5 ms·
We 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
by mmaunder 7mo ago
We 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 6mo 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 6mo 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...