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.
Social 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.
It'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
Early 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.
It'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.
My 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.
> 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.
30 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.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
Remember when that type of behavior was rude? I had a conversation with a couple in 2011 and they had told me that they saw Steve Jobs and his wife at a restaurant and Steve was on his phone most of the time and how rude it seemed. I've thought about that periodically over the years as I've seen the addiction grow and become commonplace and especially as I've seen those same habits develop in myself.
I remember going on dates a few years later, 2014/15, and the phone usage during the dates seemed rude and slightly offended me. Now it's so common it's not even really noteworthy.
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.
Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients.
If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.
From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.
I'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.
It’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
Having lived through those panics, fought against them, and then raised the alarm on Lootboxes and FarmVille the day they came out - these are not the same things.
This isn’t a moral panic.
Mortal Kombat did not result in changed behavior in its users. As I recall, The best study on video games only showed that there was some change in behavior for a short time after playing a game, and then children reverted to their baseline.
On the other hand, social media has not survived that scrutiny, with multiple studies show a causal link between anorexia, depression, anxiety, addictive design and social media.
People defended cigarettes too back in the day, and it took years for people to stop smoking cigarettes in public.
It'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.
I 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.
What 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.
It's not the screen, it's the format. It's an engineered gambling addiction where the currency is time and instead of the house taking your money the arbitrage your time to an advertiser, often surreptitiously.
Worse than that, often times the content that fosters the most engagement borders on propaganda that directly damages the social fabric over time. A lot of the extremist content (left, right, and otherwise) fits this description.
Screens 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.
There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.
The parent comment set up a false choice and then had to adapt to the response calling their bluff.
The issue isn’t with reading or consuming content, as was set up in the challenge above.
The issue is with designing feeds and surfacing content in ways that take advantage of our brains.
As an analogy, loot boxes in video games, and slot machines come to mind. Both are designed to leverage behavioral psychology, and this design choice directly results in compulsive behavior amongst users.
I didn’t mention time? From Cambridge dictionary: ‘addiction: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.’ I am in support of regulating things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing
I don't impulsively drive to the store to purchase another bag immediately after finishing the one I have whereas (for example) many people exhibit such behavior when it comes to tobacco.
In the case of social media the feed is intentionally designed to be difficult to walk away from and it is endless (or close enough as makes no practical difference). Even if it weren't endless, refreshing an ever changing page is trivial in comparison to driving to the store and spending money.
An amusing question. Episodes are much longer and most shows only have one or a few seasons. I don't get the sense that streaming services optimize for difficulty to walk away and do something else any more or less than a good book does.
Maybe autoplay and immediately popping up a grid of recommendations should both be legally forbidden as tactics that blatantly prey on a well established psychological vulnerability. I'd likely support such legislation provided that it could be structured in such a way as to avoid scope creep and thus erosion of personal liberties.
In short I think Netflix is closer to a bag of Lays and modern social media closer to the cigarette industry of yore.
This is not particularly insightful if you stop and think about it. Try to unilaterally snatch a book that someone is in the middle of reading and you will probably be met with a hostile reaction. Grab the tool someone is using to do a task, similar. What you're describing is the natural reaction to messing with someone else's possessions. Without further context it's blatantly toxic behavior even if you happen to have the authority to force the matter.
You aren’t reading or using a hammer for 6 hours a day. It’s hard to find a tone ppl aren’t using their phone that would be appropriate to take it away if it’s only while not using it
Phones and computers are used for more than one thing; in that sense they aren't analogous to a single item such as a book or hammer but rather an entire closet filled with odds and ends. Keeping in contact with acquaintances, checking traffic and looking up other day to day information, reading a book during down time, these are three completely distinct activities that have all been nearly entirely subsumed by screens for me.
so… choices, as you see them in this issue, the lenses through which on the one hand you think is extreme and the other appropriate… are either screens-as-drugs or sports fishing?
Some middle ground might be there somewhere. But if forced to choose… the choices for interpreting behavioral engineering funded by $billions in research for over a decade + data harvesting on a scale unprecedented, for the purpose of manipulating users:
My attention span is greatly reduced for example. I have a much harder time reading physical books than I did as a kid. It should be the opposite as you age
But 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?
The 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.
So 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)
Maybe. 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.
This 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.
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
The 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.
> 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?
>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?
