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> As others have pointed out, we don't need to 'ask', we need to legislate. Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social

> As others have pointed out, we don't need to 'ask', we need to legislate. Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions. Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at the degree that tech communities are rushing for legislation on this topic. When I was growing up I remember the big issue being violence in video games. Politicians went on crusades to demonize video games and demand that we pass legislation to protect the kids from any exposure to violent video games, lest the video games turn them into school shooters. With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. With social media, tech communities are doing the opposite: Writing volumes about how kids are incapable of managing themselves and will succumb to social media destroying their mental health. The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media. So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. The secondary subtext buried in most of these articles is that young girls, specifically, are most vulnerable to social media issues, whereas violent video games were largely an issue for young boys. Apparently we’re okay letting young boys handle difficult content but we don’t give the same credit to young girls. The more I watch all of this play out, the more hypocritical it all feels. I also suspect that if anti-social-media politicians see success that we’ll see a revival of the anti-violent-game politicians. After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right?

officialchicken 5y ago
> Legislate what, specifically? Treat it like digital tobacco or similar - a product with known mental health side effects engineered specifically to modify your behavior in the name of "engagement". Limit access to children, require warnings with every email and notification. etc. etc. etc. It's not hard, as long as you keep focus on the problem. This isn't about guns.
edbaskerville 5y ago
End the business model entirely! Make all microtargeted advertising illegal! (I can dream, can’t I?)
- cybernautique 5y ago
  I think it's a worthy dream and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that says otherwise. Why should we allow microtargeted advertising?
  - camhart 5y ago
    If I'm going to have to view ads, I'd prefer to see relevant ads instead of irrelevant. The issue is with the data collection and privacy issues around it. Not with making ads more relevant by appropriately targeting.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      In a perverse way, I'd rather see irrelevant ads. That way I am not inclined to purchase. I prefer not to have salespeople come to my door, I prefer to seek them out when I am inclined to.
      - cybernautique 5y ago
        This is a very apt way to put it! I'm likely to adopt it into my own descriptions, thank you! Advertisers should be relegated to their own greasy pit, to speak only at my pleasure and where I know to find them. Any other attempt to engage with me, anytime and anyplace else except where I explicitly permit them, is nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. Begone, rent-seekers! Trouble us with your A/B tests no more.
    - cybernautique 5y ago
      I reject the notion entirely that we "have to" view ads. Advertisements are nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion into my life. Further, I'd rather know that any ads I see are the same exact ads as seen by anyone else in the same space. Having said that, I agree that _another_ core issue is the data collection and privacy issues. Certainly, viewing advertisers as the value-subtracting rent-seekers as I do, I wish for them to know as little as possible about the world in general and about me specifically.
    - 5y ago
gchamonlive 5y ago
> With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation. We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. This doesn't call for banning or legislating the business to oblivion, but for talks in the society. We need to talk about social media use, our representatives have to discuss measures with the scientific community and promote research so that they can legislate based on data. One thing is for certain, what we have now is unacceptable. What we will build in the future is up for debate and should be debated.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. Again, eerily similar to the violent video game panic in the 90s. The original congressional hearings on violence in video games followed record-high gun violence in 1993 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on_video_games#Moral_panic_around_gun_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ). Politicians pushed a correlation between increasing popularity of violent video games and increasing gun homicides. It sounds dumb now, but video games were relatively new at the time. The correlation felt right to many, especially those who hadn't grown up with video games in their own lives. I see this social media debate following the same pattern where adults feel that social media is evil and assume evidence will eventually support their feelings. > Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation. That's rewriting history. Decades ago, there was a huge push for legislation against violent video games long before lootboxes were a thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ) Violent video games have been called out as recently as 2019 by president Trump ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-video-game-attack-reignites-decades-old-violence-debate-1230504/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-... ) Violent video games have been a political scapegoat for decades. The debate about social media is following in the same footsteps.
usefulcat 5y ago
Although I do think you have a point, I find this framing very convenient. Remembering how incredibly shitty people could be in middle and high school, it's not hard at all for me to see how constantly comparing oneself to one's peers could be detrimental to one's health. It was bad enough having to go to school every day, but (back in the day) at least I didn't have to have that shit follow me around everywhere else too. In short, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying any comparison between Doom and Facebook. All that said, I also have a hard time seeing a legislative solution to this problem, especially given what the typical legislature looks like these days.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > In short, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying any comparison between Doom and Facebook. That's kind of my point: The tech community can relate to Doom in the context of their own childhoods because we grew up with it. Adults can't relate to Instagram in the context of childhoods because that came after our time. So without first-hand experience, they substitute whatever feels correct, as prompted by hyperbolic articles like this one. Every generation thinks the way they grew up was correct, while subsequent social changes are bad. There has always been moral panic about what "kids these days" are doing, from social media to video games to portable music players to watching TV and so on. It was the exact same story with video game violence: Adults at the time didn't grow up with video games, so they assumed the worst. Politicians and news media stepped in to seed the most dramatic possible interpretations, pointing to correlations with increasing gun violence (at the time). To adults who didn't grow up with the context and saw no personal upside to the video games, heavy-handed legislation felt right.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    Teen suicides are up by a good bit. FB/Instagram popped up right around the time the trend started going up, perhaps a coincidence, but perhaps not. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/suicide-among-teens-and-young-adults-reaches-highest-level-since-2000 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/suicide-among-teens-and-...
