They tried to impose age verification on OS

We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.

People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.

If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.

Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).

Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

These unaligned near frontier human agents have escaped containment and are out of control!

This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.

Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.

What is the ulterior motive?

This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?

I don't get it, what's the issue with the phrase?

The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.