It’ll take more than one Bill to tame the Wild West of social media Social media was supposed to to free us all - but it's resulted in a free-for-all where no-one's free, certainly not children 12 May 2021 • 6:02pm Despite a steady stream of information on the harms of social media to children in recent years, the reaction from many quarters has been to crow that we're having the same sort of moral panic that exists with any new form of technology: “they were probably scared about the invention of the wheel too!”. Skinny-jeaned Silicon Valley-ists such as Zuckerberg have presented their creations as a sort of pioneering invention - “changing the world, connection by connection" - while cosying up to Republicans in the pretence social media was simply an iteration of the free market, a sort of unspoiled backwoods as opposed to an wild, Wild West. They suggested detractors misunderstood their role - that Big Tech was akin to Big Pharma, capable of saving our lives one vaccine at a time.