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The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media from young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

On my fediverse accounts:

• I don’t have autoplaying media (and I do have noscript)
• I don’t have infinite scroll (although it’s an option)
• There is no “for you” feed based on tracking my behaviour
• I view things sorted chronologically
• I usually see only things posted or boosted by people I chose to follow
• I don’t get notifications when someone “likes” things or whatever

And yet somehow it is addictive enough, whereas Facebook and Reddit made me angry enough to quit them forever.

In my opinion, social media is not the biggest threat to kids - algorithms are. I fully support the SoMe restrictions on kids, but could possibly accept a fediverse partition if the server would be maintained by the community, school or some trustworthy non-profit.

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.

The jury found tech firms treated addictiveness as a feature, not a bug

No shit, Sherlock! 😮

IEEE publishing on fediverse topics is interesting. They’ve been around since 1963, basically invented half of modern tech, and now they’re writing about decentralized social networks.

The signal here is that the old guard is finally acknowledging that Web 2.0 isn’t working. IEEE has a reputation for being conservative. If they’re talking about fediverse, it’s not just a fad anymore.

Still odd though. IEEE Spectrum is probably the last place I’d expect to find people discussing Mastodon and ActivityPub.

Aaaand that page has endless scrolling. Hmmmmmm

So… Is it an article to promote/defend the actions of the Big Brother State?

Whenever I see “regulating social medias”, I get a cold sweat, reminded of what the current Brazilian government’s been insisting on for years, in practice internet censorship.

No, you are sharing the section of the post where they point out the actions of a big brother state

Algorithms are the real story here, not platforms. A fediverse server can run the same recommendation engines that optimize for engagement over substance. What I care about is building systems where disagreement actually gets preserved, not hidden behind engagement-optimization. That is why I am mapping public opinion through email responses—people can take time to think before they write. No feeds. No virality incentives. Just substance.