Prohibition

The idea that access to social networks should be restricted to those over sixteen years of age, as is being discussed in our country, or as is already being legislated in other countries in the area, raises a whole set of questions about why these tools have come to be considered so harmful, or whether what should be done is to regulate their content and not their users.

Young people who currently lack access to these networks—due to family prohibitions—find all sorts of ways to communicate with each other through other platforms or any other format that will likely be invented when a market becomes available. But the problem isn't communication itself, or that young people waste a lot of time chatting with each other, which is harmless in itself, or no more dangerous than talking in the street. Social networks create a dependency, deliberately cultivated by their creators, by studying how users consume content and giving them more of what interests them, as well as fostering a dependence on reactions (gratified with likes) to everything that the user himself uploads.

Above all, they create an addiction to oneself, fostering a deepening of one's own ideas, which tend to be the worst on the intellectual market right now. Progressives want to ban all of this because it turns out that those most hooked on social media aren't exactly leftists, or if they are, they fall into that radical, identity-based left that ends up being more ineffective than fascism. If social media made us all enlightened progressives, then it would be the conservatives who would want to ban it. But conservatism doesn't object, perhaps because it sees them as private businesses, or because it's people's free choice that ultimately leads to dependency.

The idea of ​​creating a European public social network, promoted by the EU to oppose Musk, is fundamentally naive and misguided: it's like trying to fight cocaine by giving away books or seasonal fruit. A regulated, public social network isn't a social network; it's a bulletin board. It might be healthy and edifying, but for that very reason, it will be boring and a failure—throwing public money at it. Besides, we're all old enough to know better: if you prohibit this type of alcohol or drug, another will emerge. Prohibition leads to smuggling.