360. Is social media the tobacco of the XXI century?

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Those of you who know their family history will have heard stories of how our parents and grandparents, as post war children, were targeted by unregulated tobacco companies, as new consumers easy to get addicted to their products. This targeting, as we saw later on, had catastrophic consequences on public health. Tobacco corporations resisted, for years, attempts to regulate them, offering to self-regulate and casting doubt on the reported danger of their products, until they were eventually brought in line by society through extensive regulation. Today’s children are being targeted by social media companies, with ever more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithms to compete for their attention at a time when they have not developed the tools to defend themselves. We are already starting to see the consequences, but they will only be fully clear, as happened with tobacco, years ahead. It is not your purse or your life, but rather your lungs or your time, but it is still criminal

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Location: Hereford, UK

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