6 ms·

Nearly 40 states back surgeon general's social media warning labels

57 points by rntn 2y ago

superkuh 2y ago
We should all be wary when non-medical politicians start campaigns involving medical issues. There is no scientific evidence or consensus of this position these politicans are pushing. The verge even mentions this offhand in their write-up, "with the exception of state-level rules demanding adult sites add unproven health notices about pornography." This is exactly the same type of situation in terms of being unsupported non-science. But at least it's just a label and not the use of violent force like with states and their poltiical campaigns using pornography as justification/incitement of fears.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Social media is of low value. Best case, political action beats something toxic into submission. Worst case, it does to social what Musk did to Twitter (hollowing it out). Low risk, low/high reward. If social disappeared tomorrow, the world would not be worse off (although those working for it and investing in it would be). Edit: @VyseofArcadia Thank you! Words are hard.
  - tqi 2y ago
    > Social media is of low value ...to you. Everyone is a Libertarian except when it comes to other people's preferences.
    - superkuh 2y ago
      Indeed, it depends on what type of value he meant. A lot of people would lose their incomes if there was no social media. It is not really about being social or communicating. Social media is the subset of corporations that have established legal ways enable the transfer of money between people on the internet. Which is why non-profit social networks never really rise beyond a fractional percent of usage (ie, mastodon's 1 million), they don't ever try to solve (and cannot solve due to KYC) the primary use case of social media being a job.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      That’s why I vote for folks who want to strongly regulate and potentially dismantle these orgs. That’s democracy (assuming enough others seek the same harm reduction). I feel the same about tobacco, alcohol, and other industries targeting vulnerable humans. Have to defend the human from systems built to extract while harming in the process.
      - akira2501 2y ago
        > who want to strongly regulate and potentially dismantle these orgs. That’s democracy Voting for someone who intends to exceed the bounds of the constitution is not democracy. That's just a hired bully. > others seek the same harm reduction You're free to reduce your own harm. You are not free to prescriptively dictate an acceptable level of harm to others. > targeting vulnerable humans. All those other things you mentioned need well marketed and broadly advertised lies to function. Why do you suppose social media does not need the same? Aside from that wouldn't your goal to make humans less vulnerable? Or are we perennially going to bully everyone else over the imagined needs of this class while constantly ignoring the rest of their plight? "We don't care that you're vulnerable. We care that we can use you as an excuse to get what we want."
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        We already regulate many things for harm, by age (alcohol, tobacco, firearms, recreational drugs), and broadly without regard to age (meth, fentanyl, etc). I think you are confused with regards to current state vs the way you wish the world was. The discussion is adding additional items to that regulatory list. > If something changes the pathways in our brains and damages our health — and if it does so to Americans on a vast scale — it should be regulated as a threat to public health. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/03/regulating-out-of-the-social-media-health-crisis/ https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/03/regulatin... https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me... https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-it-possible-to-become-addicted-to-social-media https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-it-possible-to-become-... It’s still democracy even when you aren't happy with the outcome. You got the vote. That’s the democracy part, not the winning.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    > hallowing it out FYI you probably mean "hollowing it out". "Hallowing" is to sanctify or make holy, which is pretty much the opposite of what Musk did to Twitter.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    Social media is of immense value to humanity because it allows rapid decentralised transmission of information. It's why for instance young Americans have been making much more of a fuss about the current genocide in Gaza than any previous one, because the flow of information is no longer filtered through a small number of self-interested media corporations. The fact it pushes some psychologically unstable individuals over the edge is no justification for trying to destroy the whole system; the priority should be on getting those people the treatment they need.
    - atmavatar 2y ago
