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Meta sued for social media addiction caused by its algorithm
- xvector 4y agoThis is lame. Is an addictive algorithm an illegal substance of some sort? Is personal responsibility not a thing people care about anymore?
- yamrzou 4y ago> Is personal responsibility not a thing people care about anymore? You could say the same thing about illegal substances.
- dragonsky 4y agoHaven’t seen anybody successfully sue a alcohol company for being addicted to booze.
- syrgian 4y agoIt is the establishment you would sue. https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/08/texas-man-wins-5-5-million-in-lawsuit-claiming-restaurant-overserved-him-alcohol/ https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/08/texas-man-wins-5-5...
- SnowHill9902 4y agoThat was a default judgement so even if not immediately dismissed by the court it wasn’t really put to test.
- alpaca128 4y agoYou can absolutely find cases of companies getting in trouble for serving alcohol to minors. Or selling them cigarettes. Or running a secret casino/gambling business. You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.
- tossthere 4y ago> You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things. This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true. My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official. The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease. “It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family. Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.
- justinclift 4y agoTobacco then? Pointing those out because in my current country (Australia), laws are being gradually introduced to - eventually - eliminate tobacco consumption. eg plain paper packaging mandate, banning of smoking in more and more places, and potentially soon there will be banning of tobacco sales to people born before a point in time year (2005 maybe?) so they're never allowed to smoke
- notRobot 4y ago> potentially soon there will be banning of tobacco sales to people born before a point in time year (2005 maybe?) so they're never allowed to smoke Minor typo: the ban will be for people born after a particular year, not before.
- behnamoh 4y agoeasier to enforce such laws in a low populated country such as Australia than in places like the US.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoAustralians generally live in big dense cities. In fact, this is probably why the ban will work, they are also more into rule of law than the USA is. Also, vaping in Australia is illegal, making the ban even more impressive.
- justinclift 4y ago> illegal Don't you mean "legal"?
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoNo, illegal as in “vaping is not allowed at all in Australia.”
- 4y ago
- tjpnz 4y agoWould you expect a 13 year old to take personal responsibility?
- micromacrofoot 4y agoHow far does personal responsibility go? what if there are 100 psychologists working to undermine your self control? do you stand a chance?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThis is an interesting point, especially considering that people are born with various levels of self-control. People with little to no self-control stand no chance, but there are many people I’m sure that would survive psychologists, especially knowing that they work in a field where almost nothing is reproducible :)
- oblio 4y agoIt's also data scientists, computer scientists, and plenty of other folks in fields which are considered "hard sciences", that are working together with the psychologists. Plus, if it's "only" 20% of people we lose to these addictions, that's still a major tragedy. The dig at psychologists was funny, but this is a super serious topic, unfortunately.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoPersonally I find social media so addicting that the only thing I could do is quit entirely. I occasionally have to use TikTok for trend research, and it's shockingly addicting... to the point where I think the algorithm should be legally required to be publicly accessible or explained in some plain language way (to some extent, there are a lot of logistical hurdles).
- Emanation 4y agoSelf control is a weird thing, depending on the addiction. Self control can spawn from simply being self aware of how a thing affects you. I'm willing to bet it's not immediately obvious how scrolling through social media makes a person feel, unless they have experience with it (something psychologists teach to help their patients deal with situations.) So, if it's something that can be taught, does it affect how responsible someone is with their social media usage? Is their environment equipt to impart such information? Are they equipt to learn? Do they just enjoy it anyway?
- oblio 4y agoThis trope of "personal responsibility" needs to go away. Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught of determined, highly paid professionals, working together to basically harm them. Our brains have flaws. These people know those flaws and work actively every day of their working lives to exploit them. What hope can the always tired, always stressed out average person have of resisting, long term? Personal responsibility is failing, just look at obesity rates in countries with reduced malnutrition rates. We need systemic solutions, not blaming the poor idiot. That's how we solved other collective problems like air travel safety and road fatality rates. Your approach was the old, antiquated one, where we always blamed the pilot or the driver. Guess what? Even if the person is an idiot, we're all idiots. Let's make stuff that doesn't kill us even if we're idiots. Similar principle here.
- thebean11 4y ago> Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught... Is that true? Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media..I really don't buy the claim that people have literally no control over their actions. What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?
- micromacrofoot 4y ago> Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.
