Step 1: Remove physical third spaces

Step 2: Remove digital third spaces

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Uh.....

It's like being forced to quit drugs cold turkey, and that sucks. There's been enough whistleblowers telling us social media is being shaped to be as addicting and harmful as possible and to get kids hooked as young as possible.

I was born a generation or maybe two now? above these kids. I got to experience the early Internet and not having MySpace weaponized against me. So from that perspective I'm at I'm happy for them. It's been consistently hard to avoid social media and the backlash of friends. I'll be excluded from a group event or miss important information every so often and then get told. "Well if you were on Facebook you would've known."

These kids will be alright once they discover what avenues are available to them for communication.

The MCMC dictates that platforms must eventually implement robust age verification against government-issued records such as the national identity card called MyKad, or passports. Tech companies have been granted a six-month grace period to fully integrate a rigorous age-verification system for users aged 16 and above.

This is nothing but an anti-privacy measure, and discussing it in good faith as a child protection measure is playing into their propaganda. Discussing the merits of these "age-verification" laws as such is about as dumb as agreeing to refer to anti-abortion as pro-life when you yourself are pro-abortion.

Oh and agreeing with these "age-verification" laws because you want to save the children is even dumber.

I am a little unsympathetic to the notion that people can't socialize without social media.

You have phone calls, texts, email, snail mail, face-to-face conversations, sports, community activities, etc. Call your friends, get on bikes, and go have an adventure.

These lazy little shits don't even remember when they were young, and yearned for the mines.

Surprise surprise. If you want to help, regulate the social media itself, hold companies accountable for content they show to children.

Yeah I don't think cutting it off like this is the best approach

Oh those poor children!

Now they have to talk to each other in school

/s

📖

Form crime gangs like they are everywhere else. What 16 year old didn't go smash bottles or windows or set things on fire at that age?

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

So:

I believe that outright censorship is definitely bad, addition to being very fucking stupid.

At the same time, forcing kids to step away from the constant connectivity of social media has very fucking real benefits. There is clearly a middle ground that we need to find, but our Fearless Leaders are far too fucking inept to understand any of the pertinent technical concepts and constraints in any level of detail, thus ensuring that pretty much all government regulations on this stuff is going to be deeply fucking stupid, improperly targeted, technically infeasible, wasteful, and almost entirely ineffective.