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Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise to drove engagement, say whistleblowers
- Forgeties79 8mo agoI remember The Social Dilemma’s entire premise was basically this headline minus TikTok, and that came out what? 7 or 8 years ago? Not saying “well duh” I just think at this point I have to ask “are we going to do anything about it?” We’ve known about the financial incentives to promote anger and outrage online for at least a decade now. So what are we going to do about it?
- asdff 8mo agoWhat can you do about it? That is the rub. You can't. It is no coincidence that pretty much all avenues of information consumption you face are susceptible to this issue. It is by design that these technologies are able to reach you in these ways. It is by design that propagandists have so much success. Everyone in power today is in power because of propaganda. Why would they ever let go of their reigns of power? It is the sole forcing factor keeping them in power after all. They'd be no different than you and I otherwise, which scares them more than anything.
- Forgeties79 8mo agoLegislate! We need laws! I get we aren’t used to that anymore in the US but truly “marketing” and social media in the US has become so hostile and harmful I just don’t understand how we can in good conscience not start to put heavier restrictions on them. Enough is enough. We can’t continue to sacrifice our society on the altar of the Almighty dollar.
- asdff 8mo agoThere's the other rub. Can't get good laws passed either because laws are also subject to propaganda. You draft your good Bill A. Technocracy comes out with millions in ad spend, floods the zone, convinces the voters your bill is bad, or their Bill B with their profitable carveouts is good, voters vote against their interests and for the technocracy. This pattern has played out like this countless times already. Only thing I can think to do is dissociate and pretend like the world isn't fucked.
- quantified 8mo agoShun! You know people at Meta, Tiktok, et al? They're not people you want as friends, they're family but one step above nothing in your lives. Boo Zuck wherever he goes, MMA fights is just one place. Make it as uncool to be part of the machine as it should be for other drains on society like Palantir.
- bigfishrunning 8mo agoI feel like this is general knowledge for the past 5 or so years, but the real question is "What do we do about it?". Personally, I put real effort into not spending time being outraged online, but this is a societal ill that's bigger then I am...
- cj 8mo ago"Make the drug less good" likely isn't the answer. Nor is banning it. What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Maybe Gen Z has the answer.
- fakedang 8mo agoMake it legal and expensive?
- SirFatty 8mo agoyeah, it's called "smoking weed".
- observationist 8mo agoTechnology, culture, legalization of pot, adtech, covid, there are a metric ton of factors that all had significant impact on both decreasing socialization and reduction in drinking. And lowering the birth rates, and the number of healthy relationships, healthy friendships, etc. I'm for legalizing all drugs, regulating the sale, ensuring quality and purity, and educating the public. Cognitive liberty is sacred - but the dip in drinking has a whole lot of causes. A healthier society would be more social and get out and drink more, I think.
- GuB-42 8mo agoMillennials love their weed, party drugs too, it took over Gen X drinking in some way. But I find Zoomers to be rather tame in terms of drinking, smoking, drugs, unsafe sex, etc... Few of the traditional vices, really.
- barbazoo 8mo ago
- hmate9 8mo agoIs this unavoidable? I mean it does generate clicks and views and user engagement so if one platform is doing it, doesn't that automatically mean that the other has to do it? Otherwise they will continuously lose market share.
- hmate9 8mo agoI think the burden to curate your feed so that you do not have such content is now resting with the user and they cannot rely on the platform to do it for them.
- pocksuppet 8mo agoIf the user even wants to do that. Why would they? They're looking for a sugar rush, they're not looking to eat their intellectual vegetables. How do you get children to eat vegetables?
- brookst 8mo ago"They" being others, but definitely not you right? Those people...
- mvid 8mo agoThis assumes the platforms either allow such curation or respect it, which instagram and TikTok famously don’t
- LtWorf 8mo agoExcept there's no way to do this on those platforms.
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago> I mean it does generate clicks and views and user engagement so if one platform is doing it, doesn't that automatically mean that the other has to do it? Otherwise they will continuously lose market share. Why? User engagement isn't the same thing as market share. If McDonald's trained its cashiers to insult you while taking your order, engagement would go up, and market share would go down.
- luc_ 8mo agoDrugs.
- nelsonfigueroa 8mo agoI can't say I'm surprised and I think most people wouldn't be surprised either. But it's always good to have evidence.