How about, "If it involves exploiting aspects of human psychology that have to be taught to be mitigated it's not allowed?". There. No more marketing. For anyone. As it should have been. My heart to the artists and creatives that'll have to find employment somehow els, because it's clear that we can't both allow for creative, artistic campaigns without big industry going and sinking a psych ward worth of researchers on making themselves indispensable.
Also, I don't find questions of fairness to come into play on the topic of "getting people addicted". If you set out to do that, that's not something we should condone. Also, if you've ever cooked, you damn well know the "oil, butter, and sugar" is not what keeps people coming back to those foods. It's that they're cheap and low cognitive load to generally make. So no, I won't even entertain the question you're asking by putting food manufacturers on the same level as bloody social media. Every time I've seen A/B or marketing tests/focus groups done by the food industry, they at least have a proper psych experimentation setup. Bloody Meta made a regular habit of A/B testing without even getting consent from the parties involved. As far as other stores with marketing and all that jazz? To be quite honest, if you bother to get a psychology degree, and you are weaponizing it against the public, I really think that deserves a life reconsideration. So refer to my first paragraph. You will find no sympathy from me for usage of psychological manipulation tactics against the unawares.
This 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
Ice 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.
I 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.
I 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.
No. It's been established that social media use can produce addiction-like behaviors, that it uses mechanisms similar to gambling and substance addiction, and that a subset of people experience significant impairment as a result of social media consumption. It's still debated if it should be classified as a form of Substance Use Disorder, which is what the term "clinically meaningful" refers to, but the debate is more a matter of classification and semantics, not if the issue exists at all. And not what people are referring to in the context of this case and discussion.
If you're interested in the topic further, you could consider reading 'Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria', which should shine some more light on what people are referring to as "addiction" in this circumstance :)
If you're interested in the neuroscience, consider reading "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review".
Believe it or not, you might find the answer to that question inside the paper I shared with you called "Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria".
I’m not asking about the criteria for establishing new disorders. I’m sure there are many.
I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Nobody’s ever written a paper about Candy Crush addiction?
Everyone seems very excited to throw Meta and others in the bucket with Big Tobacco, and I don’t see how in the world that makes sense without much stronger clinical evidence on the harms of social media to non-mentally ill people.
> I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Because of the scale of the observed harm.
There is plenty of documented evidence of the harms of social media to otherwise non-mentally ill people, particularly with vulnerable demographics like adolescents and teenagers. At this point you're just playing dumb because you most likely work for big tech and are running interference. They aren't gonna give you a raise for it man, cut it out.
There are laws enabling the judiciary to operate as it has to give plaintiffs a platform in the first place, in the absence of specific laws because legislative bodies are slow to adopt new laws for various excuses.
For example; not hard to pay off a handful of legislators to vote no. Then what? People just suck up living at the mercy of the rich?
Judiciary has leeway to allow such cases and outcomes to bubble up useful context for changes to law. Longstanding precedent and in some cases is codified in law itself.
The lack of a specific legal language banning social media actions is also irrelevant because of similarities to other situations that are enshrined in law. That human biology is susceptible to psychological manipulation is already well understood. Tiny little difference in legal context does not invalidate known truth of biology.
Society doesn't exist in your head alone and has existed for some time. Much of this is not truly new territory.
Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.
I watched my 78yo step mother become addicted to reels so older people are definitely not immune. But she was able to go cold turkey as she only communicated with her sister over instagram so it wasn’t a problem to just continue with WhatsApp. Young people real life networks are too enmeshed with instagram to have the same option.
Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!
Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)
Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.
Please, I beg you, stop and think about these things.
"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.
You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.
There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.
I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.
I find casinos unpleasant but plenty of people obviously don't. I also find games with a narrow FoV unpleasant; I was never able to enjoy DotA 2 because of this and League was only just barely tolerable. Similarly I detest modern web design and gravitate towards sites with an HN or spreadsheet style information dense layout.
I think that's all related, is at least partially a matter of what I'm accustomed to, but is largely just an inherent part of how I am.
Really? I watch a lot of long-form YouTube while doing the dishes, and occasionally poke at the Shorts. Some funny, mostly dumb and I move on.
Maybe a generational thing, but for most of the latter half of the 20th Century most folks had to “exert special effort to regulate their consumption” of network television. Should there have been lawsuits and regulation of couch potatoes?
If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.
Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.
You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.
Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.
