Or maybe the americans will pay for the VPN to get normal non-addictive version of tiktok.

You can try and squeeze a free speech absolutism story out of it, but the reality is that this has been a story since Microsoft got into cable news.

At that point it was a game of "I'm not slandering you" to chip away at every other valuation, that could have easily have just been called antitrust because they didn't build it. That was 1996-2005 and went completely unchecked.

This is similar but the stack was even cheaper, and closer to more people's faces.

Even if governments take no recourse, I don't see an issue with government using it's position to put a food pyramid in citizen's faces to say like, "this can be harmful." The church probably would have if this were long ago, except, instead of fire and brimstone, some sort of epic story of social isolation, permanent dissatisfaction, and self-imposed constraints, alien abduction, transformation into a pig by a wizard?

There's probably a lot of visceral fears that would be worthy analogs to the harms of the feed.

I don't think that this narrative has been explored enough, honestly. Corps keep building crap like this, even amazon has (had?) an influencer feed.

People who are in play/leisure should probably practice tolerating more choices than "express mild, momentary dissatisfaction and receive an instantaneous reward"... that's probably not a life everyone should be trained to live

Unfortunately, based on the consumption habits of many, many people, yes.

Do you consume heroin? If not, why not?

Unregulated social media is digital heroin. And allowing it to be run by billionaires with thinly-veiled agendas is like cutting the heroin with rat poison.

"Dumb" and "insane" are thoughtless and shallow positions to take.

It's fine to disagree with the EU's stance (I probably do. I'm not sure yet) but it's not a good look to dismiss it without some recognition that a reasonable person might think this is a worthwhile position to take given the known harms of social media.

How is that insane? Maybe "every free consumer tech product is designed to be addictive" is the problem, as the cost of using the app is paid in other, much less explicit and even much less researched ways.