- thebean11 4y agoSure let's say it's 10%, is the conclusion you draw from that that free will doesn't exist? Do 100% of people need to give up the freedom of choice to lower that figure? Not sure what you're getting at about elections, are you saying that's a reason to intervene? I don't really want the government making policy for the purpose of influencing election outcomes.
- OGWhales 4y agoI used to think the same thing when it came to the obesity problem here in the US, but someone said something to me that made me rethink my position. They said: if you have a few people that are obese, that’s an issue with them. If nearly half of society is obese, you have an issue with the society. Macro issues need to be addressed at the macro level. Yes, an individual can choose to not participate and be better for it, but that still leaves us with the same macro issue and it’s likely worth addressing that issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mayowaxcvi 4y agoWait till they find out about Hacker News …
- reustle 4y agoThat's why I love http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com
- memorable 4y agoI do use Hacker News a lot, but not to a point where I feel being addicted. Might feel that in the long run though...
- antonf 4y agoI bet you can stop anytime you want, right?
- smolder 4y agoWhen I take many-days breaks from HN it's nice to come back and just read through a few pages of the "Best" list available through the lists link at the bottom. In my experience the important stuff ends up there, so while I can't participate in active discussion of some of the older links, there's not much FOMO from time away. That's a nice feature.
- chihuahua 4y agoI find FB and Instagram so unappealing that there isn't any risk of addiction, for me. The basic idea - sharing pictures and text telling your friends what you're doing - is brilliant, but in practice, most people I know are annoying, and their posts are tedious. Hacker News, on the other hand, can be slightly addictive, because every time I load the front page, there's a chance there could be something interesting and not groan-inducing.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoIn my opinion, the addiction to Facebook is dependent of your oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genetics. It would be similar to the Dopamine 2 receptor (DRD2) genetics link with alcohol addictions. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-oxytocin-receptors-influence-instagram-activity#Oxytocin https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-oxytocin-rec... http://www.fastcompany.com/1659062/social-networking-affects-brains-falling-love http://www.fastcompany.com/1659062/social-networking-affects...
- yamrzou 4y agoThe title is editorialized which breaks HN guidelines. But I hope you get away with it, because I'd like to see a discussion around this :)
- Tenoke 4y agoFwiw, title editorializing has been enforced pretty lightly for a while, you can find editorialized titles daily which I guess in turn results in more people editorializing theirs. It feels like a lost cause to even bring it up since enforcement is so haphazard.
- bertil 4y agoHappy to explain what really happened with Facebook, but I typically don’t get a lot of positive feedback when I do.
- monetus 4y agoPlease do; don't hold back. Tell us what went down. Thanks - hope you're doing alright
- bertil 4y agoThank you for your support. My response got downvoted to oblivion, so I deleted it. One day, people will be less angry and care more about what happened.
- yamrzou 4y agoYes, please do. It will be constructive whether people agree with it or not.
- bertil 4y agoThank you for your support. My response got downvoted to oblivion, so I deleted it. One day, people will be less angry and care more about what happened.
- hourago 4y agoMany social media sites evolved from time sorted posts to algorithm sorted posts. The algorithms are data driven and designed to maximize engagement, as it improves revenue. This creates an incentive to push highly controversial topics over more casual content. - China is already regulating this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/china-to-regulate-tech-giants-algorithms-in-unprecedented-move.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/china-to-regulate-tech-giant... > Users must be able to opt out of having recommendation services via algorithms. That one would be great, even better, it should be the default option. People should be able to opt-in if they feel like it, but it should not be the default.
- cronix 4y agosorting from newest first is also a data driven algorithm
- fknorangesite 4y agoYes, everyone on HN knows this. But the usage of "algorithm" in the context of social media feeds has long had the colloquial meaning of "building a feed that is anything other than chronological."
- thatjoeoverthr 4y agoIt’s also a transparent one with no ulterior motives and straightforward consequences.
- bertil 4y agoFacebook algorithm hasn’t been optimised to maximise time spent on the site since 2014, and controversial topics have a well documented negative effect on both attention and engagement.
- prophesi 4y agoTheir own leaked internal docs say that angry, love, sad, and wow reactions had 5x more weight than traditional likes. It should be easy to infer that this will promote more controversial posts than uncontroversial ones. It seems like their attention & engagement tweaks are spent on Instagram. One frustrating recent change was the introduction of a non-algorithmic feed, but it's not on by default, and it hides stories from the view, which makes it unusable for most people.
