A letter to the Western Advocate last week, in which the writer addressed concerns about bullying online among our councillors, suggested simply deleting Facebook, at least for the time being.

And the letter writer's prescription for children was even more radical: "Don't have any social media accounts. Social contact should be in person until you are 18." Parents, he said, should enforce the rule.

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This, of course, is only one man's opinion - and there will be many people who passionately disagree.

But there must also be people who are surprisingly themselves by having a late-term conversion on this most difficult topic.

The benefits of social media are well known - the ability for every person to have a voice, the democratisation of information, the chance to interact and form a connection with someone you might never have had the chance to meet in the physical world - but the downsides of this still relatively new technology are proving to be a much more slow reveal.

Our young people who have been born into and are growing up in a world of ubiquitous social media are, unfortunately, a sort of guinea pig generation who will eventually tell us everything we need to know about what it's like to have your life documented (and, increasingly, lived) on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or one of the other platforms.

In the meantime, everyone, principally parents, is just fumbling their way along.

Fast forward a few years and we might have a social media environment in which many of today's worries have been ameliorated - where technology companies, frightened by the backlash over their products, and who couldn't have fully envisaged how they would change the way we live, have created a system of self-regulation to protect their empires. Perhaps.

The alternative is that social media continues to be a sort of wild west, where behaviour - threats, hounding, angry mobs - that wouldn't be accepted in the real world is either ignored or tacitly supported.

If that's the case, then concerned parents who make the decision to keep their children from opening social media accounts for as long as possible might not be seen as radical, but as cautious.

As with any technology that changes the world, it will be fascinating to see what happens next.