| > In a free society, you penalize the people who can't act like responsible adults, not the people who can. If the ills of social media are, as you say, (and I also believe), caused by the higher-order effects of many individuals "failing to exercise common sense and critical thinking," then who are we to punish? A phenomenon like QAnon might have been started by a single nefarious person, and amplified by a small group of misinformation lovers, but it's only because of social media's leverage that millions of people have had their moral framework and way of interacting with the world corrupted so heavily. Punishing the irresponsible was a reasonable solution for all of history where the irresponsible had a reasonable amount of societal leverage. We're no longer there. Perhaps banning social media isn't the way. But focusing on the humans that find leverage points in the system to amplify bad messages also doesn't solve the fact that the system is designed to maximize ordinary people's ability to create self-sustaining societal doom loops. Banning guns might be overreach. But banning something that's the functional equivalent of distributing assault rifles to millions of toddlers seems like a necessity in a free society. |
I didn't say "punish", I said "penalize". Responsible adults should not have to have their society ruined because irresponsible people are manipulating and other irresponsible people are being manipulated.
> it's only because of social media's leverage
But what causes the leverage? It isn't just social media; if a billion people read on Facebook that they should drink nail polish to immunize themselves against COVID-19 (to concoct a fictional, as far as I know, example), and they do it, they suffer the consequences, not me.
What causes the leverage is that we have continued to hand more and more power to governments in the name of "fixing" problems that governments cannot fix. The result is that capturing that government power is worth so much that nefarious people are willing to spend billions to do it. Social media gives those people more leverage, yes, but if that big gob of centralized power wasn't there in the first place, it wouldn't matter.
Your proposed solution doesn't fix that problem; it makes it worse, by giving government even more power. And that just means responsible people get more penalized for the behavior of irresponsible people, because you're giving the government more power to ban tools that responsible people can make responsible use of.
> the system is designed to maximize ordinary people's ability to create self-sustaining societal doom loops
No, the system is designed to maximize the amount of power that nefarious people can capture, by centralizing that power. The solution is to de-centralize that power so it isn't there to capture. Stop depending on government fiat to fix problems.