ammoil 5y ago
> The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media Not something like the fact that "social media" is a (very strange) form of communication, not a type of literal media that is produced, marketed, and consumed either as popular commercial productions or niche fan-productions? I'm sure you could point out more meaningful differences than "tech bros stopped liking one of these" between: - a form of fantasy entertainment, largely analogous to the nonfiction novels, violent comic books, and violent movies/TV before them (and were complained about before them). Its only novel feature being interactivity - but no more so than even-younger children playing cops and robbers in a playground. - a ubiquitous new form of peer communication that's full of novel features, from massive network effects and propagation of speech across and in and out of peer groups, gamification of peer approval, infinite-scrolling feeds and other dark patterns, widespread coopting by marketing and degenerate forms of "news" media...
Barrin92 5y ago
I think the flippant rejection of criticism of (violent) video games was and is very mistaken. I'm unsure about the direct causal relationships between games and violence, but at the very least they're an expression of a violent culture. The glorification of shooters as 'lone wolfs', the fact that a picture of a breastfeeding mother gets banned but someone's head blown off in a game is no big deal, it makes you ponder what priorities that creates in a culture. And the criticism of the addictive nature of games, how gaming can isolate people, the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular, but also young people in general, these concerns written off as 'boomer mentality' or whatever are completely valid. >After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right? I think it's completely obvious that you need to regulate what children consume, they are after all... children. Regulating what they do is kind of the point of raising them. This consumer culture that leaves everything to 'market choice' and where every intervention is seen as overreach is terrible. This is exactly the sort of pseudo-freedom that OP was talking about.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  It's rejected because criticism is unsound. >the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular That's because everything sexual is declared amoral and banned including a breastfeeding mother. Men simply behave in accordance with what they are taught.
c54 5y ago
One piece of legislation we could adopt in the US is something like australia's requirement that Facebook pay media providers for their content. Has the effect of at least compensating media providers for their journalism. https://www.ft.com/content/ad706bd3-2aed-49da-b4f4-862f15a2e601 https://www.ft.com/content/ad706bd3-2aed-49da-b4f4-862f15a2e... I think the points about violent video games are good, but the OP here is that people are self-reporting instagram to be negatively correlated with mental health. That's distinct from more nebulous and bygone arguments about violent video games. Funnily, this is also top page HN right now: "Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547224
golemiprague 5y ago
I agree it is hypocritical but I do think there is a difference between girls and boys and what they can handle. Girls are more sensitive and impressionable, that was common sense until not too long ago but now we all have to pretend that everything is the same. So without getting into the question whether we need to legislate social media or not, the fact is that gaming is a good social activity for boys which didn't cause any harm whilst social media is causing a lot of harm to girls. I can see it with my kids and their friends. We need to first go back to the assumption that girls and boys are not the same and move on from there.
jlawson 5y ago
As a first step, how about transparency? Currently companies can do what they want in secret. Perhaps they should be able to do what they want, but in the open so it can be examined and criticized. That means their blacklists, algorithms, word lists, preferred user lists, and reasons for banning users become openly accessible. Even without compelling them directly to change anything, compelling them to be transparent would help a lot.
snomad 5y ago
> Legislate what, specifically? I got some suggestios - No company w/more than 1 million MAU and deriving any income from online advertising may not combine any online information about a user with any physical real-world data; they may not sell data to another 3rd party that will combine online and physical; - Ban the algo: Any user deriving more than $250 in value from an online service may not be banned by an algorithm. They must be given 60 days notice and an opportunity to remove their data from the service - No company may own more than 1 domain in the top 5,000 (as measured by monthly traffic). All domains must be consolidated to 1 - No more hiding behind scale, expand the carve outs for 230 form beyond child porn to definitely include any threats of violence - but especially death threats Thats just a start...
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I don't agree with the specifics here, but the first point is key. Scale matters. Emergent effects are real. Large companies need different rules than small companies. It's ok if the line is drawn imperfectly, so long as the bulk of labels are reasonable.
scotty79 5y ago
> Legislate what, specifically? Advertisement targeted at children and using children. If your advert features children or offers a product a child might be interested in, purchase it themselves or influence purchasing decision of the parent, is associated with a product children use or service children frequent then it's illegal. As simple as that. You wouldn't believe how much such ban would clear up media sphere and improve children's health in all aspects.
Cycl0ps 5y ago
I think it's worth pointing out that those threats of legislation are what led to the ESRB, which was created to show the industry could self-regulate without government intervention. While that system is outdated for modern game design it served it's purpose. These calls for regulation are leading down the same road. They tell companies ike Facebook, "This is problem, solve it before we're forced to."
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
>Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions. I have a radical proposal: reduce social media's value proposition by breaking them up. Then users' interest will naturally decrease. >So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. It applies not to any social media, but only to centralized giant monopolistic services. Federated social media like email are fine.

