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Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- slopinthebag 7mo agoGood hahaha. The ethically devoid people who have no problems engineering platforms to maximise addictiveness at the cost of immense societal harm should be scared. Doubly so the execs who push for it.
- ViktorRay 7mo ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- mmaunder 7mo agoWe all know they're addictive, they're designed to be addictive, and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. The individuals who are profiting from the harm are clearly identifiable. And that harm directly targets children. That this is allowed to continue is a symptom of a sick society.
- aprilthird2021 7mo agoBut so is cable television designed to be addictive. So are most restaurants and ice cream parlors and grocery stores designed to get you to spend more. Most loyalty programs are designed to be addictive to get you to come back, etc. etc. I just worry we left no levers for the public to regulate these entities and this is the worst option of very few options. Who isn't liable under this kind of logic?
- jfengel 7mo agoThe personalization component takes this a step above. Making something very broadly appealing is one thing. Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.
- Dumblydorr 7mo agoAnd feeding toxic content to children while doing so.
- cmeacham98 7mo agoSo if social media removed personalization from their algorithms and only applied them broadly across large demographic groups you'd be fine with them? (Genuine question I'm curious)
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoThis would be a substantial improvement yes Imagine a feed that actually just ends when you run out of posts from people you follow instead trying to endlessly keep your attention by pushing stuff it thinks you might like If I've read all of the posts from my friends I would prefer to not see anything else, but that doesn't maximize engagement for ad platforms so
- nunez 7mo agoThis would be great, yeah. Disable infinite scrolling and page caching (so that you’re not infinitely scrolling horizontally) and video autoplay too. Also add opt-out time limits and breaks.
- jfengel 7mo agoMaybe. It's hard to know what kind of world that would result in. I could well see it being so much less effective as to not be a problem. Or maybe they'd be even more effective, and if we caught them explicitly knowing that they were harming children, it would still potentially be tortious.
- aprilthird2021 7mo ago> Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level. Your grocery store app does this and gives you personalized coupons. Will everyone who buys groceries get a $100k+ settlement?
- conk 7mo agoShow me one ice cream parlor that has license psychologists on the payroll for “persuasive design” or GTFO with your bad faith argument.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoAny ice cream company that has ever hired a major ad agency.
- wheelerwj 7mo agoNot even close and you know it.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoYou don't know much about the advertising or food businesses, I take it. Suggest Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It'll open your eyes.
- salawat 7mo agoThe problem isn't X domain of business is more scummy than Y. They all are. That's kind of the problem. Tech is just egregious though in it's non-reliance on physical matter, meaning anything that can be digitally rendered is instantly a world scale fucking problem. If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. That doesn't work with digital products that started benign, then had the addictive qualities turned up to 11. That's malice, at scale. If every ice cream parlor, or link in the ice cream supply chain started adulterating ice cream with drugs, regulators would have dropped the hammer at the site of adulteration. Meta et Al have had no such presence forced upon them due to lack of regulation in some jurisdictions, or being left to self implement the regulation, thereby largely neutering the effort.
- aprilthird2021 7mo ago> If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. Most retail environments do design their storefronts, logos, placement of products, even foods have higher than normal sugar, oil, and butter content, all in the service of keeping people coming back for more whether or not it is healthy for them. How do we draw the line? Without regulations in place how is it fair to say companies are negligent in allowing people to become addicted to their products?
- slopinthebag 7mo agoI don't think that is really true though. People aren't becoming addicted to grocery stores, ice cream parlours and restaurants, or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree. None of those are engineered to addict you in nearly the same degree or magnitude.
- jen20 7mo ago> or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree 24-hour commercial cable news (in the US) is the original sin of addictive media.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoI'm not seeing any signs of addiction even within an order of magnitude of social media.
- jen20 7mo agoProbably not looking in the right places then. The over 50s are a prime candidate (also for Facebook addiction, but largely reposting nonsense from cable news).
- twoodfin 7mo agoWhat the best evidence that otherwise psychologically healthy people are becoming clinically addicted to social media? People used to spend an awful lot of mindless time watching TV. They weren’t “addicted” in a clinically meaningful sense.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoI haven't seen anybody making any claims about social media usage leading to clinically meaningful addiction. So why are you asking for evidence of that? Also fwiw I'm not in favour of regulating social media, but I am in favour of bringing lawsuits to companies who engage in societally harmful behaviour, and punishing them financially.
