People who think this doesn't or won't do anything are completely overlooking the advertising revenue impact. If social media must carry these warning labels, that devalues the ad space they sell. Does coca cola, Ford, etc. really want their ads to show up on content with these warning labels? Will they be getting a discount on ad space because it's better to deliver ads to users on platforms that don't have this warning?
In Canada the cigarette warning labels had horrible pictures of the damage smoking can cause, and all my friends that smoked liked collecting them like baseball cards.
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.
A lot of people don't understand how anything like this could help, but keep in mind that policy shapes society as much as the opposite. Yeah most social media users are going to roll their eyes and ignore warning messages, but we're out to help people, not necessarily today's people.
When you grow up around the normalization of something like, the "officially sanctioned" knowledge that social media can be dangerous, it gives you something for your brain to connect with when you realize you've been ruminating for hours or days about what someone thinks about you on the internet. It really does help the brain when you can more easily identify a threat.
And more than anything, this would set a powerful precedent in the social view of mental health. Again, when you grow up seeing a thing is normal, you are more readily able to identify the source of the problem when a bad thing is happening to you.
The point of cigarette warning labels was to kill off tobacco use. They didn't ban cigarettes either, but that's got nothing to do with the aim of the campaign.
I understand if your personal stance is that there should be zero government intervention in what people choose to use or not, but we don't live in that world and likely never will because of the complexity of society.
So under THIS society and governing system, what would you say should be done about social media and it's growing negative influence on people, particularly younger people and children? let's say you're THIS government and your people are asking for help with this problem so you need to spend the money they pay you somehow.
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.
