Meta must tighten controls on children’s accounts and pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, a New Mexico judge ordered Thursday, in a ruling that dealt the social media giant another hefty penalty and compared it to polluting factories. (CNN)

A New Mexico judge has declared Meta a “public nuisance,” comparing the social media giant to a polluting factory. The ruling orders the company to establish an abatement fund and overhaul key features of its platforms over alleged harm to children. (RT)

It’s a case of “too little, too late”, considering the condition of the generations raised on tablets, smartphones and social media, I’d say. It’s also a case of “I told you so”, since I kept saying from the beginning that social media is the spiritual equivalent of toxic waste that is by design reducing people to their basest level, but nobody listens to me so yeah. Now they have the irreversible outcomes, and this verdict isn’t going to change anything.

But I don’t think it’s just social media; it’s broader than that. Any situation where people are constantly exposed to feedback from large groups of people will result in a very reductionist monoculture of thoughts and emotions. In essence, this reduces society to a collective idiot, because stupid consensus reigns supreme, and every truly smart idea will contradict that, and such will be violently attacked and ridiculed. In essence, this polices thought until everybody is obedient, retarded and vaccinated.

Also, this form of mental coherence on a very low baseline, essentially the consensus of the IQ 85-115 crowd, the ±1 standard deviations around the median, the monoculture of the Gaussian mean, is something that creates all the fanatical hatred of all dissenting thought, and extreme intolerance of “non-approved” ideas, and it’s not like that phenomenon is new in society, but social media brought it to a whole new level of bad.

So, it’s not that only Facebook, or only the social media, or the smartphones that enable permanent connectivity to the network, are the problem. I think it merely exposes pathology within human social structures, that was always there, but this escalated it to the level of caricature.