- hattmall 7mo agoIce cream isn't engineered to be addictive. Ice cream is, for most people, actually enjoyable and costs money. If ice cream were free but you only got a small amount on random visits to the ice cream parlor then it would be engineered to be addictive.
- munificent 7mo agoA match is designed to start fires. So is a flamethrower. That doesn't mean they are equivalent and must regulated the same way. Scale matters.
- aprilthird2021 7mo agoThis isn't about regulation. Regulation would be welcomed because you can follow it and avoid liability. We are now saying Meta, YouTube, Snap, and nearly every major media app (maybe Netflix and HBO next!) are liable retroactively for the past when people got addicted to the content on the apps despite that the companies did not violate any regulations at the time
- bjt 7mo agoThe nice thing about laws passed by a legislature is that they don't need to have some airtight logic to stop us falling down every slippery slope. If cable television or restaurants or ice cream start causing harm that we want to deal with, we can vote on that when the time comes.
- insane_dreamer 7mo agoYou don’t have a cable TV or ice cream parlor in your pocket dishing it out to you any time you desire wherever you may be.
- twoodfin 7mo agoIn what sense do you mean Instagram is “addictive” to a neurotypical adult?
- bbrks 7mo agoReels are non-stop dopamine hits, just like TikTok. It's incredibly addictive to scroll through. That is by far the worst part of Instagram for anybody. Everything else outside of reels is the usual social media fake life facade, and everything amplified to the max for engagement to get it pushed to feeds via "the algorithm" (note: Interactions don't need to be positive to promote it to feeds)
- twoodfin 7mo agoSome quick Googling tells me Instagram has something like 3B users who spend an average of around 30 minutes a day in the app. Rewind 30 years or so, how long did the typical New York Times subscriber spend with their paper every day? Was the Times addictive? And I won’t even get started on network television for half a century.
- wredcoll 7mo ago"average of 30 minutes" covers a pretty massive range. Lots of people can get drunk once a month and suffer or cause no real harm. Some people get drunk everyday which is slightly more harmful.
- twoodfin 7mo agoSo any producer of X should be regulated or otherwise held liable for the injuries of unhealthy individuals who misuse X?
- fc417fc802 7mo agoDepends. Was the product intentionally designed to be that way? The addition of caffeine to soda is the closest example that immediately comes to mind but in that case many individuals are specifically seeking the additive. There are many physical products that are today designed to minimize harm and misuse after facing liability historically. So I suppose the direct answer to your question would be "yes, absolutely, and there's a figurative mountain of precedent for it".
- superkuh 7mo agoWhat these corporations were trying to do is bad and vaguely feasible to a degree. I think it's bad enough regulation could apply. But there is an additional consideration that's really important in how we as a society deal with this. Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink. We should not be passing judgements or making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs. We can't treat screens like drugs. It's a dangerous metaphor because governments kill people over drugs. Without this distinction the leverage this "screens are drugs" perceptions gives governments will be incredibly dangerous as these cases proceed. If we instead acknowledge that it's corporations that are the problem and not something magical about screens then there's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to large entities acting as gatekeepers.
- jfengel 7mo agoMaybe governments should stop killing people over drugs.
- maxaw 7mo agoScreens on their own aren’t “uniquely and magically addictive”, but infinitely scrollable short form video delivered through that screen is, because a few companies spent billions on the smartest minds in the world to make it so.
- megaman821 7mo agoSo you would support banning any form of entertainment that people spend more time on than TikTok since it would be above the threshold of addiction?
- georgemcbay 7mo ago> and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. And society as a whole. Even if you don't participate you don't escape the blast radius of the harm they've caused over the past 10-15 years.
- wincy 7mo agoMy wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference. I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out. The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.
- munificent 7mo ago> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world. Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
- dingaling 7mo ago30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms. 50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines. The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.
- the_snooze 7mo agoSocial media feeds are designed to be slot machines. Each scroll is a pull. You may or may not get something you actually want. You can't predict what's coming up next, so you just keep mindlessly scrolling.
