Australia's social media ban, one month on
bbc.comStreaks - a Snapchat feature considered by some as highly addictive – require two people to send a "snap" – a photo or video – to each other every day in order to maintain their "streak" which can last for days, months, even years.
It's interesting how much of social media's business model basically depends on forcible intermediation of personal relationships. Like, two friends might come up with the idea of a streak, or some competitive game or running joke. But as soon as the platform operator establishes this as a 'feature', they'are abrogating authority to themselves to decide how these personal interactions should be conducted, and it's clearly not for the benefit of the people involved.
The friends can continue without use of the new feature, right?
Sure, but kids are famously open to suggestion and easy to manipulate due to their relative immaturity.
Agreed, but I think that's way short of forcible.
Within the bounds of the platform the operators have unlimited authority, they can start pinging users about their streak and the users have no input into how the streak is measured and can't reason witht he 'streakbot' if they want to establish a different arrangement.
I'm sure you understand the concept of platform operators having unilateral authority over what users do there.