officialchicken 5y ago

> Legislate what, specifically? Treat it like digital tobacco or similar - a product with known mental health side effects engineered specifically to modify your behavior in the name of "engagement". Limit access to children, require warnings with every email and notification. etc. etc. etc. It's not hard, as long as you keep focus on the problem. This isn't about guns.

edbaskerville 5y ago

End the business model entirely! Make all microtargeted advertising illegal! (I can dream, can’t I?)

cybernautique 5y ago
I think it's a worthy dream and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that says otherwise. Why should we allow microtargeted advertising?
- camhart 5y ago
  If I'm going to have to view ads, I'd prefer to see relevant ads instead of irrelevant. The issue is with the data collection and privacy issues around it. Not with making ads more relevant by appropriately targeting.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    In a perverse way, I'd rather see irrelevant ads. That way I am not inclined to purchase. I prefer not to have salespeople come to my door, I prefer to seek them out when I am inclined to.
    - cybernautique 5y ago
      This is a very apt way to put it! I'm likely to adopt it into my own descriptions, thank you! Advertisers should be relegated to their own greasy pit, to speak only at my pleasure and where I know to find them. Any other attempt to engage with me, anytime and anyplace else except where I explicitly permit them, is nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. Begone, rent-seekers! Trouble us with your A/B tests no more.
  - cybernautique 5y ago
    I reject the notion entirely that we "have to" view ads. Advertisements are nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion into my life. Further, I'd rather know that any ads I see are the same exact ads as seen by anyone else in the same space. Having said that, I agree that _another_ core issue is the data collection and privacy issues. Certainly, viewing advertisers as the value-subtracting rent-seekers as I do, I wish for them to know as little as possible about the world in general and about me specifically.
  - 5y ago