- sidibe 7mo agoIt's not just the scrolling, the posting side too. They all randomly boost one of your posts so suddenly tons of feedback (especially noticable when I tried threads) and then you try to get that back again. The uncertainty keeps you at it
- munificent 7mo agoRelated: TikTok has a "heating" feature that can make a video radically more popular: https://archive.is/8YYcH https://archive.is/8YYcH
- goodluckchuck 7mo agoI keep seeing the phrase “the harm” as if we’re all supposed to know exactly what that means. What is it?
- buttersicle 7mo agoSure, but this is also how these companies make money. You need to actually pass a law that prohibits this before you fine the companies that do it. Letting juries rob them just because the jury doesn't like it is nothing more than fascism.
- wheelerwj 7mo agoTheres already laws that protect kids. Thats why they just lost in court.
- buttersicle 7mo agoPlease provide a link.
- mocheeze 7mo agohttp://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/99%20Regular/FinalVersions/SB0133.html http://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/99%20Regular/FinalVersions/SB013...
- buttersicle 7mo agoYou're linking to new mexico state law? If you're going to pick a law from one of the smallest states in the union, the least you could do is quote the relevant excerpts. This is a pathetic rebuttal.
- Paradigm2020 7mo agoMeta is also reeling from a separate $375m verdict delivered on Tuesday. New Mexico prosecutors convinced a jury the company enabled child exploitation on its platforms.
- yabutlivnWoods 7mo agoLol @ "rob them" The outcome followed laws that enable the jury to conclude as they did! So there you go, laws passed. Is this Zuckerberg's burner account?
- ramijames 7mo agoIt's such a breath of relief to finally hear people talking about this clearly and loudly. May it continue and may this bad behaviour have repercussions. Enough.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI absolutely do not know they're addictive. I've lived through this entire story before in the video game wars. People said exactly the same things with exactly the same urgency about Mortal Kombat - what kind of sick society do we live in, where greedy corporations sell you the experience of shooting people and ripping their heads off? Perhaps we have to let adults buy these "murder simulators", but only a disturbed, evil person could possibly argue for letting kids do it. If that sounds crazy to you, the moral panic over social media will sound just as crazy in a decade or two.
- gmerc 7mo agoIt’s funny since I worked extensively in both industries and the number of absolutely addicted boomers on farmville and match3 canvas and mobile games throwing their life savings and time away was totally competitive with Vegas
- abnry 7mo agoEuropeans are shocked by the portion sizes in America. But they feel normal in the US. Frogs often don't know they are being boiled.
- paulryanrogers 7mo agoFrogs actually do know the water is getting hot. They jump out. People too. That's why we call it addiction when folks struggle with stopping even though they can see the harm in their own actions.
- bigDinosaur 7mo agoI'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction. Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
- underlipton 7mo agoIt's also that this is not a function of their nature, but of the way that they've been designed to function. Things were not this bad 15 years ago, and the fact that social media existed and functioned the way that it functioned back then was incredibly important in allowing movements like MeToo and BLM and Dreamers and many others to build momentum. When social media is a tool of regular people, it's an awesome, awesome tool. But when the companies and people that own the platforms start to see users as tools themselves, for their own sociopolitical ends, that's when they become destructive forces. And there was a clear enshittification line drawn about this time 10 years ago, when the transition from one state to the other got underway. I fear that we're looking at an attempt to manufacture consent to destroy the tool and not just the malicious function.
- zoklet-enjoyer 7mo agoI think a lot of it is the ease of access now that we carry computers with us everywhere. I was tweeting from my phone in 2009, but I had to send the tweets via text message, so there was no infinite scroll accessible all day everyday to suck my mind into the phone. We had to actually make a decision to sit at a computer and go to the website to fully be fully immersed.
- neves 7mo agoHope they also go after the betting companies.
- insane_dreamer 7mo agoPolymarkets are a curse worse than casinos
- shoobiedoo 7mo agoReminds me of soda. Why the hell liquid poison is allowed to exist turns my stomach. You could fill libraries with data linking it to a myriad illnesses and causes of death. Yet they are even allowed to juke it with caffeine for no other reason than to up the addiction level. Like... what are we doing here.
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoits called freedom, do we really need the government to protect us from everything they deem bad or unhealthy?