- charcircuit 4y ago>internal research showed that the app exacerbated mental health issues for teen girls in particular. This is twisting the truth. Specifically FB had found that for teenage girls with body image issues the ones they surveyed on average thought Instagram on average made it worse. 31% said worse, 22% said better, and 45.5% said it had no impact. For the other 11 other mental health issues they said Instagram made it better on average. For teen boys for 12 out of 12 mental health issues they said Instagram made it better. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Teen-Annotated-Research-Deck-1.pdf https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
- thirtyfivecent 4y ago
- Terry_Roll 4y agoThey are not exercising when they are viewing social media though, so there is an health implication with social media. How long before we get social media induced deep vein thrombosis? The airlines took that seriously.
- 9991 4y agoSelf-reports of mental harm are not worth anything. Why do people keep quoting these useless stats?
- Aerroon 4y agoIt doesn't matter what the stats are. The point is that that specific line is often mischaracterized to imply something that it doesn't imply.
- 9991 4y agoI don’t understand what you’re saying. What does the line actually imply? And what do people think it implies? (Part of my confusion is that I don’t think the stats imply anything at all.)
- tjpnz 4y agoI hope TikTok will follow.
- pelagicAustral 4y agoI had zero exposure to TikTok until about 60 days or so. I started seeing a lot of content from TikTok on my regular feeds, like YouTube and a few other media sites. I don't have any social media accounts other than this one and YouTube, so it wasnt hard to stay away from it all, but now even on my news channels I see 'everything' TikTok content seeping in, and I have to say, I really hope the content I'm seeing is a curated list of what goes on in that place because its horrendous. They say 4chan is the cesspool of the internet but by God... I mean, I can't even begin to address all the mental issues that seem to be glorified by the platform. To these standards even a /b/ post might seem academic in nature.
- tjpnz 4y agoYou probably started seeing it because of the Johnny Depp civil suit. Most of the content in my feeds claiming to cover it seemed to be more about TikTok, which was frustrating as someone unfamiliar with the case. The mental health glorification is particularly insidious and there's already been some studies on the harm done to people who self diagnosis on the platform. Even if you avoid all the content it recommends you on the subject it still messes with your dopamine receptors.
- tejohnso 4y agoHave packaged food and fast food manufacturers been sued for deliberately making their products addictive, knowing full well that the addictive substances cause physical and mental harm?
- DiabloD3 4y agoNo, not that I'm aware of, but I'm also surprised they haven't: they'd just need to follow the model proven to work by the case against Big Tobacco. Any business model that depends on exploiting their customers is inherently illegal and following the established case law to this conclusion is the only sane outcome. The only reason we haven't is that Big Sugar (or whatever it ends up being known as when they write the history books) has more money than Big Tobacco and has been laying out their defenses against it.
- whiplash451 4y agoThis is a slippery slope, though, because then any provider of food with sugar in it would be a potential target.
- oblio 4y agoWell, maybe they should, unless their food is clearly labeled as a dessert, and if their servings also have clear and obvious markings of how much of the daily intake is covered by them. More than that, food for which the average servings exceed the daily needs of the average person should have danger warnings. Maybe not that far off from what cigarettes show as health damage caused by them. Edit: Why is this downvoted? Come on, I want some arguments. The same system has worked for tobacco, and we know food with excess sugar is as bad if not worse. Why shouldn't we do the same thing?
- azekai 4y agoI didn't downvote, but I think your solution isn't particularly effective. Part of the problem is food is more fundamental than tobacco; nearly everyone finds some kind of sweet treat appealing. Slapping labels on all the poptarts saying they are 'desserts' doesn't fix the fact that we are almost all hardwired to seek out fats and sugars.
- pluc 4y ago"Why did you not quit the platform?" aaaand checkmate
- tqi 4y agoIs a news director selecting stories for the front page of a newspaper meaningfully different?
- silexia 4y agoOn the one hand, Meta is dangerously addictive. On the other hand, I despise opportunistic class action lawyers. These articles are always titled as if people are going after someone, when in reality the lawsuits are solely driven by the lawyers behind them who collect huge fees.