… people have a tendency to underestimate how prone they are to manipulation. We should amend our constitutions to include freedom of thought as a fundamental human right.

Good for them. Chrome needs a corporate competitor, and the recent lawsuits that (I think) prevent Google from giving FireFox hundred million dollar bribes might lead to a diminished product.

Prohibition is effective, it’s just that it doesn’t work for easy to manufacture compounds such as alcohol or marijuana. Every known human culture has independently discovered alcohol, and marijuana is a weed that is ready to smoke in its natural form.

As far as social media goes, my country has reached a point where TikTok and Facebook are preinstalled on every phone. If a parent buys their kid a phone and removes them, they will reinstall themselves after an automatic update. When you take into consideration the “streamlined” registration process, one can argue this is a means to target prepubescent children.

…I guess an 8 year old could download a VPN and steal their parents identification, but I feel like some form of prohibition would help.

I still think it’s a step in the right direction. Once you make it illegal for children to use social media, you can start going after the platforms for knowingly manipulating children.

The value of social media lies is in it’s ability to change thoughts, opinions, and long-term behavior. The public underestimates how effective this technology is, especially when it comes to children. In the absence of regulations, these platforms can make people believe just about anything by exploiting perceived peer pressure.

Lol. Although this claim might be technically true, comparing the cost of the first prototype lithium ion battery with a modern mass produced batteries is apples to oranges.

…Reddit is the opposite of Republican. The people there are aggressively far left. It is hard to believe that it’s not an artificially enforced echo chamber.

The problem with echo chambers is that they are politically sterile. By aggressively forcing Republicans and moderates off the platform, we lose the ability to influence their stances and opinions. It becomes a circle jerk.

If we had sustainable practices, at least of 3rd of the people in the United States and Western Europe would have a standard of living similar to the people in 3rd world country. This is assuming we don’t compensate for things by exploiting more vulnerable populations.

I personally think this is a decent trade-off, but the people my country would end up exploiting would probably disagree.

I don’t see this information as being particu relevant. There are various boards and committees where half the people are government and half of them are from Google. From what I gather, Google more or less functions as the mass surveillance arm of the government, so a Government App serving this purpose would be redundant.