- ehnto 7mo agoAt some point we end up defending the freedom for corporations to exploit people though. I think addiction is one of those times. If a company has a product that relies on addiction mechanisms to succeed, that is a different situation, that is a corporate entity exploiting citizens for profit. Cigarettes are a great example of where we can draw lines in the sand. If you want to smoke them go ahead you have that freedom, but I think companies should be banned from putting nicotine in them. Simple and obvious lines in the sand. Vapes, whatever, smoke your bubblegum water. Vapes with nicotine? Clearly exploitive behaviour. Yes they can help you quit, but quit what? Nicotine addiction! If it weren't in cigarettes already you wouldn't need to quit it. Social media is harder to draw lines in the sand for, but I think algorithmic feeds may be one place to target regulation.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoBoth cigarettes and vapes are ways of consuming a drug. Are you just plainly against drugs? We know how blanket bans on drugs have gone historically and besides the obvious personal freedoms that are lost by mandating what people can and cannot put into their bodies (hello bodily autonomy??), trying to prevent people from consuming drugs does more harm than good (like prohibition, the war on drugs etc). This ruling was about liability, in that an entity created a product with risks without disclosing them. It's actually worse, they purposefully engineered the product to be harmful. Thus they are liable for that harm. This is subtly different from banning these products - arguably many products that are sold are harmful, the difference is that they either are not acutely harmful (junk food), or the acute harm is well known (alcohol, cigarettes). Some countries mandate disclosure at sale or on the packaging as well.
- rich_sasha 7mo agoEarly FB was bad enough when it was your actual friends posting the best (or made up) bits of their lives - and you were only scrolling when you had nothing better to do. Did you know kids, there was a time when the feed was ordered by time and you knew the people who posted stuff? It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it. But I see that as soon as there is money on the table, it's a race to the bottom, sooner or later.
- forsakenharmony 7mo agofediverse?
- LoganDark 7mo ago> It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it. Cohost existed, for, a couple years, before they shut down...
- operatingthetan 7mo ago>The verdict has forced those inside the companies to grapple with the fact that many outsiders do not view them as favourably as they have come to view themselves. I'm not sure this rings true to me. Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right? If anything they are just afraid of endless litigation while they are struggling to gain an AI foothold.
- deaux 7mo ago> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right? Do you have a source for that? I don't think it's true when looking at global Meta numbers across _all_ Meta social platforms (FB+Instagram+Threads) combined.
- hiq 7mo agoAlso WhatsApp which leans towards social features ("Updates"), in some countries. > Threads I had forgotten this one existed, so much so that I got surprised by my own forgetfulness. What's up with it, is it popular among certain demographics?
- deaux 7mo agoIn much - probably most - of the world Twitter never got any mainstream popularity, all of them fall into the potential demographic.
- bsder 7mo ago> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right? If that were true, they would be going somewhere and that somewhere would be visible. The last "new" thing that got any traction was TikTok and that is almost 10 years old at this point. For a while, the Fediverse stuff (specifically Bluesky) seemed to be getting some traction, but apparently the Fediverse wasn't ready for the influx and people have started leaching back. The social media sites have things pretty well carved up between them. If you want competition that doesn't suck as bad, you have to break them up.
- PearlRiver 7mo agoA lot of people make their job their identity instead of something to pay off the mortgage with. Which in turn creates a lot of denial about your actions.
- jibal 7mo ago“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair
- lifestyleguru 7mo agoIt's the other way round. It's easy to push the limits or even indulge in psychopathic denial, if this allows one to pay off a mortgage sooner and take another one. If job is your identity most of the times you simply throw away the years worked there and rarely earn a fortune.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo agoDunno how I feel about it. On the one hand, clearly something has to be done, because it all has been steadily going downhill for a while now. And heavens know, courts may be just one of the very few things big corps actually fear. Still, there is a part of me questions to what extent we are to blame. Yes. I know corps do what they can to keep us engaged. I read HN too. I didn't say it was a big part.
- ZunarJ5 7mo agoCrocodile tears.
- lifestyleguru 7mo agoFor years "addictive" had been a positive and desired adjective in description of projects, jobs, and services. So it appears... they really are... addictive.
- artyom 7mo ago> "We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online" Meta rep said on Wednesday. I mean, if that's where your confidence comes from...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- amazingamazing 7mo agoThis site is also guilty. Why can’t you hide your karma from the top and read all comments without the unreadable colors they give downvoted comments? Forcing you to play stupid games. Unsurprising since this site is from the same Silicon Valley. People will give excuses for this. Guess what, meta and Google have their own too.
