7 ms·

Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of

• wslh 3y ago
  > Social media companies argue that they can't monitor ever post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE. 1000%. I think there are more complex problems in the world that are solved that this. If you look at youth and teenagers activities in Instagram, their photos and videos, and social graph I don't think it is so difficult to detect them, within a high percentile.
  • rgreekguy 3y ago
    I think monitoring every post is a pretty solved problem, and it only gets better (worse?). Censoring has varying degrees of success, whether that is outright deleting a post/user or just hiding it from "not interested" users.
• 0xParlay 3y ago
  I mean FB engineers are specifically optimizing for toxicity at an algorithmic level. It’s the product. You can’t perform controlled experiments to measure the profitability of depression and also fiend ignorance. You’re all very welcome to whatabout but working at FB is a stain on your character.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I mean no, they're specifically optimizing for engagement. It just turns out that toxicity fuels engagement.
    • dfxm12 3y ago
      Among Haugen’s allegations was a claim that the company was knowingly preying on vulnerable young people to boost profits. "Knowingly preying on vulnerable young people to boost profits" is different from blindly optimizing for engagement without understanding what works.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        Oh they understood how it works, and they definitely accepted that their efforts to boost engagement caused mental health issues, especially among teenage girls. But toxicity was not a goal in itself.
      • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        True, although that's just an "allegation".
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • 0xParlay 3y ago
      Non sequitor. They're optimizing for money. Contrarian status: weak.
    • manuelabeledo 3y ago
      Isn't that a bit like tobacco companies "optimizing for engagement", but knowing that the same ingredients cause cancer?
      • tsunamifury 3y ago
        In all seriousness, no, and for obvious reasons. The toxicity is created by the participants, freely and of their own volition. Is it Facebooks responsibility to police that, shut it down, censor it? Honestly... And where who and when? According to what laws in what regions. Also how do we know Facebook created it, or if it is simply making visible the toxicity that everyone knows is middle school and highschool. I honestly don't know, but I don't like so disingenuously simple shoot the messenger answers. That being said, if Facebook amplified it willfully knowing the damage already -- then it's a different issue. And I think there is some evidence of that. Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  The mistake we are making here is to draw the problem along the boundary of age. The problem is not exclusive to children! Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.
  • spookie 3y ago
    Very much true. Marketing content should be carefully vetted, filtered. Whom you wish to project that content for may want to take back control from addictions they suffer from (i.e. food).
  • autoexec 3y ago
    Presumably adults are supposed to be old enough to know better than to use Facebook.
  • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    There are many things in life more harmful than Facebook that we don't ban. Just because you don't like something or it has some negatives doesn't mean it should be illegal. Indeed given that it's impossible to specifically define "social media" such a ban wouldn't even really be legally feasible given 1st amendment issues. Now personally I don't use alcohol, don't do drugs (including caffeine), don't gamble, and barely ever use social media (except HN, my one guilty pleasure). But I still think those things should all be legal.
• ncr100 3y ago
  Look here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001630 for talk about regulating this new-ish aspect of business.
• yodsanklai 3y ago
  > Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE. Following your reasoning, anything that could possibly harm children should be banned. Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too? Now, suppose we do ban Meta. Where should we stop? should we ban open decentralized social media too? You may not like social media, but a lot of people use them without any particular issues.
  • colpabar 3y ago
    That's not following their reasoning at all, it's a strawman. His point was that a business shouldn't be able to claim that doing something we want/require them to do is too hard and just not do it, which is what they currently do with content moderation.
    • yodsanklai 3y ago
      How do you know they're not doing it and that it's unreasonable to ask more considering the difficulty of the task? His point is that there's no excuse for not doing it, even if the task is impossible. We don't ask the impossible to car manufacturers, why should it be different with Meta? who's to decide?
      • colpabar 3y ago
        It is for the society in which these companies operate and profit to decide, not the companies themselves. And if it is indeed “too difficult”, which we all know just means it will hurt profits to a degree that is unacceptable to shareholders, too bad, they can either make less money or shut it down. If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.
      • Capricorn2481 3y ago
        Because it's well documented that they're not doing it. They have had several whistleblowers around content moderation already. The whole of Africa's content moderation was basically being handled by a mid level employee.
• jonhohle 3y ago
  As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children. I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet. Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children. COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)
    • jonhohle 3y ago
      There is historical precedent for limiting access for children. Children can't legally buy cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets, firearms (of which owning is a constitutional right), or enter certain prohibited places. Unfortunately, I many service providers have abused their access to children and acted as if children can legally enter into some type of one sided quasi-contract. The bar for working with children at any physical location is huge and boundaries are well understood. I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.
