Knowles calls out various leaders in the field, whose approach to the ethics of their work amounts to: Trust us. “Users are expected to accept the basic premise of the ‘correctness’ of the designers’ chosen end behavior; and the designer is not expected to have rigorously debated the preferability of this end behavior,” Knowles noted.

Let me be clear: there is no way to make social media safe for children by just making the content less toxic. It’s the phone-based childhood that is harming them, regardless of what they watch . Kids need to be freed from the grip of smartphones and social media, especially through early puberty. This is why two of the four norms I propose for sol