[hankman86]

The internet and social media aren’t the same. Heck, it’s not even an inherent principle of social media to be the manipulating, exploitative and addictive garbage that is Facebook. The bad things happening on Facebook aren’t a coincidence, but very much an expected outcome of a) deliberate and malicious design decisions and b) the centralised platform economy that social media companies rely on.

Hence, legislation shouldn’t target individual companies, but “features” that harm people or lead to bad outcomes for society at large. One such example is Europe’s GDPR, which imposes some fundamental limitations on what companies can and cannot do with their users’ personal data. And as negative consequences of poor social media design becomes more apparent, legislators must expand on that and ban more of the malicious practices that are at fault.