Because, in general, we see adults making bad choices as a price worth paying in a free society, but we recognize that children lack the maturity and judgment to make those choices for themselves.
Most adults also lack the maturity and judgement, but allowing adults to make bad decisions is usually less dangerous than giving someone else the power to decide which decisions are too bad to permit.
Because I'm an adult, rather than a sheep for you to control, and I much prefer being shown things in my interest (via recommendation alg) rather than things in the general populations interest. In fact, I wish I could upload my own recommendation model to all the social media, to curate it better, and put some black holes near topics I want to avoid, with the option to fuzz it a bit for exploration.
But what about the actual content? People aren't scared of social media because you can message people, it's because of the short form videos. How are you supposed to have an offline version of that?
Same as for the cigarette: it's a lot easier to regulate stuff for kids, because we as a society tend to agree that they need to be protected. Much harder to do with adults, because it is much less of a consensus.
> Much harder to do with adults, because it is much less of a consensus.
It's because humans are motivated primarily by fear, not logic.
The exact same moral panic was made about fuckin printed books. This is all hysteria, just like the TV is evil phase everyone went through. Proof of this is that nobody can even agree what social media is, let alone point to what's actually harmful about it
And we have even worse examples: it's depressing to see how many people "don't believe" in the principle of vaccination. One may be tempted to say "people don't have the time to become experts in every topic", but when you look at the energy people put into sharing their beliefs around those topics... clearly they would have the time to read a bit.
I genuinely wonder if there would be any end user against banning these algorithms. I’d love rss style content providers back. Just let me freely subscribe to accounts.
Most adults also lack the maturity and judgement, but allowing adults to make bad decisions is usually less dangerous than giving someone else the power to decide which decisions are too bad to permit.