Of course it wonβt.
The only way to get kids off social media is to provide them a better alternative. And budgets are being cut for youth programs.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Another big one is to include comprehensive access to mental health professionals as part of Medicare.
Adults have lots of alternatives. The problem is with social media.
Adults have to work, they need alternatives.
Banning social media has always felt like a kneejerk/emotional reaction. It's a surface level solution to a complex problem, a bit like drugs = bad therefore we should ban drugs. It might see some short term improvements but I don't personally see it as a realistic solution long term.
It's actually worse than that. Apparently, if you go down through enough layers of the movements pushing age-gating for social media in the US, you discover that one of the major funders is . . . Meta/Facebook (or at least this is what is getting batted around on tech sites). Whether they're actively funding it up here, or it's just slopover . . . π€·
The most benign explanation for this is that they want more anti-lawsuit armour. The cynical explanation is that they want to harvest additional personal data from the organization doing the age-gating, so that they can sell more "personalized" ad spaces to their real customers.
(And the real solution? Make the toxic elements of large corporate social media illegal, period, regardless of the user's age group. And while you're at it, require any advertising-funded online service that shows different ads to different users to put up an annoying banner saying "we steal your personal data" in big red letters that has to be clicked through every time someone uses the site.)
I think Meta is pushing it because they want to make sure ads are served to real people and not bots. It's the much simpler explanation.
That is why I stopped using Reddit and Facebook, I have a community on Discord that I so want to move to Matrix. Because of all of this big tech stuff going down I am planning on spinning up my own home lab, mostly running off of raspberry piβs. I have a measly handful of piβs right now doing things like; pihole; HAOS; a bunch of apps to sail the high seas, nextcloud, wireguard, a few other things but the best has got to be searNINGX a self hosted search engine, sure it takes results from the google and bing and maybe some others but I have it setup more to my liking. I know there is arguments to using AdGaurd home over pihole but for everything that AdGaurd home does that pihole does not do I have worked it into my pihole setup. I do not want to be the product, I want to be the user.
No, it's not like drugs at all.
Drugs have existed alongside for all of human evolution. Social media and smartphones are a brand new technology optimized to exploit you.
Also, we have extremely strict regulations on legal drugs and would not accept the effects of social media as a side effect.
I'm not comparing social media to drugs. I'm comparing reactionary banning of things.
And I'm pointing out how that is too broad a brush to be meaningful
... a social media ban would fail to protect kids while also posing risks to privacy and free expression for all Canadians.
So, it will work exactly as intended, then.
Drop social media, do drugs instead.
Drop out, tune in, turn on.
How is it that people are even talking about a "social media ban" as if it's a thing that could actually happen in Canada? WTF happened to you Canada?
People who say this never lived in a world without social media.
Social media didn't improve anything. It's an outrage machine that wastes trillion of hours of people's lives.
Yep had high hopes for the internet but people are lazy and cheap. Bow web have this shit ads everywhere and most of the internet is 5 companies. The democrazation we where supposed to have has consolidated to reddit and Facebook.
If it's a wasteful outrage machine why are you here?
Heroing addicts are often some of the most able to recognize the problems with heroin.
I can only assume that you've never known anyone who lost their life to an opioid addiction. There's nothing wrong with that; lucky you. I remain in favour of your right to express your thoughts in public even when you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
Or maybe I do and you don't get to fucking claim a monopoly on how people make analogies just because you lost someone.
It wasn't that it's a bad analogy that provoked my ire (although it is) β it was more about the apparent intention behind it. The problems with "social media" are not inherent to social media. It's not a fundamentally dangerous drug, it's a whole universe of different forms of telecommunication which people have come to rely on in myriad ways, the most prominent of which are badly designed for nefarious reasons that are completely avoidable without demonizing the whole concept. Aim to stop the abusers who've taken it hostage, not to abolish the whole concept or restrict it through unconscionable intrusions on civil liberties.
Objectively correct opinion given common sense and all evidence.
Just fine the companies for accepting Canadian IP addresses, easy to get around but will make them less popular.
Kinda like the Digital Sales Tax?
Except that doesn't scale for repeated violations.
I understand why they this. And they are right. Which mean that at the end, it's just locking further more systems.