gchamonlive 5y ago

> With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation. We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. This doesn't call for banning or legislating the business to oblivion, but for talks in the society. We need to talk about social media use, our representatives have to discuss measures with the scientific community and promote research so that they can legislate based on data. One thing is for certain, what we have now is unacceptable. What we will build in the future is up for debate and should be debated.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. Again, eerily similar to the violent video game panic in the 90s. The original congressional hearings on violence in video games followed record-high gun violence in 1993 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on_video_games#Moral_panic_around_gun_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ). Politicians pushed a correlation between increasing popularity of violent video games and increasing gun homicides. It sounds dumb now, but video games were relatively new at the time. The correlation felt right to many, especially those who hadn't grown up with video games in their own lives. I see this social media debate following the same pattern where adults feel that social media is evil and assume evidence will eventually support their feelings. > Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation. That's rewriting history. Decades ago, there was a huge push for legislation against violent video games long before lootboxes were a thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ) Violent video games have been called out as recently as 2019 by president Trump ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-video-game-attack-reignites-decades-old-violence-debate-1230504/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-... ) Violent video games have been a political scapegoat for decades. The debate about social media is following in the same footsteps.

usefulcat 5y ago

Although I do think you have a point, I find this framing very convenient. Remembering how incredibly shitty people could be in middle and high school, it's not hard at all for me to see how constantly comparing oneself to one's peers could be detrimental to one's health. It was bad enough having to go to school every day, but (back in the day) at least I didn't have to have that shit follow me around everywhere else too. In short, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying any comparison between Doom and Facebook. All that said, I also have a hard time seeing a legislative solution to this problem, especially given what the typical legislature looks like these days.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> In short, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying any comparison between Doom and Facebook. That's kind of my point: The tech community can relate to Doom in the context of their own childhoods because we grew up with it. Adults can't relate to Instagram in the context of childhoods because that came after our time. So without first-hand experience, they substitute whatever feels correct, as prompted by hyperbolic articles like this one. Every generation thinks the way they grew up was correct, while subsequent social changes are bad. There has always been moral panic about what "kids these days" are doing, from social media to video games to portable music players to watching TV and so on. It was the exact same story with video game violence: Adults at the time didn't grow up with video games, so they assumed the worst. Politicians and news media stepped in to seed the most dramatic possible interpretations, pointing to correlations with increasing gun violence (at the time). To adults who didn't grow up with the context and saw no personal upside to the video games, heavy-handed legislation felt right.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  Teen suicides are up by a good bit. FB/Instagram popped up right around the time the trend started going up, perhaps a coincidence, but perhaps not. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/suicide-among-teens-and-young-adults-reaches-highest-level-since-2000 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/suicide-among-teens-and-...

ammoil 5y ago

> The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media Not something like the fact that "social media" is a (very strange) form of communication, not a type of literal media that is produced, marketed, and consumed either as popular commercial productions or niche fan-productions? I'm sure you could point out more meaningful differences than "tech bros stopped liking one of these" between: - a form of fantasy entertainment, largely analogous to the nonfiction novels, violent comic books, and violent movies/TV before them (and were complained about before them). Its only novel feature being interactivity - but no more so than even-younger children playing cops and robbers in a playground. - a ubiquitous new form of peer communication that's full of novel features, from massive network effects and propagation of speech across and in and out of peer groups, gamification of peer approval, infinite-scrolling feeds and other dark patterns, widespread coopting by marketing and degenerate forms of "news" media...