The difference is that the media is 30 seconds not 2 hours so the feedback loop is shorter and the content pool is far far far deeper because it is user submitted so the content recommendation algorithms become so effective , and the experience so compelling, that it becomes addictive. And as a wise man once said “a difference in scale is a difference in kind”
I’m actually strongly sympathetic to this argument, but I’d love to see some actual clinical research that suggests algorithmic short form video has mental and physiological effects that (say) video games do not.
Reels 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)
Depends. 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".
Are you intentionally being obtuse? It means whether or not the product was intentionally designed to be addictive. What was the intent behind the design? Why were the decisions made? Was there a reasonable alternative that was otherwise functionally equivalent?
The limiting principle on liability is quite complicated. You'd have to go ask a lawyer. At least in the US (and I believe most of the western world) it has to do with manufacturer intent, manufacturer awareness, viable alternatives, and material harm among other things.
No, it is not begging the question. Can you point to where I presupposed my own conclusions? You are (I suspect disingenuously) pretending not to understand intent.
It doesn't matter if the outcome is the same here what matters is the intent behind the design when considered in the context of the intended usecase. That's in addition to lots of other factors (some of which I listed) plus any relevant legislation plus any relevant case law and that will all be examined in great detail by a court. At the end of the day what is legal and what is not is decided by that process. A large part of the point of employing corporate lawyers is to prevent a situation where your past behavior is examined from arising in the first place.
I'd suggest the essay "what color are your bits" if you're genuinely struggling to understand this concept.
You said it mattered if a product was “designed to be addictive”.
I’m asking what that means.
If your answer is, “Only the lawyers can tell us,” then that’s not particularly satisfying if we want to live in a world where how we choose to spend our time is not under the supervision of some elect.
The line between "addictive" and "fun" is tricky. That doesn't make it umimportant or nonexistant.
It's hard to explain black holes, especially in a hackernews text box, but that doesn't make them irrelevant.
At the end of the day it doesn't truly matter if there was intent before we regulate it. If I mix random chemicals/foods/etc and end up with an addictive drug like alcohol, we don't need to try to prove it was intentional before we start considering the harm it causes to society.
Reminds 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.
At 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.
But an adult is and should be allowed to develop a nicotine addiction. The reason why people do above all else is that nicotine is an intoxicant and (to most people) pretty pleasant. It's a rational choice.
It's addictive, but the price of quitting is a few weeks of cravings. It's not like alcohol (which is relatively uncontroversial) or opiates.
Don't let them sell to kids. Include scary images on the box. Whatever you do, the truth is that human beings like their drugs and this one isn't really that bad.
Both 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.
I 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).
> I also really don't like the idea of the government regulating how apps are designed
I agree with this whole heartedly, but the government works on mass-scale patterns. It's essentially their entire job to regulate such things. Wind the clock back 20 years and the regulation seems insane. With how prolific computers have become? How they've been shoehorned into everyone's lives, whether or not they have any business or interest in actually interacting with one? It's a logical necessity.
I don't like it and I don't think this is a real solution. We should instead be looking to wind things down. Less people using less computers in a smaller fraction of their day. That's it. Unfortunately it looks like instead we're just going to be losing all of our computing freedoms while doubling down on the bullshit because Grandma needs email or something.
It'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)
The big difference is that in many cases the people who support this are the same ones that are addicted. You’re telling addicts to stop their moral panic over their own addiction
Weve stopped worried what unaccountable social media ceos might be doing to manipulate the media environment with mark Z as an advisor to Trump? How is legacy media oppressive but social media algorithms freedom?
Social media is a regulated space, it’s not a free market of ideas, it’s a particular viewpoint shaped by like 5 people. How can you be so skeptical of everything else but be like “stop it guys, Zuck’s got our best interests at heart”
How would like regulating more transparency in social media algorithms violate your right to free speech?
What if we just made it so social media companies had to give you more control of the algorithm?
Duolingo's notifications are borderline emotional blackmail ("don't make the owl sad!"), and Duolingo is a vastly profitable company that expressly targets school-aged children. But because it's not social media, it's... fine?
At some point we limit your freedom of expression to do things like dump toxic waste up river. This ought to be no different. The poisoning of the american mind for profit.
Yes, such a coherent argument: "no one is trying to restrict your speech, and if they were it would be good actually."
