Banning Things for Other People Is Easy

We shouldn't ban children from drinking. It doesn't even help, because kids drink anyway, just illegally and largely unsupervised by adults. I certainly drank like a fish when I was underage.

I feel like if the conclusion is "ban it for everyone too" I'm okay with it?

But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.

Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.

You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.

Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.

So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.

There are quite a few things wrong with this article, but above all, placing children on the same level as adults overlooks how crucial our early years are.

Overall, this blog post feels somewhat outdated.

I also can't clearly grasp the author's position: are they arguing that we should ban this for everyone, or not ban it at all? Or is the point simply that the people who write such bans or laws do so because the law doesn't apply to them?

I think this is a good point. What differentiates alcohol and social media? Well, social media is not physically addictive, but it's pretty clearly psychologically addictive. Along those lines it would be hard to argue that children should have unfettered access to social media. Social media is also _not_ like TV in that there's psychologists and algorithmic engineers working hard to make these types of apps as addictive as possible. Not to mention the fact that children obviously can't consent to having their data harvested, most ADULTS don't understand the ramifications of that, much less children.

All of this also applies to adults, I don't like how corporate profit-seeeking algorithms dictate public discourse and I think it's perfectly reasonable to combat this. The great question is how to do so without trampling on people's right to freedom. The EU tends to combat "misinformation", but this has loads of problems, and I think it misses the mark of what the problem truly is. In my opinions it's the algorithms that maximize fear responses and lead people down rabbit holes that's the true problem.

I think the best way to combat it is by supporting federation and decentralization of the internet and attacking the advertising industry that maximizes eyeballs and time spent on the platform, rather than providing service to paying users. It also has the beneficial side-effect of increasing freedom of thought and speech rather than limiting it.

I know some people see the fragmentation of communities as the leading cause of echo-chambers, but this is not my impression. Actually, the smaller internet communities are often less extreme than algorithmically dominated central-hubs. Pseudonymous small communities function more like the local village that tends to mitigate extremism as the loudest, more extremist, community members can be challenged, without those challengers drowning in potential oppressive moderation and hive-mind mentality.

This isn't a one way door. It's a warranted societal experiment. Re-eval in 5 years, ask the kids, compare to other countries... this sort of do-nothing hand wringing is why we stagnate.