Barrin92 5y ago

I think the flippant rejection of criticism of (violent) video games was and is very mistaken. I'm unsure about the direct causal relationships between games and violence, but at the very least they're an expression of a violent culture. The glorification of shooters as 'lone wolfs', the fact that a picture of a breastfeeding mother gets banned but someone's head blown off in a game is no big deal, it makes you ponder what priorities that creates in a culture. And the criticism of the addictive nature of games, how gaming can isolate people, the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular, but also young people in general, these concerns written off as 'boomer mentality' or whatever are completely valid. >After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right? I think it's completely obvious that you need to regulate what children consume, they are after all... children. Regulating what they do is kind of the point of raising them. This consumer culture that leaves everything to 'market choice' and where every intervention is seen as overreach is terrible. This is exactly the sort of pseudo-freedom that OP was talking about.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
It's rejected because criticism is unsound. >the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular That's because everything sexual is declared amoral and banned including a breastfeeding mother. Men simply behave in accordance with what they are taught.

c54 5y ago

One piece of legislation we could adopt in the US is something like australia's requirement that Facebook pay media providers for their content. Has the effect of at least compensating media providers for their journalism. https://www.ft.com/content/ad706bd3-2aed-49da-b4f4-862f15a2e601 https://www.ft.com/content/ad706bd3-2aed-49da-b4f4-862f15a2e... I think the points about violent video games are good, but the OP here is that people are self-reporting instagram to be negatively correlated with mental health. That's distinct from more nebulous and bygone arguments about violent video games. Funnily, this is also top page HN right now: "Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547224

golemiprague 5y ago

I agree it is hypocritical but I do think there is a difference between girls and boys and what they can handle. Girls are more sensitive and impressionable, that was common sense until not too long ago but now we all have to pretend that everything is the same. So without getting into the question whether we need to legislate social media or not, the fact is that gaming is a good social activity for boys which didn't cause any harm whilst social media is causing a lot of harm to girls. I can see it with my kids and their friends. We need to first go back to the assumption that girls and boys are not the same and move on from there.

jlawson 5y ago

As a first step, how about transparency? Currently companies can do what they want in secret. Perhaps they should be able to do what they want, but in the open so it can be examined and criticized. That means their blacklists, algorithms, word lists, preferred user lists, and reasons for banning users become openly accessible. Even without compelling them directly to change anything, compelling them to be transparent would help a lot.

snomad 5y ago

> Legislate what, specifically? I got some suggestios - No company w/more than 1 million MAU and deriving any income from online advertising may not combine any online information about a user with any physical real-world data; they may not sell data to another 3rd party that will combine online and physical; - Ban the algo: Any user deriving more than $250 in value from an online service may not be banned by an algorithm. They must be given 60 days notice and an opportunity to remove their data from the service - No company may own more than 1 domain in the top 5,000 (as measured by monthly traffic). All domains must be consolidated to 1 - No more hiding behind scale, expand the carve outs for 230 form beyond child porn to definitely include any threats of violence - but especially death threats Thats just a start...

spywaregorilla 5y ago
I don't agree with the specifics here, but the first point is key. Scale matters. Emergent effects are real. Large companies need different rules than small companies. It's ok if the line is drawn imperfectly, so long as the bulk of labels are reasonable.

scotty79 5y ago

> Legislate what, specifically? Advertisement targeted at children and using children. If your advert features children or offers a product a child might be interested in, purchase it themselves or influence purchasing decision of the parent, is associated with a product children use or service children frequent then it's illegal. As simple as that. You wouldn't believe how much such ban would clear up media sphere and improve children's health in all aspects.

Cycl0ps 5y ago

I think it's worth pointing out that those threats of legislation are what led to the ESRB, which was created to show the industry could self-regulate without government intervention. While that system is outdated for modern game design it served it's purpose. These calls for regulation are leading down the same road. They tell companies ike Facebook, "This is problem, solve it before we're forced to."

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

>Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions. I have a radical proposal: reduce social media's value proposition by breaking them up. Then users' interest will naturally decrease. >So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. It applies not to any social media, but only to centralized giant monopolistic services. Federated social media like email are fine.