      > because the flow of information is no longer filtered through a small number of self-interested media corporations Isn't it, though? It seems to me, particularly due to the fact that people now overwhelmingly get their news from social media, that we've merely shifted which self-interested media corporations do the filtering.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- wkat4242 2y ago
  True, there's a lot of misinformation about porn. I do some amateur/OnlyFans stuff and i have several friends that work for a big studio. Never heard of any abuse going on in the industry itself. Though it is true that people with prior abuse are more likely to be in this industry, it does seem to be pretty common. But I think it's a coping mechanism too. Everyone I know is happy to do the work anyway. The environment seems also really chill, they shoot at these luxury villas and afterwards hang out in the pool etc. Of course N=1 but the whole stigma of it being a cesspool of abuse seems more politically/religiously motivated.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    There is some abuse, but I don’t have reliable statistics to say whether it’s worse than, say the music industry. What is true is that very often the people who complain loudly about porn don’t actually give a fuck about the women and would want them in the kitchen anyway. It’s like nationalists pretending to care about the welfare of migrants when arguing that they should be kept somewhere else. It’s pure hypocrisy.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      > say the music industry. Yeah or the vanilla film industry. With characters like Weinstein and the others..
      - kergonath 2y ago
        I had this in mind as well. Or academia, which I know better and still has a lot of issues, even if it rarely goes all the way to rape.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Soon we wont be needing ad-blockers because we'll have so many legal nag pop ups that you wont be able to see the ads! Seriously, can we come up with a better solution to these things? Like can browsers notify you about cookies instead in a non-intrusive way? Same with social media nagware. Just thinking aloud, because websites will become increasingly annoying over time.
- johndhi 2y ago
  I'm a lawyer in this space. Couldn't agree with you more. Edit to add some more detail. There's a lot of scholarship that more information or transparency can't be bad - and I don't disagree too much - but the cluttering and intrusiveness is too much. Every legal regime (privacy, safety, consumer protection, IP, etc) clambors to be the most important and worthy of being front page news. But this results in a brutal web experience. I miss the old, simple websites we had as kids. Can't we all agree that a privacy policy or terms link is enough? That's what links are for.
  - the8472 2y ago
    My understanding as a layperson is that most of those banners are not mandated by law and it's companies choosing this approach rather then picking other options such as not storing PII unless strictly necessary for the interaction with the user. So why fault the laws here?
    - johndhi 2y ago
      You're right, I guess -- but if you want to build a competitive business in today's world, you simply need to collect a lot of personal information and do analytics on your website. If it were outlawed to place cookies on people's browsers, then it would be easy - Amazon.com would have only strictly necessary cookies, Facebook.com same, etc. But given it's possible to comply with the law by throwing up obnoxious banners, that's what these companies do, and you're basically forced to do, if you compete with them. Whether you blame 'capitalism' or 'the marketplace' for those things or, you believe 'the government' has the job of understanding this and putting in place laws that make it easier across the board, is kind of up to your political affiliation.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
beaglesss 2y ago
Compelled speech. Strike it down, SCOTUS.
- perihelions 2y ago
  The Ninth Circuit struck down something adjacent to this last week (California's AB 587, with a social media compelled-speech provision), if you're looking for news to cheer you up! You'll rarely read uplifting stuff about 1A on HN; this crowd does not like to upvote those stories. The AB 587 law had 400-comment threads excitedly cheering it on, and total silence when the courts overturned it. You'd get the wrong impression if you got all of your tech news from HN.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
