Radicalization, as the algorithm deliberately feeds you bad takes from your political opponents and good takes from your political allies, to keep you engaged.
Overstimulation, the YouTube Kids channel Cocomelon is way too addictive for kids. This isn't exclusive to social media, and YouTube Kids apparently has an exemption.
Addiction, social media eats into hours upon hours in kid's days. Time they could spend with their family/friends or processing their emotions, instead they're being numbed out on their phone.

I think we should ban algorithmic recommendations (or strictly limit them), ban the practices of Cocomelon, and ... I'm not sure what we can do about the addiction thing (humans are super prone to addiction). I'd also ban smart-phones in schools, kids should only be allowed flip-phones/brick-phones.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Produce studies and I swear to god if it's that one where they say kids are scroiling Instagram for 9 hours a day when they report using it as a messenging application I will reach through the screen and strangle you.

Legislation should not be based on vibes ffs. I think Mark Zuckerburg should be hung in a public square and skinned alive for the evil he has wrought with shit like aiding genocide but there is not sufficient evidence that social media, which covers everything from usenet to lemmy to Instagram to youtube, causes harms warranting age based bans. This is a world where we allow coca cola and factory farming, "it's probably bad for some people some of the time" is clearly not the bar for criminalisation.

[–] Tenderizer@aussie.zone 0 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Produce studies saying to say it's not harmful, or be quiet. Social media is too new, and all the psychologists that know the implications are working for the social media companies to make it more addictive. We don't know whether social media is harmful, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of the three issues I raised. I should not I haven't actually looked for any evidence because who can be bothered using Google for a Lemmy (Reddit) argument.

In my experience, the type of engagement that social media encourages is not healthy in any way, and this is not on the level of books or movies (some video games fall into the same category though).

Or let's just go with privacy laws. Any information on engagement with their platforms should be depersonalized before use in content recommendation and ads. Users should need to manually select the criteria of content they want to see, rather than TikTok deciding they're autistic or something and doing that automatically. In practice though this'd probably just means there'd only be the trending page, but as long as it's useless (and we'd need to rely on human recommendations) then all's fine.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

Produce studies saying to say it’s not harmful, or be quiet.

My dude, that is not how epistemology works. You cannot prove a negative empirically.