this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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High Court challenge says law imposing ban is ‘grossly excessive’ and infringes on ‘constitutional right of freedom of political communication’

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[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 6 points 1 day ago

It’s pretty depressing to see how many people have been ignoring the genuine harm that can occur using social media.

I feel like most people agree that it can be harmful. The problem is more that they don't understand enough about how social media works to realise that it's a structural design problem with the technology itself and one that can only start to be addressed through government regulation. To a lot of people it becomes solely a personal responsibility problem. If a child has an addiction it's solely the parent's fault for allowing their child to become addicted. If an adult has an addiction then it's solely their own fault for letting themselves get addicted. When it gets framed as an individual problem rather than a structural one, it's easy to oppose any and all legislation on the basis of "well none of us have a problem so why do we have to pay for a solution/be punished?". It's difficult to understand how easily psychological manipulation can occur if you don't understand the techniques being used.

Another, related, problem in this particular case is that a lot of people still seem to think the main problems are the more sensational things like child predators or violent content. Whilst those are very real and serious concerns, they are pretty extreme examples and getting fixated on them makes it very easy to ignore the more insidious effects of social media usage on developing brains. I guess that's one of my main problems with the current implementation; it’s based around account ownership and some platforms like YouTube still use an algorithm and build a shadow profile with recommendations based on what you've viewed even if you're logged out. For some of these platforms, the current legislation is going to do little to combat addiction (beyond signalling to parents that this stuff is bad, which is definitely important).