This will most likely end up like prop 65 where the warning will be completely ignored and if anything make make people not care about the important warnings like on wine bottles. A surgeon general warning makes sense on a bottle of wine to prevent pregnant mothers from causing their children to have FAS or worse. I'm generally a proponent for government enforcing companies to improve consumer knowledge, but only for matters of simple fact such as nutrition labels or the recent ISP speed labels.[0] I could see such labels also making sense for eg. laptops or mobile phones, but there is no evidence that these manufactures are hiding these specs so it seems unnecessary. Similar arguments could also be made for movies and video games. In those cases, companies voluntarily provide age restrictions such as the MPA and ESRB rating systems. This is perhaps infeasible with mass user generated content like social media. However, I'm not sure the issue people have with social media is the "content rating" per se but other issues such as bullying or addiction (taking these claims at face value). Lastly, I have read that the evidence for a teen mental health crisis caused by social media is not as substantial as claimed in news media, but I haven't looked into it deeply. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/starting-today-isps-must-display-labels-with-price-speeds-and-data-caps/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/starting-today-i...
ck2 2y ago
Pack-a-day smokers do not give a damn about the black box (death label) warning on cigarettes. Minors by definition do not have any responsibility, nor do they have any perspective to consequences, they are immortal in their own minds The only answer is to make parents and guardians responsible, start with fines, end up with prison if there is something so dire to what you are trying to stop and it is destroying lives.
- piva00 2y ago
  > Pack-a-day smokers do not give a damn about the black box (death label) warning on cigarettes. Probably not but I've seen not-a-pack-a-day smokers stop smoking also because of the warning labels. It's a constant nudge and if you are not that deep into the addiction it makes some people wonder if it's worth keeping the habit after seeing the throat cancer image for the 500th time. It's a nudge for the ones that might pick up on it, it's never going to be perfect (and not even designed for that) but at a societal level if that label made some thousands of people consider quitting smoking it's already done its job. Combine it with other nudges such as increasing taxes on cigarettes to absurd levels, education campaigns in schools, forbidding advertisement, so on and so forth, and changes happen. The label is just one part of a whole strategy, only judging it in a vacuum is the wrong approach.
vondur 2y ago
I'm sure it'll work as well as it does for Tobacco and Alcohol.
mFixman 2y ago
Should HN have addiction warning labels?
- Spivak 2y ago
  This website is known by the state of California to cause flamewars.
- vundercind 2y ago
  HN isn’t social media. No endless and ever-changing personalized algo-feed showing me stuff I didn’t ask for to try to keep me “engaged”. No alerts. No social graph at the center of it. No “friends” or “follows”. It’s missing enough of the things that characterize social media that it’s unambiguously not in that category. [edit] however, separately: yes, it should :-)
  - _proofs 2y ago
    HN is absolutely social media, it's just attempting to blend aggregator with online forum. you can network, dm, and users who post frequently are often recognized here. you can doom-scroll as much as anywhere else whether it be in the feed or in the comments (so long as you don't have a bias towards different mediums like video). and also while it might not meet your criteria for social media algorithmically or otherwise, an algorithm is not necessary for someone to engage with the internet in unhealthy ways. the surface area for emotional damage is just different. and that doesn't imply HN is some special place where the only users engaging here are "emotionally well" in both their engagement/usage, and in their personal. and speaking as someone intimately familiar with relevant behaviors and presentations, the algorithm exerts influence and exploits, but it is ultimately not the RCA -- it's just like a drug dependency for someone with maladaptive coping mechanisms -- the drug isn't "the problem", it's a symptom, and the "drug dealer" is taking advantage of it. side-thought: it always makes me wonder if people manufacturing and distributing what i see as a "need" for social media, while employing HOOKED marketing dopamine strategies to establish said need in its users, ever ask themselves: is this a net-good? should i be doing more with my life? is this harmful? imagine being a demonstrably great mind and seemingly great person, but working somewhere like FB or IG or TikTok and applying every ounce of your intelligence to maximize user engagement.
karaterobot 2y ago
> “A surgeon general’s warning on social media platforms, though not sufficient to address the full scope of the problem, would be one consequential step toward mitigating the risk of harm to youth,” the attorneys general said. I agree that it's not sufficient, disagree that it's consequential. Consequential means it has consequences, I don't see what those are. Situations like this remind me of that old sketch by The State, where there's a penitentiary with a big, wide-open gate, and all the prisoners are politely asked to please not escape, as a favor to the warden. Our Surgeon General is asking people to voluntarily not abuse social media, when that's the exact thing people are doing already, want to keep doing, and in fact in many cases define their lives around doing. Also, there's absolutely no proposed way to stop them from doing it, or even incentivize them not to do it. Not sufficient indeed.

