I don't think social media needs to be banned, but maybe using complex algorithms to drive attention should be. Even Facebook was pretty good back when its feed was a simple, chronological display of all your friends posts and nothing else. It went down the tubes as they moved away from that.

Put together, it’s likely most people’s friends wouldn’t produce enough content to drive engagement, at least in ‘public’ social media like Facebook.

I remember this phenomenon back when Facebook was less algorithmic — some days there’d just be no new content at all. Especially I’m guessing if you limit adding friends to actually just the people you’d be happy to grab lunch with.

I wouldn't ban social media.

Here in the UK we require cigarette suppliers to advertise the dangers of smoking on every package.

I'd mandate that every social media platform is required to advertise the dangers on every page, and also give a very visible option to reveal the workings of the algorithm that is feeding you the pages.

If you apply the logic of your comment's parent to your suggestion you'll discover that banning social media would soon lead to using any and all communication under mandatory supervision and only after an application and a written permission for every individual act of communication.

Did banning heroin soon lead to consuming any and all substances under mandatory supervision and only after an application and written permission for every individual act of consumption?

No, but they issued an umbrella ban on anabolic steroids of any kind, regardless of chemistry, even on those not invented yet. FDA criminalizes or makes prescription-only whatever they want, willy-nilly and without any consequences - drug enforcement opened the door for that.

I'm not saying that drugs should be legal, only that given perverse intensives, legitimate problems are routinely used as a Trojan horse to sneak in oppressive regulations.

In the case of communications and speech, the government's incentives for censorship, eavesdropping and control are enormous - otherwise there wouldn't be a Constitution, 1st amendment or the entire Bill of Rights that depends on it. Once the routine circumvention of these becomes acceptable, any kind of true but inconvenient for Big Brother speech will become impossible - with or without a written permit.

The manner of doing it doesn't matter, the permit was a figure of speech, kind of telling that I have to state it explicitly.

At the risk of doing a "you participate in society", would that include HN?

That depends if it's social media.

Severely disabled people need social media to get any form of communication with others. It is a key mechanism of infrastructure that provides connection for those limit to their homes and bed, which nowadays is an increasing amount of people with Long Covid and ME/CFS patients. We are talking about 10s of millions of people here that you would cut off from each other and the wider world.

Social media isn't just bad interactions, there isn't just one twitter or reddit, its about what you choose to read and interact with and most of its not toxic its just people talking on the same topic.

The government shouldn't be limiting any legal communications over the internet

That's a tautology. The limited communications are illegal.