Social Media Bans Are for Kids. What About Adults?
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Social Media Bans Are for Kids. What About Adults?<br>A 2022 book about social media reminds us that the rabbit hole problem was never solved. We just changed the subject.
PMZ Opinion<br>May 14, 2026
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“Turn it off” was the conclusion and recommendation of The Chaos Machine, a book about social media by Max Fisher, published in 2022. I finished it in mid-2026, at a time when social media bans for children are spreading. At first, this made me think the book’s message had been received. But on closer inspection, not quite. We have accepted that social media is harmful, but we have changed the subject from radicalisation to child safety.<br>If you read this book, which I recommend, two things will strike you: first, there is little that is novel about the events the book describes; and second, despite discussing well-known events, the conclusions it draws from them are different from what you may have heard.<br>The Myanmar genocide, the Sri Lankan riots, and the Christchurch massacre were pretty hard to miss, so I bet you are at least aware of them. You probably also know that social media played some role in each of them, but might not remember, or know, what role specifically. Probably the only one that is less widely known, and which I only vaguely recognised myself, was Gamergate (a misogynistic online harassment wave) - and it is also the one that starts the book’s story. They all form a pattern that the book discusses, but which has lately been forgotten: how engagement driven social media leads to real life violence. I do not want to go at length into the mechanics of how social media can contribute to real-life violence - the book does a great job of that - but two mechanisms are worth mentioning.<br>Speculation or outright falsehood can be amplified as long as it is emotionally charged. In Gamergate, the initial accusation against a female game developer - that she had traded sex for a positive game review - was false. But it spread because it generated outrage among a mostly male gaming audience. As a result, she, and later other unrelated women, had to go into hiding after receiving death threats.
Extreme views can become overrepresented and, as a result, normalised. Some of the most active posters in the run-up to the Sri Lankan riots and the Myanmar genocide were openly calling for violence against minorities. On social media, frequent activity is itself rewarded. Combine that with the amplification of emotionally charged content, and what would normally be a fringe opinion can become one of the main topics of discussion.
If I were to summarise the most striking observation about social media from this book, it would be that we cannot expect contemporary social media platforms to fix their problems, because their incentives are fundamentally misaligned. Platforms such as YouTube or Facebook are driven by engagement, and it just so happens that emotionally charged content is among the most engaging things out there. Algorithmic governance of these sprawling online empires is driven by simple KPIs, for which a rage-bait post full of racial slurs and based on speculation is just a high-engagement, and therefore successful interaction, worth recommending too. Any measures against the harms caused by it will always come after the fact, usually only because of external pressure. Departments tasked with combating hateful content will remain neglected and underfunded cost-centre initiatives, always outmatched by core departments that remain steadfast in their singular mission of maximising eyeballs and engagement. This system makes good money from ads, and just very occasionally wakes up some of the darkest tribal instincts humanity has.<br>If you look around, this problem has only got worse, while the discussions including those in national parliaments have moved on to something else. What is vaguely referred to as polarisation is basically the online rabbit hole problem that went mainstream. Any legal reforms to the system that are currently being discussed focus on protecting the children, who may suffer from social media more directly, and in ways different from adults.<br>I am happy for the next generation to grow up without social media (if these bans are passed and effectively enforced), as I believe it is unquestionably better for their health and physical safety. But what about adults? All of the perpetrators of violence featured in the book, from the Christchurch massacre to rioters in Sri Lanka, were adults. Social media driven radicalisation pipeline is still waiting for its own solution and in case of adults it is unlikely to be a ban.<br>While banning social media for kids is already a technically difficult endeavour, a wholesale ban for adults would not work at all. Adults often benefit from social media: to organise local communities and hobby groups, sell second-hand stuff, get the news, and keep in touch with old...