I started smoking as a teenager after those warnings were put on cigarettes. I did it despite knowing it was addictive and it was bad for me.
Kids don’t give a shit. They think they’re immortal.
But sure, waste your time.
Those warnings had a statistically significant effect on smoking rates. Just because it doesn’t work on everyone doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
https://academic.oup.com/her/article/34/3/321/5424102
In short, yes, but only before addiction.
The idea of a warning is not because anyone thinks you’re going to read it and get scared and stop doing the thing you’re hooked on.
The idea of a warning label is so your ice-age brain, the brain that loves to make up stories to explain things, has something to connect with when you start having a negative experience on something like social media, or something to help you realize that the thing, whatever it may be, is addictive and the reason you’re having problems is because of that addictive quality. We greatly overestimate our brains and our capacity to properly identify threats and tell ourselves the correct story to escape the threat.
Can’t wait to have to sign in with your driver’s license to get on Facebook think of the children.
How Money Changes the Way You Think and Feel
Money is clearly harmful. Let’s put a warning label on every bill and coin: “Addictive”?
I don’t particularly feel like there needs to be a government campaign to get rid of Lemmy/kbin/mbin, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I’m glad that the government is trying to address the issue of social media, but obviously adding warnings isn’t going to do anything.
I think the only way to actually solve the problem would be to regulate the recommendation algorithms to make them less addictive and less harmful.
It seems like an awareness campaign is a good start. People on this platform are generally very social media savvy, but the harms of social media are far from common knowledge.
One of the most important things that Lemmy has done is to introduce a transparent ranking algorithm. It turns out that people do like algorithms in our social media, as long as we can see and control them. There’s nothing sinister about an algorithm when you can easily see what is getting boosted and why (and switch it off at will)
Other federated media are developing personalized algorithms that will be well suited to other platforms.
I can’t tell if this dude is 23 years old or 53 years old.
