Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology. I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the technology. It's the people. Meaning not just the people running companies, but all of us. Technology is a tool. Any tool can be used for nefarious purposes, or for beneficial purposes. Which kind it gets used for depends on the people who use it, and on the pe…
These are the same word games that got us tired arguments like "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Looking only at people as individuals limits you to seeing first-order effects. The insidious effects of social media come about because large scale algorithmic optimization has found high leverage points for influencing society. While that's ultimately a consequence of individual people, you can't solve many…
Where did I say "looking only at people as individuals"? My point was precisely the opposite: that people are not just individuals, that an individual person's failure to exercise common sense and critical thinking skills, making them susceptible to manipulation, when aggregated over a large enough segment of society, has higher order effects that go way beyond the consequences of the manipulation of that individual person, because it creates an environment where nefarious people can thrive, which is bad for everyone.
Social media technology certainly makes that problem worse by giving the nefarious people more leverage. But you can't fix the problem by banning or restricting the technology; the nefarious people will always have the means to control how those rules get written so that they can continue doing what they want to do, just with different labels pasted over it to satisfy the letter of the rules. Just as has happened with past attempts to do the same thing.
> People seem to be fundamentally incompatible with social media
You are assuming that there is no way for anyone to use the tool of social media without being an addict. That is as false and pernicious an assumption as the corresponding assumptions in the case of guns and drugs, which you are also making.
With that false assumption taken away, your argument boils down to: since some people are incapable of using tools like social media, guns, and drugs responsibly, we have to ban, or at least impose draconian restrictions on, those technologies for all people. That kind of thinking is incompatible with a free society. In a free society, you penalize the people who can't act like responsible adults, not the people who can.