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Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children
- josefritzishere 4mo agoThis is an area where we really could use case law to protect kids from the Zuckerberg's of the world. It's important for the future. We're not going to "self-regulate" our way out of this.
- whynotmaybe 4mo agoIs there a place where self-regulation ever works?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zach_miller 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Dues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Dues I think this is a fun historical example. Ships passing through Denmark needed to pay a tax of 1-2% of the value of their cargo. They self-assessed that value. The twist that makes it interesting was that the King could choose to purchase any cargo immediately at the reported value. If a ship underreported, they might save on tax, but they risked taking a hefty loss. I have no idea how effective this was, but it's compelling. I wonder whether great self-regulation might need clever design like that example.
- soco 4mo agoNitpicking, I have the feeling that's self-declaration, not self-regulation.
- Bratmon 4mo agoThat's literally the opposite of self-regulation.
- nixon_why69 4mo agoNot quite the opposite, it still outsourced the administrative burden. They avoided the hassle of boarding every ship and inspecting the cargo with a random threat. One could even call it "properly incentivized self-regulation".
- Bratmon 4mo agoI'm genuinely curious how you imagine this system working without a government bureaucracy keeping track of the values of all cargos and regularly inspecting ships to verify the accuracy of their manifests. What stops ships from reporting something like "Wheat - 25 guilders per ton" when they're actually carrying diamonds? It doesn't even solve the "It's hard for the bureaucracy to know how much stuff is worth" problem- The government still needs to know enough to decide whether or not to call BS on "Caribbean Grey Ambergris- 300 guilders per pound" This system does have the advantage that it allows the government to make small fines without the legal burden of establishing that the merchant was lying, but that's in no way the same as self-regulation.
- nixon_why69 4mo agoThe story is from the 15-1600s. I imagine it working like things generally worked in that time period which is with quite a lot less bureaucracy than today. The cleverness of the idea is it leverages fear to prevent ships from declaring "wheat" for their ship full of diamonds. You can make some sporadic, random inspections, just enough to keep the fear up, instead of having to inspect every single ship.
- Bratmon 4mo agoThe idea of "Wait, we can just make sporadic random customs inspections" is way older than this law. I suspect it was invented by the first ever customs inspector. (At a minimum, Plutarch at one point described it happening at a checkpoint between Roman provinces)
- cyanydeez 4mo agosounds like Bernie Sander's modern day "lets just buy 50% of AI companies"
- whynotmaybe 4mo agoWe're in the "exceptio probat regulam" zone with this example.
- newobj 4mo agoInteresting variation on the "I cut you choose" game mechanic!
- alistairSH 4mo agoAmateur motorsports has a similar concept - often called a "claim rule" or similar - in an attempt to control costs. Basically, for $x amount, a competitor can buy the winning car (or its engine, or similar). Where $x is the amount the group decides should be a reasonable amount to spend on building a car. A racer is free to spend more, but if they win too much, somebody will write a check and buy the car. In theory. In reality, plenty of people have the money to spend $x^2 and risk the loss.
- plagiarist 4mo agoI love solutions like that. Like if you are splitting food, one person cuts and the other chooses.
- Bratmon 4mo agoThe best I've seen is ESRB ratings on video games.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoVery few. But it's the core of our current economic system... which explains a lot of the problems.
- _doctor_love 4mo agoThe dive industry, when I got my PADI one of the instructors told me diving is mainly self-regulated.
- okuntilnow 4mo agoBut when governments do regulate (UK, AUS etc all) - people cry foul.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoPeople cry foul about every other thing too. It's best to ignore them.
- datsci_est_2015 4mo agoUnfortunately we can’t ignore them when they’re our “representatives” in the government.
- toofy 4mo agoi agree with the sibling comment here. someone in a comment section somewhere is crying foul about everything.
- morkalork 4mo agoBecause the implementation is a shit show?
- consumer451 4mo agoThe entire age verification push in AUS was started by an advertising consulting company to distract from proposed online gambling regulation. Protecting children is a noble goal that I personally agree with, but it's also often used to sane-wash further erosion of privacy. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, age verification turns out to be the complete loss of Internet anonymity due to its implementation techniques. There are proposed alternative implementations, very conveniently for some, this is not part of the discussion. This is exactly the time when nerds like us should speak up. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
- okuntilnow 4mo ago
- hnisfrauds 4mo ago[dead]
- snickerbockers 4mo agoThis actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research. There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo ago> MKULTRA > There's no hard evidence There are thousands of manchildren living in moms' basements, with corkboards festooned with scraps of photographs that are connected by colored yarn and pushpins, and they would all vehemently argue to the contrary!
- cyanydeez 4mo agoMKULTRA was about using _drugs_ to alter state. It has literally zero other than pop culture memes and conspiracy theory in relation to what facebook is doing. The facts are basically: Facebook's own researchers and independent researchers presented real harms caused by Facebook's algorithms, and they fired them, ignored them and took the datasets away and continued doing as they want. You don't need to go to any conspiracy anything; that just makes the claims sound crazy aby unnecesary ssociation.
