The Herald:

It was an image to chill the heart any parent. Instagram bullies following their children into their bedrooms. “The last thing they see on social media at night is someone being cruel to them”, the former Facebook employee Frances Heugan told MPs this week,”and the first think they see in the morning is a hateful statement”. And the worst thing is that Facebook's own research confirms this. Instagram is another of Mark Zuckerberg's social media nasties.

How did we get here? Ten years from now we will ask how we allowed these tech behemoths, with their insidious algorithms, into the heads of our children. Of course, not all children spend their time looking at self-harm websites or the photoshopped body images of Instagram's “influencers”, but enough of them do, and there is no doubt about the risk to mental health.

There is only one real answer to this: regulation by governments. But given the complexity of these tech companies, and their monopoly of knowledge about how they exploit our data, I think we will have to go further and start a campaign to have placed under direct state control. Yes, Facebook should be nationalised.

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