I agree with the first two paragraphs, but the rest really feels like you projecting your political and social outlook on the situation.

Social media provides and strengthens biased worldviews and confirmation bias. If you stick to social media, you’ll think violent crime is rapidly increasing (in the US), but it’s actually down. It’s still a problem, but it’s being used to push political agendas that don’t actually solve the problem. For example, banning bump stocks, which are almost never used in mass shootings (most of those are handguns), and make guns way less accurate. Only enthusiasts get them, and pretty much only for range use. And you also have to pull the trigger each time, it just makes that easier (can get the same effect with a rubber band…). It’s also how we got the anti-vax movement and various other conspiracies.

Social media is one way to get less censored news, but it’s unreliable and tends to lead to echo chambers. We should instead be pushing to get government and political bias out of news reporting (or at least make bias explicit), not protect the less trustworthy, biased social media based news sources. There are countless examples of large social media sources providing incorrect information, and never correcting it, and the false information gets more views than the correct information. Social media drives people toward radicalization, and it’s largely how we got Trump.

Social media is a liability. Mobile games are too. Parents should be restricting their children’s access to both (we do), and instead teaching children to recognize bias and find good information (we’re working on that, but they’re still young).

What’s SM?

For scenario one, they totally need to delete the data used for age verification after they collect it according to the law (unless another law says they have to keep it) and you can trust every company to follow the law.

For scenario two, that’s where the age verification requirements of the law come in.

They aren’t, but adults are allowed to decide about that addiction

Because you don’t have the votes for your fascist nanny state.

From the description of the bill law (bold added):

https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S7694A

To limit access to addictive feeds, this act will require social media companies to use commercially reasonable methods to determine user age. Regulations by the attorney general will provide guidance, but this flexible standard will be based on the totality of the circumstances, including the size, financial resources, and technical capabilities of a given social media company, and the costs and effectiveness of available age determination techniques for users of a given social media platform. For example, if a social media company is technically and financially capable of effectively determining the age of a user based on its existing data concerning that user, it may be commercially reasonable to present that as an age determination option to users. Although the legislature considered a statutory mandate for companies to respect automated browser or device signals whereby users can inform a covered operator that they are a covered minor, we determined that the attorney general would already have discretion to promulgate such a mandate through its rulemaking authority related to commercially reasonable and technologically feasible age determination methods. The legislature believes that such a mandate can be more effectively considered and tailored through that rulemaking process. Existing New York antidiscrimination laws and the attorney general’s regulations will require, regardless, that social media companies provide a range of age verification methods all New Yorkers can use, and will not use age assurance methods that rely solely on biometrics or require government identification that many New Yorkers do not possess.

In other words: sites will have to figure it out and make sure that it’s both effective and non-discriminatory, and the safe option would be for sites to treat everyone like children until proven otherwise.

Eh, whackamole enforcement usually cuts mustard with this kind of stuff.

Like yeah someone’s gonna do it anyways just because, but then all it takes is enough people raising an alarm to bring it down, and as a side effect, remove more shitass developers from the market.

You end up with an equilibrium where not every example is getting the hammers of justice, but enough examples are that the average consumer still feels the benefit of a noticeably less toxic internet.

The problem is algorithmically driven content feeds and the lack of transparency around them. These algorithms drive engagement which prioritizes content that makes people angry, not content that make people happy. These feeds are full of misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, rage bait, and other negativity with very little user control to protect themselves, curate the feed or to have neutral access to news and politics.

Lemmy sorts content very simply based on user upvotes. If you want to know why you’re seeing a post you can see exactly who upvoted it and what instances that traffic came from. It’s not immune to being manipulated but it can’t be done secretly or in a centralized way.

Yet based on their actions we already know that Facebook has levers they can pull to directly affect the amount of news people see about a specific topic, let alone the source of information on that topic. These big social media companies guard these proprietary algorithms that are directly determining what news people see on a massive scale. Sure they claim to be a neutral arbiter of content that just gives people what they want but why would anyone believe them?

Lemmy is not the same thing, though it’s not without its own problems.