@osma @neil

Social media has also helped incredible amounts of people though. It's allowed marginalized minorities to find people like them. It's allowed people to organize against oppressive governments.

It's also curated local events and increased turnout and access to so many things for so many people.

We can say "burn it to the ground" and part of me wants to agree, but... It would harm a lot of people too.

@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil yes, for whatever the real problems of social media there are also a bunch of things that aren’t problems with social media, that it’s nevertheless blamed for.

The Brianna Ghey case always comes to mind here: it’s been framed retroactively by her mother as a social media problem and used to argue in favour of a ban. But she wasn’t bullied online: she was bullied and murdered by people who she knew in person. Social media was in fact a safe place for her, where she found support. (It’s becoming increasingly clear that the ‘problem’ her mother perceives with social media is that it ‘turned her trans’.)

And that’s a more general pattern, I think, though not as extreme in most cases: a lot of LGBTQ young people have found support that way when they wouldn’t have been able to do so pre-internet. Age-restricting access to social media — and to LGBTQ-oriented content more broadly — seems directly harmful in those cases.

And then again for example that Guardian piece. It sounds awful — but I don’t think an age limit is the answer. Is misogyny towards adult women supposed to be okay? Either mandate that social media companies address the problem effectively, or ban them entirely — a ban for under-16s is just for the sake of looking like they’re doing something without it actually being meaningfully effective.

(Edit: to be clear I don’t think a social media ban would be positive overall, or even that it’s a workable concept — how do you define social media? — but it would at least make more sense than an age limit.)