#DailyBloggingChallenge (347/365)

Hypothesis: This current epidemic of social media use in childhood and adolescents and its impact of their developing brain has probably been seen before.

About 150a ago the alcohol laws on minimum drinking age has been established to minimize the effects on the developing brain. Back then medical advances in the scientific method just started advancing, thus it took so long to establish such an age. Additionally the age of adulthood has been pushed back by many years, where lots of regions had the ruling that one can drink with marriage, which could start as early as the beginning of teenage years.

Fast forward to today where we already know the adverse effects of social media on the molding minds and are taking little action to prohibit and/or minimize its use. Corporations have tried to install a minimum age requirement and this can be very easily lied on.

I doubt that ID checks will be established on such platforms any time soon, because of the current ecosystem of data value and angst of where such data will land.

It seems like the only place where ID checks were successfully applied are on services where can earn money. And these were first implemented once governments started stepping in to learn where the user is gaining the influx of money.

tl;dr As long as government doesn’t intervene, we won’t see any positive change towards child brain development.