There is an opinion that to prevent residents from harmful content on the Internet, the government should control the use of social media platforms. Personally, I partly disagree with that statement for some reasons.
On the one hand, the most common age group that tends to use social media is teenagers; consuming many harmful short videos on the Internet, including violent content, could negatively affect their awareness. As a result, they are likely to mimic some actions based on those contents, leading to bad consequences. In order to deal with those problems, the regulation of content on some famous platforms such as TikTok and Facebook should be controlled and managed carefully by the government. Additionally, limiting and banning content could allow people to avoid some incorrect information which is widespread on social media. Citizens have a chance to access official and precise news and avoid misunderstandings and meaningless arguments, which helps raise their awareness positively.
On the other hand, filtering a large amount of data on the Internet is an impractical and risky process for the government. There is no government agency which has the effective technical capacity to govern the numerous pieces of information being spread on the Internet per second. Moreover, during the process, the government also suffers from dramatic criticism from plenty of people who disagree with that policy, leading to an uncontrolled society. Instead of banning or controlling it, boosting media literacy education is an effective effort. By teaching people how to evaluate the frequent harmful content they commonly see, a sustainable form of protection is created. For example, whenever residents see some types of videos relating to violence, they should report them and give a voice to prevent the increase of that content.
To sum up, although controlling the use of social media platforms could enable people to have the right morals and avoid inaccurate information through the Internet, it is probably impossible due to the vast quantity of data they have to deal with, and educating people is perhaps a viable
approach.