- webdoodle 7mo agoNot in that order: first denial, because like nicotine industry, they KNEW IT WAS ADDICTIVE but got everyone hooked anyway. The Fear is only because it might (but probably won't) get regulated heavily. They are predators, and the only way to fix this is to give them hard, long jail time. Fines won't do shit.
- next_xibalba 7mo agoI am convinced that social media is addictive for some, and likely a negative influence for many. But this is just shoddy journalism: > "The verdict has forced those inside the companies to grapple with the fact that many outsiders do not view them as favourably as they have come to view themselves." They quote one unnamed insider for this characterization. I recall from my stats 101 class that n=1 is not a strong basis from which to make broad claims about a population of 10s of thousands.
- techblueberry 7mo agoMeta has made it abundantly clear through their words and actions they dgaf what happens to anyone as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their profits so I say throw the book(s) at them. Repeatedly. Indefinetly.
- taurath 7mo agoI hope they’re gone and all their money Feeds without options should be illegal. Not every interaction needs to be your self control vs 30 years of professional marketing psychology doing A/B tests. It’s not a fair fight. Pokemon cards are the same too.
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoI have no love for social media, but I also really don't like the idea of the government regulating how apps are designed, or trying to circumnavigate online privacy to "protect children" which where I see this whole thing going. On another note, personally I'm not sure I buy the "addictive" argument with social media, maybe its just me but I find social media pretty boring, but I think for a lot of younger people it is something that fills a need for meaning and connection to the world that has been diminished due to a loss of community in our society (which does predate social media).
- troad 7mo agoIt's wild to me how many people are willing to throw basic civil liberties overboard because they don't like the other guys. Today's media circus is about addictive social media. Before that it was video games and rock music and D&D clubs. Before that it the Satanic panic of the 80s, gay 'recruitment', Soviet spies. Much before that it was witches and heretics. And so on and so on, forever. If you have a choice, maybe don't be part of the pitchfork wielding mob? The people with the pitchforks always think they're warriors of justice. They generally aren't. They just tend to make everything worse. (Plus the economic motivations are so clear here - traditional media hate social media because social media ate the traditional media's cosy entrenched profits, so now social media are to blame for Russia, for Trump, for anxious teenagers... and must immediately be regulated out of existence)
- lern_too_spel 7mo agoGood. Zuckerberg fought common sense regulation, and now people are suing for what he did without those regulations. Let the chickens go home to roost.
- martythemaniak 7mo agoI propose a Neotemperance movement. The original Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century were not just against alcohol but all sorts of social ills, including gambling. The Neotemperance movement would be anti engineered addiction, anti gambling, anti misinformation, anti ads, and anti corruption.
- twoodfin 7mo agoMay it have similar success!
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoah the good ole nanny state, yes that will work out fine I'm sure.
- ktimespi 7mo agoThe fact that I couldn't turn off shorts recommendations on youtube is just so, so annoying. It's such a time sink and I'm glad that the tides are finally shifting against addictive algorithms like these.
- nojvek 7mo agoYeah not having a switch to turn off shirts is a great indicator that Google’s “do no evil” is a relic of the past. Google gives no fucks other than printing more billions every quarter.
- ktimespi 7mo agoIt's a major disservice to me as a paying user too.
- zparky 7mo agoif you're on android, advanced is a blessing to de-shorts your YouTube.
- thunderbong 7mo agoDid you mean revanced?
- nunez 7mo agoUninstall the app and use it in a browser that lets you disable them. It’s the only way.
- cyberclimb 7mo agoI use this extension on desktop and Firefox mobile to block shorts. They also support chrome (idk about chrome mobile). https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts?tab=readme-ov-file#installation https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts?tab=readme-ov... You can also look at NewPipe on Android if you want an alternative YouTube app rather than web mode. Needless to say it's a real shame you have to work this hard to hide shorts...
- czhu12 7mo agoWhat would be an actually good faith way of regulating this short of banning it for children (which I’d think is fine). How do you define what is too addictive? At any given time it seems like whatever is defined as the most addictive is just the one with most market share? For me personally I think most addictive is actually hacker news (god bless you all)
- rudhdb773b 7mo agoWhy regulate? Look at the failure that is the "war on drugs". The solution is education. The government should be educating society and especially parents on how to protect their children. Education worked to cut cigarette use, and is starting to lower alcohol consumption as well. It can work for social media without all the negative impacts on civil liberties that come with regulations.
