| > who are we to punish? 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. |