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.
They’re the victims of a lot of money being poured into making sure they don’t use other means of communication. I’m sure they’ll figure it out. I don’t think you have to be unsympathetic to these kids to also tell them to explore other forms of social interaction
‘Victim’ is the correct word.
These young people were fed into a digital ecosystem that is 100% meant to be harmful to their brains in order to get them to buy shit they don’t need. If we lived in a just world Facebook would have been held criminally accountable when it was disclosed in 2014 that they were conducting experiments on their users by tweaking their news feeds in order to manipulate them.
Thanks to the addictive element of these applications it will require effort to reorient themselves into this new reality, but that’s better than living in front of a screen. In time, they’ll learn that but it is going to be a learned skill.
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.