57 points by rntn 2y ago

We should all be wary when non-medical politicians start campaigns involving medical issues. There is no scientific evidence or consensus of this position these politicans are pushing. The verge even mentions this offhand in their write-up, "with the exception of state-level rules demanding adult sites add unproven health notices about pornography." This is exactly the same type of situation in terms of being unsupported non-science. But at least it's just a label and not the use of violent force like with states and their poltiical campaigns using pornography as justification/incitement of fears.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Social media is of low value. Best case, political action beats something toxic into submission. Worst case, it does to social what Musk did to Twitter (hollowing it out). Low risk, low/high reward. If social disappeared tomorrow, the world would not be worse off (although those working for it and investing in it would be). Edit: @VyseofArcadia Thank you! Words are hard.
- tqi 2y ago
  > Social media is of low value ...to you. Everyone is a Libertarian except when it comes to other people's preferences.
  - superkuh 2y ago
    Indeed, it depends on what type of value he meant. A lot of people would lose their incomes if there was no social media. It is not really about being social or communicating. Social media is the subset of corporations that have established legal ways enable the transfer of money between people on the internet. Which is why non-profit social networks never really rise beyond a fractional percent of usage (ie, mastodon's 1 million), they don't ever try to solve (and cannot solve due to KYC) the primary use case of social media being a job.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    That’s why I vote for folks who want to strongly regulate and potentially dismantle these orgs. That’s democracy (assuming enough others seek the same harm reduction). I feel the same about tobacco, alcohol, and other industries targeting vulnerable humans. Have to defend the human from systems built to extract while harming in the process.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      > who want to strongly regulate and potentially dismantle these orgs. That’s democracy Voting for someone who intends to exceed the bounds of the constitution is not democracy. That's just a hired bully. > others seek the same harm reduction You're free to reduce your own harm. You are not free to prescriptively dictate an acceptable level of harm to others. > targeting vulnerable humans. All those other things you mentioned need well marketed and broadly advertised lies to function. Why do you suppose social media does not need the same? Aside from that wouldn't your goal to make humans less vulnerable? Or are we perennially going to bully everyone else over the imagined needs of this class while constantly ignoring the rest of their plight? "We don't care that you're vulnerable. We care that we can use you as an excuse to get what we want."
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        We already regulate many things for harm, by age (alcohol, tobacco, firearms, recreational drugs), and broadly without regard to age (meth, fentanyl, etc). I think you are confused with regards to current state vs the way you wish the world was. The discussion is adding additional items to that regulatory list. > If something changes the pathways in our brains and damages our health — and if it does so to Americans on a vast scale — it should be regulated as a threat to public health. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/03/regulating-out-of-the-social-media-health-crisis/ https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/03/regulatin... https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me... https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-it-possible-to-become-addicted-to-social-media https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-it-possible-to-become-... It’s still democracy even when you aren't happy with the outcome. You got the vote. That’s the democracy part, not the winning.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  > hallowing it out FYI you probably mean "hollowing it out". "Hallowing" is to sanctify or make holy, which is pretty much the opposite of what Musk did to Twitter.
- logicchains 2y ago
  Social media is of immense value to humanity because it allows rapid decentralised transmission of information. It's why for instance young Americans have been making much more of a fuss about the current genocide in Gaza than any previous one, because the flow of information is no longer filtered through a small number of self-interested media corporations. The fact it pushes some psychologically unstable individuals over the edge is no justification for trying to destroy the whole system; the priority should be on getting those people the treatment they need.
  - atmavatar 2y ago
    > because the flow of information is no longer filtered through a small number of self-interested media corporations Isn't it, though? It seems to me, particularly due to the fact that people now overwhelmingly get their news from social media, that we've merely shifted which self-interested media corporations do the filtering.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
wkat4242 2y ago
True, there's a lot of misinformation about porn. I do some amateur/OnlyFans stuff and i have several friends that work for a big studio. Never heard of any abuse going on in the industry itself. Though it is true that people with prior abuse are more likely to be in this industry, it does seem to be pretty common. But I think it's a coping mechanism too. Everyone I know is happy to do the work anyway. The environment seems also really chill, they shoot at these luxury villas and afterwards hang out in the pool etc. Of course N=1 but the whole stigma of it being a cesspool of abuse seems more politically/religiously motivated.
- kergonath 2y ago
  There is some abuse, but I don’t have reliable statistics to say whether it’s worse than, say the music industry. What is true is that very often the people who complain loudly about porn don’t actually give a fuck about the women and would want them in the kitchen anyway. It’s like nationalists pretending to care about the welfare of migrants when arguing that they should be kept somewhere else. It’s pure hypocrisy.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > say the music industry. Yeah or the vanilla film industry. With characters like Weinstein and the others..
    - kergonath 2y ago
      I had this in mind as well. Or academia, which I know better and still has a lot of issues, even if it rarely goes all the way to rape.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

