[openrisk]

You can cast any regulation as a "nanny state act". Life is more complicated than that.

The ability of individuals to be aware and take conscious action against harmful behaviors is clear and should be used when possible. But that ability gets exhausted very fast in a hyperspecialized and complicated world. Most parents are digitally illiterate, can't protect even themselves online, let alone their kids.

Delegating to collective institutions that can pool the required expertise and weigh-in the pros and cons is the means to empower individuals to better handle these hard to evaluate risks.

If our institutions really dont produce good regulation the obvious thing to do is check and fix that, taking into account that the complaints about over-regulation, bad regulation etc. might be by the offenders or aspiring abusers that have something to lose.

[throwawaythekey]

Is there a time when you would find "nanny state" to be a useful concept? What would make that situation different to the social media ban?

[openrisk]

I think the answer in implicit in my comment: When all the affected individuals can readily make their own judgement about the risks and benefits of their choices (1) they have all the relevant information, (2) they are able to comprehend it and (3) they can act on it using a menu of options.

99% of people are entirely clueless as to what happens behind the scenes in social media platforms because the information is not there, and it is doubtful they would be able to evaluate it anyway. Plus, there are hardly any differentiated alternatives available.

So when these conditions are not met, anybody throwing around terms like "nanny state" has ulterior motives to exploit vulnerable populations (ignorant, addicted, low information, trapped etc.) for their own gain.

Which is "fine" or at least understandable, moral values are not universal. But lets make clear the starkly different visions.

[throwawaythekey]

If TV were to be banned under similar reasoning would you believe that to be justified? TV programming is similarly opaque to the social media algorithms.

[openrisk]

There are many TV channel alternatives, public TV is pretty transparent and there are regulations around when various programs would air, obligatory reporting of age suitability etc.

[throwawaythekey]

> There are many TV channel alternatives

There are many social medias

> public TV is pretty transparent

In what manner? As a kid I didn't know that the pokemon cartoon existed in order to make me buy trading cards.

Even in news there is an army of editors and producers making decisions all of the time. This leads to things like the state media adding sound effects to footage to make it more sensational and then after losing in court investigating themselves and finding no intentional wrongdoing [1]!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/05/abc-editorial-...