Bananas? Bent. Lids? Fixed. Social media: you're next!
Blog, 23/01/2025, by Sven Franck (au français , in deutsch)
The Trump inauguration went by with the expected amount of hitler-hoopla. As the new president and his social-media lackeys started swarming the world with the equivalent of telescreen-propaganda, the European Union should deliver in the way it knows best: regulation. It's no longer enough to threaten a slap on the wrist only after the media picked up the demand made by a Volt MEP. The Commission should treat social media as what it is - hazardous to mental health.
Regulators!
Maybe you still remember the 2004 movie "Supersize me". The protagonist tried to survive on a diet of McDonalds for 30 days straight documenting his mental and physical decline including liver damage and heart problems. He needed a full 14 months to recover. Whether it's burgers or soda, the European Union and member states are protecting us by banning chemical flavours and levying taxes on sugar, fat and processed food. Compare for example (bonus if you know the historic and skin-color reason) Fanta sold in the US and in Europe. There is a big difference even though the European version still contains excessive amounts of sugar.
Sugar, fat or likes. Social media is like junk food. Just as addictive and worse, available at the click of a button. Look around: when was the last time you saw kids not being sucked into their smartphone, being fed a steady diet that does not end up on their hips but in their heads. Whether Musk, Meta or TikTok, we should be happy if our children only demand Dubai chocolate. The Austrian Tagespresse recently tested what kids were fed if they signed up on TikTok and ended up swamped with extreme-right and islamist content. Do we want our kids to grow up brainwashed?
The numbers speak for themselves: In 2024 every internet user between 16-64 spent an average of 2h30 hours on social media. 2h30 hours of doom scrolling. The effects on the adult population are already visible at the ballot box. The effects on our children will occupy us for years to come. And with the social media - even from China - lipservicing the new US President and now publicly weaponizing their various platforms, simple slaps on the wrist will no longer suffice. If the European Commission is not able to reign in social media through regulation - the one thing it is seemingly good at - we need to wonder whose interests the Commission is protecting - US business or EU citizens?
Parental advisory: explicit content
Cigarette packaging could tell the story. But the EU Commission should use existing regulation: The EU Data Act forces cloud providers (like Google or Amazon) to "open" their clouds, so a user can move his applications and data from one provider to another. Why not count social media platforms as cloud providers and break their walled gardens? The EU Commission could mandate a decentralised format such as Mastodons ActivityPub to be implemented and freely accessible, so users can build their own feed on independent platforms that can load the posts from followers on X, Facebook, etc.
The EU could go further: how about banning bots? You could read social media without identifying yourself, but once you interact - whether via like, comment or post, you need to have a verifiable identity. Bot-armies would no longer be able to push specific content in popularity and down our throats and, even better, online hatred and harassment would likely also decline faced with the prospect of law enforcement easily tracking down perpetrators.
Finally, how about digital ownership rights? Is my post "my post” just as "my DNA sequence” should be my DNA sequence and not property of the provider doing the sequencing? Why shouldn't I be compensated, if my post and content are being used by social media platforms to train AI models? Finally, how about demanding critical platforms to provide the right to speak to a human within 24 hours in case of an account being banned or a post being deleted and penalties per violation.
Europe doesn't have to “follow” the United States. The European Union is not helpless and neither are we. We can move followers to platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon with initiatives like HelloQuitX. We can stop using social media - and gain 2.5 hours of additional free time every day - to read a book (if you still can) or to talk to real people (see if you still know how). Let’s try to be social without the media. And if the European Commission pretends to be helpless, let's vote it out. In every national election. So that in the 2029 European election we can demand a Commission President for the people.