There are people who just can't admit to themselves they actually hate free speech. Because they're people who've never needed it. They've never been abolitionists speaking against slavery, or civil rights leaders speaking against apartheid - whether in South Africa or the American South. They've never been gay people fighting for equality, or trans people fighting to survive. They've never been an unfavoured minority - ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic, what have you. They don't need free speech, so why should you? Everyone else already has all the rights that they could possibly want or need, so as far as they're concerned, all these people are needlessly disruptive to the public order. So they maintain a fiction of collectivism, in reality a majoritarian hegemony, while silencing anyone who'd speak out against it. They can't quite bring themselves to say they oppose free speech, but they act in practice to undermine it.
It is a contemptible stance.
Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online. And the majority is as ever ready to throw the most vulnerable under the bus, so that they, the majority, don't need to take a modicum of responsibility for their own idle doomscrolling. And if they need to whip up a moral panic to do so, fine. More efficient that way, helps override people's rationality.
> Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online..
The real problem is, the oppression of these people is already happening. Mark Zuckerberg is not your friend and he’s come out saying he wants to make it harder for LGBTQ+ youth to find each other and be safe online.
Idle doomscrolling is not the problem, monopolization and the lack of real choice is.
You really want young women looking for information on abortion to be connected to anti-abortion support groups? Young gay folks to be sent conversion therapy literature, that young lesbian in Russia to be turned into the police? This isn’t speculation, it’s happening now.
Your ideals are noble, but you’re trying to protect something we’ve already lost. The days when social media was owned by folks pretending to be in the left are long gone.
Also, wtf are you on about, none of the people you mentioned need infinite scroll and addictive algorithms to connect with eachother.
Aside from the fact that these social media companies have LITERALLY put their finger on the lever to prevent the kind of people you’re talking about from connecting with eachother! If you want to defend those people then what we need is better protocols and platforms, not giant trillion dollar companies with three people in control of speech.
There is zero excuse to defend addictive algorithms with “but won’t you think of the underprivileged”
Sure, kiddo. I'm sure sweeping regulations of social media won't have any consequences on people's ability to express themselves. I'm sure all these regulations will be well tailored and have absolutely no overreach. And I'm sure a pliant, non-E2E-encrypted, non-anonymous social media will be super safe for oppressed minorities in the hands of the Saudi, Russian, etc authorities. (Or authorities closer to home, if things go even more pear-shaped for minorities than they already are.)
> I’m not one of those people, I hate free speech.
Cool. Then we have nothing to talk about. I'm not trying to win you over in some fetishistic 'debate me bro' manner. Your stated ideology is deeply hostile to my existential needs, as part of a fragile minority that exists at the sufferance of the majority. If you're openly seeking to destroy free speech, then I don't require your agreement, I require your defeat. "Debate me bro" is a luxury reserved for privileged teenagers on Reddit with nothing at stake, including you, as is apparent from your blithe dismissal of civil rights that made it possible for me to exist in the modern world at all.
Social media is already in the hands of all those folks. Saudi Arabia was an investor in Twitter. Zuckerberg is literally an advisor to the president. All your worst fears are coming true! You’ve already lost your freedom of speech. Fight to get it back!
At some point I think we’re going to regulate these social media companies and it won’t be perfect, but similar to cigarettes we’ll figure it out and it will be largely fine. Have we all become reaganites internalizing his "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"?
We’re going to start needing a definition of freedom of speech that includes corporations, because we’re already in a world where they don’t need the states help to censor you. I’m not even confident the governments monopoly on violence is long for this world if Peter Thiel gets his way.
The traditional solution worked for traditional problems.
I suspect most people don’t remember WHY free speech itself is valued. It’s often treated in a talismanic sense.
At least in America, a good part of the value of Free speech comes because it is a fundamental building block to having a vibrant market place of ideas.
Since no one has a monopoly on truth, our best model is to have a fair competitive market place that allows good ideas to thrive, even if they are uncomfortable.
The traditional risk to the free exchange of ideas was government control; the suppression of trade.
However, in the era we live in, we have evolved to find ways to shape the market through market capture. Through overwhelming the average user, instead of controlling speech. Bannon called this “flooding the zone”.
The traditional solution ensured a working and vibrant marketplace for its era. I don’t know what tools we will develop for the modern era.
Do note, we depend on content moderation to keep forums like HN running. The fundamental power of content moderation is censorship. Without the exercise of these censorial powers, we would not be able to have this discussion.
