[standupstandup]

You can't really know what the impact is. You probably can't even come up with a crisp, uncontroversial definition of what "social media" actually is. Most people seem to use the term to mean Twitter, but Twitter is garbage and lots of people don't use it at all. Is Hacker News "social media"? Is Slashdot? Is the comments section of the New York Times? Is IRC?

The moment you start down the "we are weak and helpless and we need the smart benevolent geniuses in Government to help us" you're just gonna lose a whole lot of people. Because there's no reason to believe there is even a problem here, let alone a problem that needs to be solved with regulation.

[addicted]

The demarcation line is pretty clear IMO (it isn’t even social media). It’s technology whose goal is to manipulate its users to engage with itself. And it hires an army of engineers, designers, scientists, and soon AI to achieve that goal.

Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.

[standupstandup]

That's not clear at all. Do you think the Twitter founder's goal was literally written down somewhere as "manipulate users to engage with it"? Or for Facebook? None of these companies will agree with that assessment, so it's entirely your own subjective opinion.