- techblueberry 7mo ago“Education worked to cut cigarette use” I mean, they banned it from most public locations first.
- imiric 7mo ago> Education worked to cut cigarette use Ah, yes, it was education, and certainly not strong regulation of how cigarettes are produced, marketed, and sold. Educating the youth is why vaping and smoking is not cool anymore.
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoI really don't think there is a good faith way to regulate it without either violating free speech and/or removing online privacy/anonymity. I strongly believe it should not be regulated, though I would support better educational programs on the dangers of social media usage and other dark patterns (and somewhat related, I would remove most screens from (public) schools).
- imiric 7mo agoWhat "free speech" exactly? Do you think that such a thing actually exists on platforms controlled by giant corporations? This "free speech" is heavily regulated by opaque algorithms and very specific terms of service. It's "free" as long as it aligns with the company's values and business goals, and your opinions will only reach other people if the algorithm decides that promoting it would drive engagement. There is definitely a risk of governments using this as an excuse to encroach upon civil liberties, as they've done in the past, but this is not a black or white issue. The reality is nuanced and passing regulation requires careful discussion and balancing. I'm sure we can agree that regulating Big Tobacco and Big Pharma was a good thing, and not some civil rights issue, so why is Big Tech different? We can also work on educating people, as you suggest, but it can't be the only solution. Regulating greedy and predatory companies should be a part of it. It's amusing that you would rather support a ban on screens in schools, than regulating companies that make using screens harmful in the first place. It's very reminiscent of the blanket "TVs are bad" argument from past decades.
- jmyeet 7mo agoI believe there's a Chicxulub level meteor headed for social media and it's not addiction. It's liability. We, as a society, don't really care about addiction. That's reflected in our government. Gambling, nicotine, alcohol, drugs, etc. Remember with tobacco it was the harm not the addiction that was their undoing. Core to all of this is what's colloquially become known as The Algorithm. Google in particular has sucessfully propagandized this idea that The Algorithm is a neutral black box over which we have no influence (for search). But every feature and behavior of any kind of recommendation or ranking or news feed algorithm is the result of a human intentionally or negligently creating that behavior. So one thing most of us here should be aware of is to get more distribution for a post or a video or whatever is through engagement. That is likes, comments, shares, reposts, quotes and so on. All these companies measure those and optimize for engagement. That sounds neutral and possibly harmless but it's not and I think it's foreseeably not harmless and no doubt there's evidence along the way to demonstrate that harm. We've seen this with some very harmful ideas that get a lot of traction online. Conspiracy theories, antivaxxer nonsense, doxxing queer people, swatting, the manosphere and of course eating disorders. ED content has a long history on the Internet and you'll find pro-ana or "thinspiration" sites and forums going back to the 1990s. So I think social media sites are going to have three huge problems going forward: 1. That they knowingly had minors (and children under 13, which matters for COPPA) on their platforms and they profited from that by knowingly or negligently selling those audiences to advertisers; 2. They knew they had harmful content on their platforms but hid Section 230 in particular as simply being the host for third-party content. I believe that shield is going to fail; and 3. They knowingly or negligently pushed that content to children to increase overall engagement. One clue to all this is you see Mark Zuckerberg who wants to push age verification into the OS. Isn't that weird? The one company that doesn't have an OS thinks the OS should handle that or, more specifically, should be liable for age verification? That's so strange. In an era where we have LLMs (and the systems that came before) that can analyze posted content (including video) and derive features about that content you don't get to plead ignorance or even user preference. These companies will be held liable for the harm caused by content they distribute.
- im3w1l 7mo agoI think the issue people are not acknowledging is that social media and apps and phones are addictive because they are fun. People are addicted to having fun, and to outlaw the addiction is to literally make fun illegal. Let me take half a step backward from that provocative stance. Of course we don't need to outlaw all fun, but we perhaps we really do need to outlaw some fun, to prevent people from overindulgence. Maybe a sin tax could be the way to go.
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoor hear me out, we could just let people have the freedom to make their own choices and take self-responsibility for their choices in life.
- techblueberry 7mo agoWhy tho, are you really just a nihilist?
- jimmyjazz14 7mo agoHow is respecting peoples freedoms nihilistic?