Toxic waste is harmful to everyone all the time, social media is maybe harmful to some people some of the time, kinda like peanuts, should we ban peanuts? I'll further add that social media is beneficial to many people as well.
TLDR: This isn’t a moral panic, and this has been building up for a decade plus now.
Heck no. Year after year after year these issues have been brought up and ignored.
I worked in this damn domain, and have seen better people than me try their best to avoid exactly this outcome, for these exact same firms.
I can give credit to the people at these firms who try to do the right thing, but the firm itself needs to answer in terms of revenue and growth figures.
The fact is that your policy and T&S teams are cost centers, while the quarterly shareholder report is God. There is only one way these incentives line up.
It’s been YEARS of teams within these firms raising the issues of user harms and getting no where.
I remember having T&S folks cry on MY shoulder about how they couldn’t get engineering resources even while working at a FAANG company.
Others talked about how, out of sheer repetition, they developed a protocol for the times an engineering team would inevitably come in to “fix” T&S issues. They knew they would get sidelined, till eventually the PM/engineers/Savior would run into the same problems they had been dealing with forever, and then ask for help.
Public research also has issues - If you want to do actual research on tech, you can’t even get the data.
If you get the data, you also get the NDA, which means your results need to make tech look good, or the report becomes an internal report that will never see the light of day.
This is a completely false equivalence. No one’s trying to regulate an activity they’re trying to regulate the unhinged behavior of trillion dollar companies.
How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!!
The closest thing would be cigarettes. And while I think cigarettes should be legal normalized and plentiful, I’m aware enough not to attack the movement that marginalized them.
No one is talking about content here, and to emphasize the point, I think no one is really defending social media, for all the examples you gave it was an activity no one understood except the small group of people whom it gave meaning. Everyone understands social media and most people hate it.
And in fact, I might go so far as to say you’re directionally incorrect. Social media is the force that killed speech, that killed the things that made DND and punk music and transgressive video games possible. Social media is the victory of those people who wanted to normalize the abnrormal.
>> How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!!
Lol. Tell me you weren't around for the D&D panic without saying you weren't around for the D&D panic.
This was precisely the argument used. "These kids should be out, running around, climbing trees! They're missing their childhoods! Here's Becky, age 15, to tell us how much happier she is now that she's hanging out with her girlfriends at the park, instead of summoning demons in her parents' basement."
And everyone bought it in exactly the same way that they buy the social media teen panic now. There were developmental psychologists on TV to explain how harmful D&D was to the kids' sensitive developing brains, how it was a gateway drug to all sorts of destructive self-behaviours, how parents were just so gosh dang powerless to do anything about it (all their friends are doing it!), and how the state needed to step in NOW! Sound familiar?
Honestly, you've seen it once, you've seen all there is to see. The social media panic has all the characteristics of any other moral panic. Some unpopular thing is alleged to be hurting children, and if you support it, then you're probably some kind of child abuser. Because we're all so perfectly rational, we all know our suspicions are 'directionally correct', to borrow your beautifully Orwellian turn of phrase. Certainly nothing to do with the ceaseless drum of narratives directed against social media that we imbibe from every external conduit - films, TV, newspapers - and live and breathe and occupy as though it were reality. Hey did you see that Netflix show Adolescence, about the harms of social media? It's fiction, but it really <strike>creates</strike>captures the moment. It's just so directionally correct, you know?
Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop. No need to build up any defenses against that sort of thing. Grab those pitchforks.
In not sure who you’re arguing against, but you’re arguing against the opposite point I made, the satanic panic of the eighties is like a special interest of mine. Also lol @directionallly correct.
And I’m not asking anyone to ban social media, maybe just regulate some of the behaviors by companies who are creating products 60% of users say that wish were less addictive. The key distinction is insiders. If people playing DND overwhelmingly reported they thought it was harmful, I would say we should ban that too, but they don’t. With DND the only people worried about the harm were outsiders.
Maybe just the ever so slightly tiniest bit of friction to the experience, nothing that prevents those from loving the products to continue using them.
Als, I think I would liken my objection to social media less as a moral panic and more in Marx’s “opiate of the masses” framework. But I’m also maybe a bit contrarian here. I think medium-centered moral panics (as opposed to content-centered) were mostly correct. That is to say, going as far back tot he Greeks worrying that the written word would have a negative impact on memory, the fears around television reducing social ties were largely correct.
