The word 'Chaos' made out of black netting

Paris Marx, who is back on Ghost after a brief flirtation with Substack, takes a look at social media regulation in a recent post. Comparing the regulatory landscapes in the US, UK, and Australia, he argues that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” when it comes to what he calls the “social media harm cycle.”

As he points out, although the regulations are targeting children under the age of 16, the issues around AI and algorithms on social networks affect everyone. We’ve tried our best to keep our two teenagers off algorithmic social networks until they turned 16, but it’s difficult. And it’s not like there’s a magic “maturity and self-control” switch that is turned on when you reach specific ages.

Instead, and this isn’t something I would have advocated for a decade ago, regulation is required to break the loop of algorithmic addiction. Back in 2012 when my son and daughter were five years old and one year old, respectively, I argued that “The best filter resides in the head, not in a router or office of an Internet Service Provider (ISP).” I’m still anti-censorship, but we’ve managed to allow Big Tech to have far too much control over our everyday lives.

These algorithms are perhaps the most powerful shapers of society at the moment — which is why it’s kicking off everywhere. They’re rage machines.

In the past, I might have been more hesitant about these efforts to ramp up the enforcement on social media platforms and even to put age gates on the content people can access online. But seeing how tech companies have seemingly thrown off any concern for the consequences of their businesses to cash in on generative AI and appease the Trump administration, and seeing how chatbots are speedrunning the social media harm cycle, many of my reservations have evaporated. Action must be taken, and in a situation like this, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I don’t support the US measures that are effectively the imposition of social conservative norms veiled in the language of protecting kids online. But I am much more open to what is happening in other parts of the world where those motivations are not driving the policy. Personally, I think the Australians are more aligned with an approach I’d support.

They’re specifically targeting social media platforms, rather than the wider web as is occurring in the UK, and the mechanism of their enforcement surrounds creating accounts. So, for instance, now that YouTube will be included in the scheme, that means users under 16 years of age cannot create accounts on the platform — that would then enable collecting data on them and targeting them with algorithmic recommendations — but they can still watch without an account. There are still concerns around the use of things like face scanning to determine age, but in my view, it’s time to experiment and adjust as we go along.

Even with that said, if I was crafting the policy, I would take a very different approach. It’s not just minors who are harmed by the way social media platforms are designed today — virtually everybody is, to one degree or another. While I support experimenting with age gates, my preferred approach would focus less on age and more on design; specifically, severed restrictions algorithmic targeting and amplification, limiting data collection and making it easier for users to prohibit it altogether, and developing strict rules on the design of the platforms themselves — as we know they use techniques inspired by gambling to keep people engaged.

To be clear, the Australians and the Brits are looking into those measures too — if not already rolling out some measures along those lines. These are actions we need to take regardless of the politics behind the platforms, but given how Donald Trump and many of these executives are explicitly trying to use their power to stop regulation and taxation of US tech companies, now is the time to be even more aggressive, not to cower in the face of pressure and criticism.

Source: Disconnect

Image: Declan Sun