I don’t have any strong feelings either way on the government’s proposals to ban under 16s from social media. Obviously, I am in favour of banning children from seeing, for example, pornography and extreme violence but I have reservations about laws that are quite possibly unenforceable.
Children are, we are told, tied to their mobile phones via a kind of umbilical cord. I know of children who appear to have developed a permanent stoop due to their gazing at social media as they walk along the road. And if social media severely distracts children from their studies at school any reduction in use must be a good thing, right? But how about adults?
I was told last week by a near neighbour that Rupert Lowe, the far right MP, has evidence that the government is randomly putting people in prison for things they are posting on Facebook. It was true because he had seen it on Facebook. Last year, I learned that taking the Covid vaccine is proven to cause cancer. A friend of mine who died of cancer last year was effectively told by someone he thought to be a long term friend that getting cancer was his own fault and she declined to ever see him again. If we are worried about kids on social media, that takes some beating.
I read last week that some 40% of what we see on Facebook in particular is AI and we can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is AI slop. I think that’s a massive underestimate given the amount of AI shit that appears on my social media timelines.
I actually think that children, at least the intelligent ones, are actually better at using the internet that many older folk and my own children and their friends are far smarter at seeing the wood through the trees than us doddery geriatrics.
It is a fact that older people are far more right-wing politically speaking than younger folk. Is that because they are wiser and more mature than young people or because they are more easily influenced by the glut of extreme right-wing opinion that these days dominates the media? Every time I see an older person singing the praises of Nigel Farage, I think to myself: do you really trust a bloke who admires the fascist Russian president Vladimir Putin and believes the NHS should be scrapped in favour of the American model?
Maybe we should all scale back our use of social media for the sake of our mental health and indeed our sanity? I know I have, particularly X, which I have got rid of, and Facebook which has become more of a senior citizens playground, full of tiresome ‘photo-dumps’, gurning selfies, grotesque AI images, sometimes of the Facebook users themselves, and sheer ‘isn’t-my-life-great’ exhibitionism.
My guess is that the government has had to act to protect children because the trillionaire-owned social media companies can’t be trusted to moderate their own platforms themselves. It’s a shame that so-called adults have been able to teach their children to not obsess with social media at the expense of everything else. Maybe they haven’t had time, what with the effort required to keep up with everything that is happening on Facebook?
