There's always a lot of discussion about how bad and scary "social media" is, but I've never really gotten a clear definition of what that actually is.
UK has 13 as a threshold by default. This is a Google policy, but BT implying that smartphones for 12 year-olds is ok sounds self serving.
Who are these nobodies lecturing us how to parent? I could care less how they feel and there's a clear conflict of interest. It's a bad precedent when some policy maker crawls from under the rug to explain what is "suitable"
- Infinite scroll
- Autoplay
- Sort by popularity
- Recommender systems
Note that e.g. Facebook had none of these features when it was getting popular, so any suggestions that social networks are impossible without them is revisionism. Suggesting friends based on your stolen phone contact list isn't really a recommender system as by definition they're contacts that you already know.
Remove those, and most of the harm of social media is gone. If you want to go further, you can do away with user-facing popularity metrics (likes/upvotes/friend counts).
Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. [1]
& Wikipedia:
... interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. [2]
Then, that would include HN, Discord and various online games imho. There's more about profiles / services in the Wikipedia page. That said, such definitions feel like they would also include emails / Discourse etc. Mailing lists feel like they could be considered part of "social media". Sending emails to family or close friends doesn't. So perhaps one needs to separate the platform from its various applications?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=social+media+definition [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
The problem is that some people (and/or companies, organizations, etc) seem to think that they can apply their values on the rest of us with privacy-destroying legislation.