But here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: with all the previous moral panics you mentioned, the distinction was usually generation. Older generations didn’t understand the new thing and feared it and as the younger generations grew older it was more integrated into their culture.
But social media doesn’t have that pattern, the younger generations seem to hate it as much or more than the older generations. So what is going to change in twenty years to show social media is not that bad, if young people see the harms, maybe even more than older people.
Another argument, just because I’m having fun — ask all dnd players what policies or laws the government should put in place to prevent the harm caused by dND and I think consrervstively 99% of them say “what the fuck are you on about.
Ask a similar question to just the folks who say that social media is a net benefit to their lives, and I think you get a litany of responses.
It's ridiculous that you're getting downvoted, you're 100% right. Though it's not unexpected given the forum. Many people here are either directly employed by social media companies and Big Tech, or are inside that bubble. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The parallels between social media and cigarettes are undeniable. Nicotine and chemicals in tobacco are addictive on their own, yet tobacco companies made cigarettes as addictive as they possibly could. They also advertised to children, and deceived the public with false advertising and disinformation for decades. They were prosecuted for all of this, which put a stop to it in first-world countries, at least. There are still countries with lax regulation where the tobacco industry is engaging in the same tactics they used decades ago, and business is booming. Cigarettes didn't go away. People can still smoke if they want, but it's much more strictly regulated, as it should be.
Nobody was against regulating Big Tobacco, as it was obviously doing more harm than good. And yet whenever regulating social media and Big Tech is brought up, it is a civil liberties and government overreach issue. Give me a break.
Just for the record, I am neither directly employed by social media, nor big tech, nor am inside that bubble. And I never have been. My salary includes precisely zero dollars linked social media in any way. But hey, don't let the facts stop you from spinning a good yarn, built on many fine cliches.
Social media sucks. I used to use it, and I do not use it now. And yet regulating it, off the back of a moral panic, is going to be significantly worse than not regulating it. The laws will overreach. This is a sensitive area where the government greatly benefits from overreach, and there's not enough public pushback to prevent it, on account of the moral panic whipped up by traditional media, who also stand to greatly benefit from overreach.
I am completely consistent in my beliefs on this. I was against all the anti-terrorism legislation too, being absolutely confident it would overreach - and I was completely correct, which brings me no satisfaction at all. Terrorism is obviously far more dangerous than all this 'teenagers seeing images online that harm their self-esteem' nonsense.
It's the traditional media that have a direct pecuniary interest in defeating social media, and no one questions their motives. I'm just some guy, but apparently I'm the ExxonMobil Chairman of Cigarettes and Opioids, just because I dare disagree with the narrative being peddled.
It's much easier to pretend like I'm some paid shill than accept that you're taking a huge gamble with your civil liberties when you push for social media laws. If I could somehow segment reality so you get to live in your restricted world, and I get to live in my free one, I would. But unfortunately I'm trapped in this world with you, and your pitchfork mentality consistently affects me, so I have to take on the utterly thankless task of convincing the mob to take a goddamn second to think about the obvious consequences of their own actions.
And then they don't listen. And then ten years later they come back with their tails between their legs, acknowledging I was right, but by then it's far too late to do anything about it. Deeply unsatisfying cycle.
I think I would agree with you outside of the specific context we’re living in. I’m not advocating for a patriot act. I’m advocating for arresting or punishing the terrorists who are documenting their acts in e-mail!
I’m not saying you can’t organize an anarchist group, but when you start hoarding weapons of war the FBI should investigate.
I don’t quite understand the fear you have that maybe putting a limit or two on a company who’s market cap rivals small nations is terrorism, because that market cap may start rivaling big nations, and Mark Zuckerberg is already an advisor to the president.
So I’m taking a second to consider the “obvious” consequences of my actions, but we’re living through the consequences of inaction. And if we don’t start taking small steps now, the Orwellian future you fear is coming, and governments will start taking big steps later.
By saying “there’s nothing we can do” you’re forcing the very future you’re trying to prevent, which by the way is already in the works in the form of age verification laws and social media bans for under-18s.
So maybe consider there are some valid concerns folks have before the people with invalid concerns take over.
