> The strategy is as simple as it is disturbing: rewarding screen time with financial incentives.

This is just work in IT.

IT work isn’t marketed to children

So regulate the market to prohibit children to use.

That’s easier said than done for internet products.

As far as I see it there are 2 broad options, which I exaggerate here.

You could either regulate companies such that they aren’t allowed to engage in addictive and potentially harmful behaviors (including gacha games and maybe gambling games)

OR

Require everyone who accesses the internet be known and registered in such a way that any service could verify that said person has the legal permission to access that service.

I’d take the former.

IT work does not force you to stare at content that's spreading brain rot...

Unless you work with in a cloud-native, ai-native environment that has more microservices than developers I guess (I jest, I jest).

You know the famous russian saying: in every jest there's a little bit of jest (...and so much truth)

I'd say the saying is common in a lot of Eastern European languages, not only Russian :)

Don't jest, just say more micro services than paying customers and you have my work life described.

> rewarding screen time with financial incentives

So the social media companies can do this through ads but not their users, interesting line to draw.

It's really hard to not see the DMA as some ambiguous law that EU is gonna throw in the face of everything they don't like, with good merits or not, long term this is gonna help the EU as much as paying the mafia to not break into your shop.

Ads do not encourage more use, they do the opposite - annoy users into closing the app.

Teens do not need encouragement to spend more time on TikTok than they already do.

Nah the EU stays the western world babysitter. And let's be honest, the US doesn't make it easy for them.

It’s somewhat humorous that the US is the military world police while Europe is the regulatory police. Spider-Man pointing meme.