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Everyone has the ability to exercise personal accountability for how much they gamble, smoke, eat junk food, play video games, use social media etc. However, if

Everyone has the ability to exercise personal accountability for how much they gamble, smoke, eat junk food, play video games, use social media etc. However, if these consumer products become so addictive, or are designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes. Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.

cdogl 3y ago
The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other. If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    Community need not be tight for change to occur. A random stranger calling you out on your shit is just as effective. Maybe even more effective as it doesn't always hit so hard when someone you are comfortable with says it.
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  I never said it was binary, but we’re talking about governments stepping in to help. The government cannot and will have the capacity to come in and solely fix the problem. Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.
Loic 3y ago
I explain to our kids that it is normal for them to have difficulties with stopping playing or looking at a stream from a social media platform. My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted. Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.
- ghxst 3y ago
  Just want to say I love how simple yet effective this explanation is. Can I ask what age range your kids are in and do they understand this perspective enough that they are aware of it and take steps to avoid it?
  - Loic 3y ago
    They are 11, 15 and 17. Thanks to the screen time stats from their mobile, they can reflect on the time wasted per week. This works great for the oldest ones, but not for our youngest. My impression is that getting older is enough for them to start reflecting as we are as adults also struggling. Screentime hygiene is for us a tooic we try to address like mouth hygiene, think about it every day, but do not make a big fuss about it.
jimz 3y ago
Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme. Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation. That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law). In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector. There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
lynx23 3y ago
So, why are alcohol (and nicotine) still legal then? Maybe there is a 100 year old lesson hidden somewhere...
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  And maybe that lesson is hiding in ellipsis or maybe it's not. Who knows...
  - lynx23 3y ago
    I wasn't expecting a reference to Prohibition to be that cryptic to some. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Effects
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > So, why are alcohol (and nicotine) still legal then? I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA. The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  This is actually the classic example of where personal accountability fails, which is what cigarette companies would lobby for. Which is the root of this post As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes. Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability. Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Um. They are heavily regulated? Isn't that what is being argued for for social media?

cdogl 3y ago

The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!

Barrin92 3y ago
>the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other. If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Community need not be tight for change to occur. A random stranger calling you out on your shit is just as effective. Maybe even more effective as it doesn't always hit so hard when someone you are comfortable with says it.
NoPicklez 3y ago
I never said it was binary, but we’re talking about governments stepping in to help. The government cannot and will have the capacity to come in and solely fix the problem. Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.

Loic 3y ago

I explain to our kids that it is normal for them to have difficulties with stopping playing or looking at a stream from a social media platform. My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted. Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.

ghxst 3y ago
Just want to say I love how simple yet effective this explanation is. Can I ask what age range your kids are in and do they understand this perspective enough that they are aware of it and take steps to avoid it?
- Loic 3y ago
  They are 11, 15 and 17. Thanks to the screen time stats from their mobile, they can reflect on the time wasted per week. This works great for the oldest ones, but not for our youngest. My impression is that getting older is enough for them to start reflecting as we are as adults also struggling. Screentime hygiene is for us a tooic we try to address like mouth hygiene, think about it every day, but do not make a big fuss about it.

jimz 3y ago

Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme. Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation. That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law). In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector. There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.

lynx23 3y ago

So, why are alcohol (and nicotine) still legal then? Maybe there is a 100 year old lesson hidden somewhere...

johnchristopher 3y ago
And maybe that lesson is hiding in ellipsis or maybe it's not. Who knows...
- lynx23 3y ago
  I wasn't expecting a reference to Prohibition to be that cryptic to some. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Effects
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> So, why are alcohol (and nicotine) still legal then? I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA. The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.
NoPicklez 3y ago
This is actually the classic example of where personal accountability fails, which is what cigarette companies would lobby for. Which is the root of this post As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes. Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability. Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia
ajkjk 3y ago
Um. They are heavily regulated? Isn't that what is being argued for for social media?