- techblueberry 7mo agoBecause we’re entering this era where the only freedom we’re recognizing is the freedom to be miserable at some extreme end, “freedom” is just a euphemism for neglect.
- techblueberry 7mo agoTo elaborate, people often see freedom as an unqualified good, but I think in a sense the opposite of freedom isn’t slavery but purpose. Everyone talks about the sense of meaning that came from fighting world war 2 and that was a time when freedom in the world was extremely precarious. There was a draft. Purpose turns into slavery when you only have one purpose and people use violence to enforce it. Getting married, having kids, buying a house, having a job. These are all constraints on a persons freedom.
- fromMars 7mo agoIt's screens. We don't allow my son to use social media and he is still addicted to using an Ipad. We have to forcefully remove it. He just wants to play games on it constantly. Heck, I am constantly looking at hacker news on my phone.
- bradlys 7mo agoI don’t think it’s even screens. It’s something more broad. I don’t get how people can see third spaces and so forth dwindling even in the 80s and 90s before screens in everyone’s hands were a thing. People want community but at a distance and only when they want it at a specific time. Everyone talks about how great it is to have community/village for raising kids but then they deal with their family teaching their kids bad habits, others being slightly neglectful compared to them, and having to put up with giving back to others to make it more fairly compensatory. Shocker. Many people didn’t like that shit and decided it was better to do it all alone than deal with any inconveniences from others. You what your parents to help raise your kids? Nope. They often did bad things to you that you didn’t like. Also it means someone’s family has to move or live with the other. Another dealbreaker. We just live in expensive times and these things are harder to do in a more globally competitive economy. People have lower tolerance.
- thunderbong 7mo agoYes, it is. You just have to visit a dimly lit restaurant or bar with a nice big window facing the street. You'll see everyone mesmerised with what's happening outside during the day. The same place will might end up being a great conversation place after dusk!
- intended 7mo agoI have noticed that even on HN, it’s not quite popular to bring up the ills of social media. It might be the way I frame it, but one comment did stick in my mind. Social media is one of the few good paymasters left.
- edb_123 7mo agoI found it quite entertaining (as well as deeply disturbing) to picture Zuckerberg & the other social media kingpins as a modern subtype of druglords rather than "traditional" software billionaires. It's just that they deal in modulating and manipulating the dopaminergic system with code rather than chemicals. And what's worse, they give you the drug for free, and then try to sell you to the highest bidder while you're "under the influence". I mean, it can't be that hard to imagine them, with their never-before-seen fortunes, extensive real estate portfolios and their extravagant lifestyles, in the roles of modern day Pablo Escobars and the like. Addiction is extremely profitable.
- ChimpWithHat 7mo agoIsn’t a big part of the issue that social media is free and funded via ad revenue. So the business incentives push towards addictive engagement and increasing viewing time to see more ads. Not so different from traditional TV, but 1000x more potent since it’s a personalized algorithm. What if instead of banning these addictive services we require companies to charge for them and disallow advertising revenue. That changes the entire business model, and there is no longer a strong incentive to have users spend as much time on the platform as possible. In fact, the best customer would be one that subscribes but barely uses the platform. For me this all comes back to the perverse incentives that arrive when advertising is the primary source of revenue for the largest companies in the world. Social media allows advertising at scale never seen before and it’s no surprise that it’s been weaponized in ways that are actively harming people.
- nickvec 7mo agohttps://archive.ph/dixqB https://archive.ph/dixqB
- tempodox 7mo agoWhy would they fear anything? They’ve been getting away with criminal behavior for so many years now, I don’t even remember when it started. If they get fined now and then, it’s less than 1 percent of their quarterly profits, so that’s not even small change. This won’t influence their behavior in the slightest.
- stephen_cagle 7mo agoDoes anyone have a breakdown from the case itself about what particular features of these social media apps makes them threshold into the "addictive" classification? - Infinite Scrolling? - Play Next Video Automatically? - Shorts? - Matching to your peer group? - Variable Reward? - Social Reciprocity? - Notifications? - Gamification (Streaks)? Was the case won on the argument that it is the aggregate of these things (and many more I am sure)? The power imbalance between the user and the company? Was it some particular subset of them that they rest their argument on? I'm just genuinely curious how you can win a very challenging case like this without inadvertently lassoing so many other industries that your arguments seem ludicrous?