- cdrnsf 8mo agoOf course they did. As long as they're legally allowed to do so and profit from doing so they will continue.
- KennyBlanken 8mo agoGiven how TikTok "trends" seem to consist mostly of "get teenagers to do stuff that causes huge expenses for US society": * "eat tide pods" * "stick a fork in electrical sockets in your school" * "destroy your school's shit" aka "Devious Licks" - bathrooms, chromebooks (jamming stuff into the charging ports to start fires...) * "drink a shitload of Benadryl to see what happens" * "steal a kia/hyundai and drive 80mph, run from the cops, etc" ...convince me that this is not a purposeful attack on US society by the CCP?
- someotherperson 8mo agoGiven that the 'tide pod challenge' was before TikTok's time and took place on wholly US-owned platforms like YouTube, we can safely assume it's all in your head. Most of the other stuff you're sharing sounds like a reflection of what you find out in the streets of any major US city. Perhaps you should question if your government is the one that is attacking you.
- kotaKat 8mo agoBingo. Not to mention the constant bullshit excuses back from TikTok claiming they were never the source of the trend and “their moderation stops it”.
- charcircuit 8mo agoBritish people complaining about free speech and trying to censor the internet. America needs to keep standing up to British censorship interests.
- vinni2 8mo agoDupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403929
- aenis 8mo agoI look at people who use fb or tiktok, or x, the same way I look at smokers or alcoholics. With sadness and pity. The fact that we let children use this is hard to accept. The fact that fellow hackers and engineers, some of the brightest minds, have contributed to this is extremely disappointing. Shame on you.
- thin_carapace 8mo agothe bucket of crabs truly pervades in its metaphorical accuracy. regardless as to intelligence, humans are liable to drag down their fellow men. insane to consider that children are effectively drugged from infancy. for this i do not blame an uneducated society strained to its zenith; i blame the sociopathic and the craven who have enabled the proferring of digital drugs, and consequently accelerated societal addiction. the shame falls entirely on them. may reincarnation be real such that sadistic six figure salaried software engineers and their malicious managers are forced to reap the rewards of such "engineering".
- jongjong 8mo agoWhat? Conspiracy theories are not harmful!
- webdoodle 8mo agoThrow away your 'smartphone' and stop using anti-social media. It is killing society, and only making the Billionaires more powerful. They are evil and will do anything to stay in power.
- nmstoker 8mo ago* to drive
- nomilk 8mo agoWhy are social media platforms picked on? Did we forget Gresham's Law applies to content and has done so since humans could communicate? Bad or wrong ideas are the ones that get talked about. Do we discuss the 10 issues politicians get correct, or the 1 they screw up? Platform is irrelevant here; the exact same phenomena occurs/ed on radio and TV decades before it did on social media platforms, and in news papers centuries prior.
- delichon 8mo ago> since humans could communicate You have finally identified the problem. It all started with Homo habilis and misinformation has been rampant ever since. But even protozoan parasites mimic host proteins and block signals, so you really have to go a lot further back to deal with fake news.
- simpaticoder 8mo agoThe feedback loop for this moral hazard is slow but implacable. You can treat the zeitgeist as a dumping ground for so long, until you get so big, that you can no longer treat it like an idealized infinite substance.
- ghm2199 8mo agoIf you like better content look for kagi's small web or better yet find a better algorithm that optimizes for your preferences rather than engagement. I have my instagram, x on a locked down browser in a container with a fake profile that an LLM drives and finds the posts for specific users and compiles a gist of all the important things in my locality(or what u care about) every evening, without me ever going near that FOMO driven dumpster fire of tiktok/insta/x. Best LLM RoI I made.
- zyxzevn 8mo ago[flagged]
- Nevermark 8mo agoWhen I hear "Meta" and "Facebook" the top 10 things I think: 1. "Surveillance" 2. "Advertising" 3. "Scams" 4. "AI slop" 5. "Manipulated experience" 6. "Child harms" 7. Misinformation campaigns. 8. Disinformation campaigns. 9. "Doom scroll regret" 10. "Zuckavatarphilia" But I don't claim to have the "right" opinion and am curious how other people respond to the brands. If each of you could reply, and re-list those associations in the order you experience them, I will collate the results and post them everywhere I can think of. It would go a long ways to satisfying my curiosity, and the curiosity of reporters that like to repeat things they read on the internet.
