Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP), the Finnish public health authority THL and two-thirds of Finns are in favour of banning or restricting the use of social media by under-15s.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even your worst enemy will sometimes agree with you. Social media may not be automatically bad but effectively all for-profit implementations are irredeemably corrupted and a catastrophic danger to the fabric of democracy and civilization. Banning it will not eliminate it but it is the only viable harm reduction strategy we have available for any of us at this point. Techbro dominance and devastating levels of abuse by cynical, manipulative actors has robbed us of the luxury of choosing any more reasonable, nuanced approaches.
Except this solution has nothing to do with your complaints. It’s not a ban, it’s age verification, i.e., improved data gathering, and that applies to all users, not just children.
It’s not that I disagree with that, but I can guarantee that our government doesn’t think of technofascist dominance as a bad thing. Like @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz said, this is being pushed to make it easier to gather data on us. Age verification does nothing to fix the underlying problem.
This government is explicitly antidemocratic and is eg. working on expanding police and military intelligence’s ability to wiretap and hack people, even if they aren’t suspected of a specific crime. There is exactly zero chance that the data on who logged into what service will not be used against us citizens eventually.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even your worst enemy will sometimes agree with you. Social media may not be automatically bad but effectively all for-profit implementations are irredeemably corrupted and a catastrophic danger to the fabric of democracy and civilization. Banning it will not eliminate it but it is the only viable harm reduction strategy we have available for any of us at this point. Techbro dominance and devastating levels of abuse by cynical, manipulative actors has robbed us of the luxury of choosing any more reasonable, nuanced approaches.
Except this solution has nothing to do with your complaints. It’s not a ban, it’s age verification, i.e., improved data gathering, and that applies to all users, not just children.
My point exactly.
It’s not that I disagree with that, but I can guarantee that our government doesn’t think of technofascist dominance as a bad thing. Like @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz said, this is being pushed to make it easier to gather data on us. Age verification does nothing to fix the underlying problem.
This government is explicitly antidemocratic and is eg. working on expanding police and military intelligence’s ability to wiretap and hack people, even if they aren’t suspected of a specific crime. There is exactly zero chance that the data on who logged into what service will not be used against us citizens eventually.