• Zufriedenheit 3y ago
  But what about all the small, independent forums in the internet? For them it would really be impossible to comply with monitoring every post. Often they are hobby projects.
  • username332211 3y ago
    To paraphrase the GP - Well, tough luck. [This] is YOUR problem, not MINE. If hobbyists can't comply, maybe it's about time we prevented small independent forums from existing.
  • MrRolleyes 3y ago
    [dead]
  • ianai 3y ago
    Thats obviously not a primary concern. Similar to how your home kitchen isn't going to have a food inspector show up and close it.
    • username332211 3y ago
      The comparison you're making is nonsensical. My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does. If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way. Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart from scale. Hence, small forums hosted by hobbyists and volunteers should be shut down.
      • glimshe 3y ago
        Anything at scale is something else entirely.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
• olalonde 3y ago
  > a factory that wants to dump harmful chemical on water people use for drinking Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable. > no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. I disagree. Businesses and websites ought to have a right to exist as long as they do not inflict harm on third parties and their users participate willingly. Individuals ought to be free to make decisions regarding their own health and that of their children. If we were to consider otherwise, can you fathom the sheer volume of things we'd need to prohibit?
  • edgyquant 3y ago
    > Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable. Yeah just like alcohol and drugs, you can easily restrict your children from using them so companies should be free to sell to whomever. Good parents ensure their children aren’t doing this.
    • olalonde 3y ago
      Talking from personal experience growing up, I would generally agree. The prohibition from selling alcohol/cigarettes to minors was pretty ineffective. The only effective prevention was having stricter parents and facing consequences. That said, I wouldn't say Facebook is at all comparable to alcohol or drugs...
    • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      The prohibition on selling alcohol and drugs has clearly had no effect on their availability. So I'm not sure what you are trying to argue.
• nitwit005 3y ago
  > Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE. Nope. It's also your problem, because it has to be enforced somehow. Few websites are age appropriate for young children (this one certainly isn't), so perfect enforcement would mean essentially no viewing websites without login, and all logins requiring display of face and government issued ID to live webcam. The ID check is already in place for several countries with YouTube if you try to view an age restricted video.
• paulddraper 3y ago
  > no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law.
  • jrflowers 3y ago
    > I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law. Simply put this sentiment on the landing page of your website, labeling on your product or, if you have a mailing list, in the subject field of your next newsletter. “I do not understand if my business is inside or outside the law” is bound to generate useful feedback
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  Glad to see this take here. So often I've seen the opinion that effectively expresses that some company or business plan has a God-given right to be viable. Not directly of course but through about-face when someone points out that the company's business proposition conflicts with something—but how will the business make a profit if it has to [submit to government regulation] because of [concerns about marketing to children]? Some people could probably steadfastly support a new business that was selling something dangerous but that was new and “innovative”. “Oh well people just have take responsibility for their own well-being—regulating crystal dust fumes™ would be way too onerous and impractical.”
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE." Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access. Instead the "Silicon Six" intend only to scale their own gargantuan websites that they now refer to as "platforms". All web publishing and even internet communications are expected to be intermediated by a handful of surveillance advertising companies. What a disaster. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/25/silicon-six-spread-propaganda-its-time-regulate-social-media-sites/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/25/silicon-si...
  • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Not saying I think it's a good outcome but I don't see why it's relevant what the "original architects" thought. This is just a variant of 'argument from authority'.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • simpaticoder 3y ago
    >Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access. This, I think, is roughly true but the issue is nuanced. The history of the web can be characterized by ever-decreasing barriers to entry. At first you needed a physical host and apache. Then, you could have a shared host and put html files in your user directory. Then, you could run wordpress. Then, you could sign up for myspace and never have to run anything. The 'like' is the smallest unit of content that can be captured by such systems. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, wikipedia, etc are what you get from this evolution. The unexpected downside is that with reduced friction to content-creation, the content has become quite awful. In part because people are awful, but also because of money and how effective it is to hire people to say things using these systems. If the friction to create content remained high, it may have been a "better" internet in some measures. It would certainly be a much smaller one. Who knows how it will turn out? I suspect that AI will have a significant impact on all these systems, to wit, injecting massive amounts of noise that will reduce their utility significantly, if not to zero. No empire lasts forever.
• zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  It's unclear if even the porn site verification laws will be allowed[1] so I'm not sure the chances are that good in terms of requiring age verification for all social media. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23854369/texas-porn-age-verification-law-blocked-judge https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23854369/texas-porn-age-v...