Despite all those positives, the foundation of the platform is built in an abusive, addictive way. We shouldn’t ban any social media applications, we should regulate them to end their abbhorent practices / business models. I totally agree that we should ban targetted advertising, although there is a good middleground solution as well: banning targetted advertising which relies on cloud-based AI. If recommendation algorithms could run locally on your phone, with a way to validate everything is processed locally, you could keep the modern formula for social media while simultaneously maintaining privacy. I would imagine the suggestions would become more primitive to account for the extra processing power, but at least people can continue to doomscroll if they’d like. My idea applies better to post recommendations than advertising, but if ad recommendations could be kept anonymous (the entire system would need to be open source), you could have a privacy-respecting service AND tailored feeds / advertising.

Regulate Social Media (including domestic corporations) > Ban Social Media > The Current Situation, imo.