I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage.

I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?

This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that.

I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it.

What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population.

Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...

No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.

Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.

Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.

It's like saying ww2 started because of a few grams of lead and ended because of a few kilo of uranium

You'd be technically true but your missing 99.9% of the point, you can't dilute these complex topics in such dumb ways and use it as an argument