- hparadiz 4mo agoSeriously losing confidence in the American judicial system with rulings like this. Facebook is already blocking children below age 13 and now with social media bans in place in many states the cut off is now 16. So frankly rulings like this just seem like the government seeing dollar signs and asking for hand outs. And all because people apparently can't accept any personal responsibility. Disclaimer: I do not have a FB account.
- wry_discontent 4mo agoThis seems totally reasonable. It is designed to be addictive, and they definitely target folks under 18. The article specifically mentions teens.
- hparadiz 4mo agoYou still haven't convinced me that is inherently bad that is warrants some sort of monetary damages. All entertainment is addictive. That's the whole point. This is just people seeing dollar signs asking for handouts. Nothing of an real value to society. Why is it okay for FB to be sued but not say Pokemon? I think Pokemon is way more dangerous, addictive, and is basically gambling with the card packs. Have some personal responsibility for once.
- GuinansEyebrows 4mo ago> This is just people seeing dollar signs asking for handouts. Nothing of an real value to society. this is exactly facebook's business model ???
- gchamonlive 4mo ago> All entertainment is addictive But not all entertainment is made equal, a simple example is single player games and microtransactions based games. Similarly, social media as we know it abuses reward mechanism specifically to maximise engagement and screen time with complete disregard of the person's well being and proclivity for compulsive behaviour. > Have some personal responsibility for once. I am of this same opinion, people need to assume some level of responsibility for them to get better, but the fact is that addiction forces people to make choices they regret later. It robs the person from their individuality.
- everdrive 4mo agoLarge groups of people just don't know how to solve these sorts of problems. A government will never say "facebook should either not exist or should radically modify its product so that it is no longer successful" At best, they will push for identity verification or age verification. These are not the only two possible courses, but these will be the choices put in front of us. Get used to reading books and going on walks. The internet is almost dead.
- Zigurd 4mo agoThe government regulates plenty of complex products and markets. Software isn't that special.
- datsci_est_2015 4mo agoThe trick is to cut away at the user-hostile foundations of the product. In theory, a product like Facebook or Instagram would have no need to be regulated, but the sale of user data, the engineered addictiveness (looking at you “Data Scientists”), etc. are all worthy of being regulated.
- aspenmartin 4mo agoby your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol. But also I think people forget: this is not cut and dried. This is not simple. This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things. "I enjoy the product and use it a lot" and "I am addicted" is blurry and market pressure is not going to recognize that limit because it does not care about human suffering unless that suffering meaningfully impacts the bottom line. If these companies hit regulations that effectively cap their advertising revenue per user (i.e. the "addictiveness"), they are dead. That may be totally fine, and I'm sure majority of people would rejoice hearing this. But remember: advertising dollars are earned, especially at tech company scale, by the effectiveness of the targeting to get get more $ / DAU since DAU cannot grow beyond the Earth's population and that is the scale that these companies have already achieved. If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness. You cap the ability for small companies to connect quickly with prospective customers without being locked out because they have to spend too much to find them. Yes you also cap scammers and other nefarious actors too, but thats arguably a different issue. The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important. My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
- alex1138 4mo agoAddiction has a lot of definitions one can split hairs over but I note the following The feeds are and have been for years highly random (at least one anecdote of two people who were 'married' - relationship status - on FB yet none saw the others' posts) If you don't go on FB they really don't like it and they spam you to death Can Zuck meaningfully claim they're not in the business of addiction, whatever else? No. His life philosophy is "dumb fucks" Edit: Oh, and People You May know. Now everyone can friend you and you have 2000 friends... none of whose posts you'll ever see. And the psychological baggage. Is the cute girl I like looking at my profile and that's why they're on there, or is it shamelessly pulled from geolocation data?
- intended 4mo agoThese are the types of cases that shed light on the desire for age verification.
- mullingitover 4mo agoThe obvious answer to this mess is probably a simple engagement tax. Companies like Facebook and Tiktok are incentivized to behaviorally modify their users in a way that's harmful to society: they make more money the longer everyone in society has their face glued to a phone. They'd be thrilled and printing money as society collapsed into every person staring into a slab of glass 20 plus hours per day. Tax that time directly so it's no longer profitable to glue everyone to their phone.
- sgnelson 4mo agoI was going to ask "at what point do people who work for Google and Meta ask themselves "Are we the baddies?"" But who am I kidding, as long as you're all making the big bucks for sitting at a computer, you'll continue to see this as harmless behavior that people are just upset about for no particular reason. As someone who grew up as OG (original geek), it's now amazing to look around and see that technology seems to be having an ever more negative impact on my everyday life.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoSometimes there are HN comment complaining about articles reporting on legal proceedings that fail to include URLs pointing to the documents referenced. No complaints in this thread so far Here is the order denying Meta's motion to dismiss https://ia803204.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.472927/gov.uscourts.cand.472927.1.0.pdf https://ia803204.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
- Bratmon 4mo ago[dead]