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What you're implying here is that people aren't smart enough to navigate social media intelligently, without being duped by propaganda and group think, yet you are.
Protecting dumb people by hiding them from social media, is a bad fix for a symptom of other major problems. Fixing symptoms like this is never a good solution.
What we need is education massively overhauled, to the point it would be unrecognizable to what we have today. People should have the critical thinking skills and educational background to laugh there ass off and shrug off ~~right wing~~ propaganda, and never let it take hold.
This is a much bigger problem, and we're losing significantly, but it's what should be discussed instead of just hiding social media from people.
Follow up question: how would this hypothetical educational reform even work? I fully understand that education funding in the US is very much at risk with darth cheeto coming back, but say you managed to creat this curiculum. How would it be different from what we currently have, and do you see a path of reaching it from our current system? (Would it require starting small with charter schools or is it something we could realisticly change with a large bill + funding)
Not trying to be a bother bear, but you proposed a solution so I want to see where the collective would take it.
Most people in the US do not have the requisite media understanding to navigate social media, or even media, for that matter, without being duped.
This is evident in the growth of the flat earth movement, and other literally idiotic movements.
Being influenced / tricked / conned has surprisingly little to do with being 'smart' or 'educated'. Smart people can still be tricked.
A way to manipulate people is to give them plausible (mis)information. What counts as 'plausible' depends on a person's education and interests; but there is always an area of vulnerability at the edges of a person's understanding. That's why there are so many different layers to misinformation campaigns. They are targeting different groups of people. And it is highly dangerous to start believing you can see through them all - because in reality, you only see through the ones that don't target you.
One of the propaganda powers of algorithmically controlled social media is that it is if a user gives up enough of their person info, it makes it possible to automatically target that person with misinformation that is specially suited to their interests, circles of trust, and level of understanding.
... anyway, my point is that although education is always good; it doesn't defeat propaganda outright.
The social media sites are known to collect vast information about us. The explanation is that it is meant for targeted ads, but the same information can be also used to know which buttons to press.
You scroll between funny videos and once in a while you get something that maybe will anger you, or maybe scare and in any way impact what you will do.
Just taking a recent example. To pro Palestinian people they received messages that Harris is bad for Palestine and we can show her and protest by not voting.
Meanwhile the same social media was telling pro Israeli people that they should not vote for Harris, because she is pro Palestine.
This is how they are getting desired outcome. And unlike MSM they can fine tune the message to specific category of people.
”and shrug off ~~right wing~~ propaganda" FTFY
Yeah fair enough.
Section 230 protection also needs to be removed. Let civil cases take care of misinformation and such. Currently content aggregators take no liability in what they choose to show in the their feed. Between sorting chronologically and machine learning, there is a line to be drawn.
I was initially strongly in defense of it, but it now benefits corporations and almost no private users (as it originally was intended). So removing it probably would be a net benefit. Or maybe make it only applicable to private people and non profit.