Countries around the world are starting to ban kids and teens from using social media. Australia have already banned U16’s and other countries including the UK are following suit.
Personally as someone that has two young kids, I think it’s the right call. I’ll acknowledge that there are good aspects to social media. People use it to document their lives, post photos, put their thoughts and ideas out there for others to see. It’s a place to find others who share the same interests as you, who you may never otherwise have met.
The problem is all of these good aspects of social media come bundled in with the problems, the algorithms, the echo chambers and toxicity of idiots. Companies build businesses on capturing your attention, keep you scrolling, and send you an endless stream of notifications to manage.
By removing social media it doesn’t mean we have to remove the good parts of the internet. It might actually be an opportunity to introduce these people to a better part of it.
If a teenager wants somewhere to write about their football team, upload photos from a trip, review games, document a hobby, share artwork, write about something they’ve learned or just post whatever is on their mind, they don’t actually need Instagram, TikTok or X to do any of that. They just need a website.
You can publish whatever you want and best of all you own all of it forever if you’re publishing on a platform like WordPress.
If you’re around my age you probably remember MySpace. At one point everyone had a profile, and then everyone left. The internet is littered with platforms that were once enormous before quickly becoming irrelevant.
Bring back the personal web
I think people see social media as the internet, but its not. The web existed before Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. People had blogs, people built weird websites about weird and niche interests, it was messier and more fun, more human (nostalgia maybe? who cares).
Restricting teens from using social media isn’t the same as saying they can’t participate online. I think we should start encouraging this more and see it as an opportunity.
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