giancarlostoro 2y ago

Soon we wont be needing ad-blockers because we'll have so many legal nag pop ups that you wont be able to see the ads! Seriously, can we come up with a better solution to these things? Like can browsers notify you about cookies instead in a non-intrusive way? Same with social media nagware. Just thinking aloud, because websites will become increasingly annoying over time.

johndhi 2y ago
I'm a lawyer in this space. Couldn't agree with you more. Edit to add some more detail. There's a lot of scholarship that more information or transparency can't be bad - and I don't disagree too much - but the cluttering and intrusiveness is too much. Every legal regime (privacy, safety, consumer protection, IP, etc) clambors to be the most important and worthy of being front page news. But this results in a brutal web experience. I miss the old, simple websites we had as kids. Can't we all agree that a privacy policy or terms link is enough? That's what links are for.
- the8472 2y ago
  My understanding as a layperson is that most of those banners are not mandated by law and it's companies choosing this approach rather then picking other options such as not storing PII unless strictly necessary for the interaction with the user. So why fault the laws here?
  - johndhi 2y ago
    You're right, I guess -- but if you want to build a competitive business in today's world, you simply need to collect a lot of personal information and do analytics on your website. If it were outlawed to place cookies on people's browsers, then it would be easy - Amazon.com would have only strictly necessary cookies, Facebook.com same, etc. But given it's possible to comply with the law by throwing up obnoxious banners, that's what these companies do, and you're basically forced to do, if you compete with them. Whether you blame 'capitalism' or 'the marketplace' for those things or, you believe 'the government' has the job of understanding this and putting in place laws that make it easier across the board, is kind of up to your political affiliation.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

beaglesss 2y ago

Compelled speech. Strike it down, SCOTUS.

perihelions 2y ago
The Ninth Circuit struck down something adjacent to this last week (California's AB 587, with a social media compelled-speech provision), if you're looking for news to cheer you up! You'll rarely read uplifting stuff about 1A on HN; this crowd does not like to upvote those stories. The AB 587 law had 400-comment threads excitedly cheering it on, and total silence when the courts overturned it. You'd get the wrong impression if you got all of your tech news from HN.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

This will most likely end up like prop 65 where the warning will be completely ignored and if anything make make people not care about the important warnings like on wine bottles. A surgeon general warning makes sense on a bottle of wine to prevent pregnant mothers from causing their children to have FAS or worse. I'm generally a proponent for government enforcing companies to improve consumer knowledge, but only for matters of simple fact such as nutrition labels or the recent ISP speed labels.[0] I could see such labels also making sense for eg. laptops or mobile phones, but there is no evidence that these manufactures are hiding these specs so it seems unnecessary. Similar arguments could also be made for movies and video games. In those cases, companies voluntarily provide age restrictions such as the MPA and ESRB rating systems. This is perhaps infeasible with mass user generated content like social media. However, I'm not sure the issue people have with social media is the "content rating" per se but other issues such as bullying or addiction (taking these claims at face value). Lastly, I have read that the evidence for a teen mental health crisis caused by social media is not as substantial as claimed in news media, but I haven't looked into it deeply. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/starting-today-isps-must-display-labels-with-price-speeds-and-data-caps/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/starting-today-i...

