Teens

France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)

The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.

In England, Australia and Switzerland parents want to ban mobile phones from children beneath 14 years of age. In theory this is an excellent idea this is a fantastic and fabulous idea, because it means parents can avoid spending thousands of francs per year on mobile phones, and tech is seen as toxic.

In practice parents are scapegoating the medium, rather than the source of the problem. Facebook, Zynga, Supercell and many other companies are deliberately targeting people to make their platforms addictive and compelling. In my eyes, and in those of others Social Media platforms should be held to account. In my eyes the issue is not mobile phones, or social media that is the problem. Toxic leadership is.

Today I read from Techcrunch and The Verge that there are new tools to limit things so that people can only get comments from friends and family. The irony isn’t lost on me.

The irony I’m thinking about is that we have built a social media landscape where the content from strangers floods our timelines without us wanting to see it. Rather than just give us chronological timelines with posts from our friends, they add mitigation factors for slowing down and stopping harrasment.