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My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
I think there are some confusing claims being made here.
How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.
Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!
This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.
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