Word of Praise for Growing Recognition That Social Control Media Causes Health Problems (But It's Not Just 'TikTok' or "China")
Fentanylware ('TikTok') is just harvesting brains (spying) and brainwashing them
There are many press reports, partly spurred by a cluster of lawsuits in over a dozen US states, concerning health harms of Social Control Media. Those ought not focus on children because adults are similarly affected (maybe they know how to handle addiction a little bit better). They should not single out 'TikTok' or "China", even if the latest leaks (or evidence) come from 'TikTok' (we'd rather call it Fentanylware to symbolise what it does to "users"... like drug users).
In his public talk at Web3 Summit 2024 (which he physically attended in Berlin), Richard M. Stallman (RMS) said: "Some US states are considering passing laws that platforms can't direct their recommendation engines to quote children unquote which means people it's not clear what age. They're not all actually children but the problem with that is these recommendations are dangerous for adults too. So you're not really solving the whole problem if you try to protect only children. But I'm not saying ban recommendation engines, I'm saying disconnect them from platforms so platforms can't dump recommendation engines on poor users, or on any user if the user doesn't choose it."
When he speaks of "recommendation engines" he means social control media (or "Social Control Media" capitalised; we coined and popularised this term) and a core "functionality" of them (filtering what people see, based on the platform's agenda, i.e. the politics of its owners or whatever drives more "engagement").
Seeing that GitHub (social control media for code), LinkedIn (gamification of careers), and Twitter are collapsing in terms of traffic and in value, we're fairly confidence more people in society inoculate themselves, seeing the press openly admitting the harms of these nonsensical things. Mastodon failed to replace them and Facebook has just pre-announced another big wave of mass layoffs.
The future of the Web ought to be something more like personal blogs. It is the "Web We Lost". █