- softwaredoug 8mo agoIn my experience there’s a strong “banality of evil” that happens. Some poor schlub ML Eng has shipped a feature that wins an A/B test. They’re pushing to get promoted. Their management wants to show they’re hitting their KPIs. An engine of destruction filled with well meaning people just hoping to advance in their careers. You might say, it’s ultimately the designers of the incentives that matter. Even there, the leadership will change. Inevitably the needs of the capitalist machine take over.
- spacechild1 8mo agoZuckerberg himself demanded these features. Some board members even protested, yet they got ignored. Also, you can't tell me that the "engineers" at Meta don't know what they are building. Some may be in denial, blinded by their fat paycheck, but I assume most just don't care.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo agoSomeone changed the title and added a typo
- leftytak 8mo agoAs long as the general public respond to sensationalism, what’s stopping the social media platforms from exploiting. Most of them are click baits anyways.
- nikisweeting 8mo agoDoes anyone know of watchdog agencies that do the research to document and litigate harmful algorithmic trends?. I know https://www.reset.tech/ https://www.reset.tech/ does really good work in this space, but are there others, and who is funding them?
- yoyohello13 8mo agoWhat!? I’m shocked! Shocked I say! Is it really whistleblowing when everyone already knows it?
- ptek 8mo agoIf you make 20 billion and the fine is 0.2 billion…. I don’t think they care about their users mental health.
- Otterly99 8mo agoIt's the same story since at least 2012. It is well documented in the book "The chaos machine" by Max Fisher. Facebook employees, journalists and psychologists have studied the phenomenon and Facebook's (as well as Youtube's) response is always the typical "We have done something" to calm the protest, but it's never really the case. It's a constant game of deflecting, delaying, diminishing, denying.
- kkkou3302242754 8mo ago[dead]
- dev_l1x_be 8mo agoImagine my shock. Ad companies chose profit over people's best interest??
- ray023 8mo ago"Harmful content" translation: What the government do not like. What ISRAEL does not like. Another call for more censorship from a force financed state propaganda outlet nobody with a brain takes seriously. How original.
- revlolz 8mo agoI don't know I have straight up calls for violence against jews on my TikTok pop up and when I report them, TikTok almost always comes back with "No Violations Found"
- huhkerrf 8mo ago> Internal research shared with the BBC showed comments on Reels had significantly higher prevalence of bullying and harassment, hate speech, and violence or incitement than elsewhere on Instagram. I mean, if you want to claim the Jews (let's be honest about what you mean by ISRAEL) are opposed to the above, then... good?
- tempodox 8mo agoSadly, nothing new. Why do they do it? Because they can. That regulators let companies operate this way is a massive failure.
- ETH_start 8mo agoThe idea that there is a certain category of content that is harmful and there are certain people who have the authority to declare what is harmful is extremely dangerous, practically how every single censorship system has ever been built.
- tsoukase 8mo agoSince a long time whistleblowers aren't needed to say the obvious and self-evident about online media. A thoughtful user can realize it instantly. From the era of b/w TV programs until now the content has the same goal. I believe after enough iterations of user control the delivery will become regulated like drugs. Now it's starting for kids.
- 7xgames 8mo ago[flagged]
- rsrsrs86 8mo agoThis has been known forever… they shouldn’t exist. Anyone shocked to know Zuckerberg’s company does it? The guy started by stalking and ranking girls at college FFS.
- spacechild1 8mo agoThe fact that they are still allowed to operate this way is extremely frustrating. The damage that is done by these "social media" platforms has been know for over a decade now, yet nothing ever happens... FB and TikTok should be treated as what they are: dangerous digital drugs engineered by sociopaths.
- david_salerno90 8mo ago[dead]
- silexia 8mo ago[flagged]
- khernandezrt 8mo agoAs someone who uses IG a lot. I have found this to be overwhelmingly true. Very often when i stumble upon a controversial video the very top comment is a ratioed hot take on the topic, as if meta purposely put the comment at the top to ruffle feathers. On top of that, when i find controversial topics(like the moon landing), a large majority of comments are leaning to one, extreme opinion with all the other differing opinions pushed to the very very far bottom of the comment section