ck2 2y ago

Pack-a-day smokers do not give a damn about the black box (death label) warning on cigarettes. Minors by definition do not have any responsibility, nor do they have any perspective to consequences, they are immortal in their own minds The only answer is to make parents and guardians responsible, start with fines, end up with prison if there is something so dire to what you are trying to stop and it is destroying lives.

piva00 2y ago
> Pack-a-day smokers do not give a damn about the black box (death label) warning on cigarettes. Probably not but I've seen not-a-pack-a-day smokers stop smoking also because of the warning labels. It's a constant nudge and if you are not that deep into the addiction it makes some people wonder if it's worth keeping the habit after seeing the throat cancer image for the 500th time. It's a nudge for the ones that might pick up on it, it's never going to be perfect (and not even designed for that) but at a societal level if that label made some thousands of people consider quitting smoking it's already done its job. Combine it with other nudges such as increasing taxes on cigarettes to absurd levels, education campaigns in schools, forbidding advertisement, so on and so forth, and changes happen. The label is just one part of a whole strategy, only judging it in a vacuum is the wrong approach.

vondur 2y ago

I'm sure it'll work as well as it does for Tobacco and Alcohol.

mFixman 2y ago

Should HN have addiction warning labels?

Spivak 2y ago
This website is known by the state of California to cause flamewars.
vundercind 2y ago
HN isn’t social media. No endless and ever-changing personalized algo-feed showing me stuff I didn’t ask for to try to keep me “engaged”. No alerts. No social graph at the center of it. No “friends” or “follows”. It’s missing enough of the things that characterize social media that it’s unambiguously not in that category. [edit] however, separately: yes, it should :-)
- _proofs 2y ago
  HN is absolutely social media, it's just attempting to blend aggregator with online forum. you can network, dm, and users who post frequently are often recognized here. you can doom-scroll as much as anywhere else whether it be in the feed or in the comments (so long as you don't have a bias towards different mediums like video). and also while it might not meet your criteria for social media algorithmically or otherwise, an algorithm is not necessary for someone to engage with the internet in unhealthy ways. the surface area for emotional damage is just different. and that doesn't imply HN is some special place where the only users engaging here are "emotionally well" in both their engagement/usage, and in their personal. and speaking as someone intimately familiar with relevant behaviors and presentations, the algorithm exerts influence and exploits, but it is ultimately not the RCA -- it's just like a drug dependency for someone with maladaptive coping mechanisms -- the drug isn't "the problem", it's a symptom, and the "drug dealer" is taking advantage of it. side-thought: it always makes me wonder if people manufacturing and distributing what i see as a "need" for social media, while employing HOOKED marketing dopamine strategies to establish said need in its users, ever ask themselves: is this a net-good? should i be doing more with my life? is this harmful? imagine being a demonstrably great mind and seemingly great person, but working somewhere like FB or IG or TikTok and applying every ounce of your intelligence to maximize user engagement.

karaterobot 2y ago

> “A surgeon general’s warning on social media platforms, though not sufficient to address the full scope of the problem, would be one consequential step toward mitigating the risk of harm to youth,” the attorneys general said. I agree that it's not sufficient, disagree that it's consequential. Consequential means it has consequences, I don't see what those are. Situations like this remind me of that old sketch by The State, where there's a penitentiary with a big, wide-open gate, and all the prisoners are politely asked to please not escape, as a favor to the warden. Our Surgeon General is asking people to voluntarily not abuse social media, when that's the exact thing people are doing already, want to keep doing, and in fact in many cases define their lives around doing. Also, there's absolutely no proposed way to stop them from doing it, or even incentivize them not to do it. Not sufficient indeed.