[LexiMax]

Erm, I actually agree with you. Blanket prohibition wouldn't work, and in any case isn't really viable, due to the amount of money in the status quo.

I suppose I hope that future generations will consider social media in its current form to be a vice in the same way that alcohol or gambling are, but I don't claim to know what an actual society-wide solution would look like.

All I can do in the here and now is point out how fake social media is, try and articulate why, and gently guide people who might want off the ride towards spaces where they can connect with actual human beings.

In a way, I feel sorry for terminally online social media addicts. I never understood the appeal of sites like Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram in the first place. Facebook seemed neat until the artifice of real people + real names + real pictures turned out to be smoke, then I stopped bothering with it. Reddit was probably the closest to being appealing that social media ever got, but it had some serious systemic issues with community-building that only got worse as moderators went from community curators to doing janitorial work for a large company >for free.