Notice that I said "many people". I have no way of knowing what your affiliation or agenda is, or even if you're human. That doesn't change the fact that many people here are indeed biased in favor of Big Tech, and at the same time would never admit it. You may simply be a fervent social media user, or have your own reasons for being wrong. :)
Look, do you think that I somehow don't care about my civil liberties? That I wish to live in a nanny state where the government gets to control every facet of my life? Obviously not. But at the same time, it would be foolish to look at the current state of the world without coming to the conclusion that social media has played a significant role in creating it.
FWIW, I'm not opposed to social media in principle. I think it creates spaces where cacophony dominates which ironically does the exact opposite of "connecting people", so I wouldn't be a part of it even if it weren't controlled by giant corporations. But if someone else feels differently, it's their own choice and I respect it. The real problem is the weaponization of these platforms to corrupt democratic processes, spread disinformation, and serve as a playground for companies to conduct mass psychological experiments, and do all kinds of devious shit we're not privy to, which should make it very clear that this technology is doing much more harm than good.
Which brings me back to the core of my argument, and what GP brought up: the undeniable parallels between social media and cigarettes. Do you think that regulating Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other industries, was government overreach? Would you rather live in a world where cigarettes are marketed towards children, are pumped full of addicting chemicals (beyond some "safe" limit, whatever that is), and where the Zuckerbergs, Sacklers, and Johnsons of the world get to do what they want? That seems objectively much more harmful to society than whatever erosion of your "liberties" you think is taking place. Governments don't need some big excuse to erode your liberties; they'll do that behind your back regardless. This "free" world you think you live in is an illusion.
Besides, which civil liberties are you particularly defending in regards to social media? Your rights to publish and consume content on platforms controlled by giant corporations? These are not some "public squares", as its CEOs would lead you to believe. Your "free speech" on them is heavily regulated by opaque algorithms and very specific terms of service. There are plenty of other channels you can use to communicate with people without being exploited and manipulated, while enjoying actual freedoms, so why is social media so sacred?
Regulation is a double-edged sword that needs to be carefully balanced. I share your own concerns about government overreach. But it's foolish to have the viewpoint that social media, and Big Tech in general, shouldn't be regulated. This is not "off the back of a moral panic"—it's based on hard evidence of the harm it actually causes. Do these companies actually have to commit genocide before you agree that something has to be done? Which has effectively already happened if you consider Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide.
Do you never wonder if we’ve gone too far though, out of fear of relatively accountable governments manipulating the flow of information, we’ve put like five capitalists in charge of the flow of all information. Sure, there is a danger in giving the government more power, and that danger is not theoretical. But we’re in a dangerous situation right now!
It feels like we’re free soeeching ourselves into the most constrained and controlled free speech environment in history.
If freedom of speech is supposed to do something like create an environment where people can present alternate ideas and speak out against the government, social media is raising the noise floor so much that’s basically impossible.
Aside from that that know one seems concerned that Zuckerberg is on like an advisory panel on AI reporting directly to Trump? The fox is in the hen house.
>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.
> 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.
Also 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?
I hate that they own it. The case for antitrust is less than in the case of Whatsapp (though with Instagram Zuckerberg had to hasily backpedal in an email, probably because his lawyer furiously told him not to say certain things about buying up the competition) but they tried merging all the backend systems for messaging once
Instagram doesn't make Zuckerberg "successful". He's a black hat that deserves jail
> 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.
That’s different. A friend at one of the SM platforms didn’t think they were the “bad guys”. Even now if you talk to people at Meta, they will point out the good they do.
I am sympathetic, because there is actual good that Meta does and teams that still try to fight the good fight.
But this is different from the way they are perceived in the broader public, which includes more than teens.
This is ignoring the strong America centricism that permeates decision making at an American firm. The emotions in the rest of the world are not even given the same degree of consideration.
The 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.
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...
Isn’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.
It'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.
Yes, 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!
I 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.
Dunno 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.
Does 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?
Why 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.
What 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)
I 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).
What "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.
Why 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.
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.
The same methods that are used for gambling are a good start.
I know lootboxes in video games are regulated in some countries. Not sure if they are banned in some places, but I do know that they have to show the odds in some places, and in others they have to be deterministic.
The crux of the issue is personalization and behavior psychology. If you move to a boring feed design, you end up addressing most of the current issue.
Another option is to allow for interoperability between social media platforms, which is a competition respecting way of giving people the ability to move to platforms that “work” for them better.
I’d hazard that Civil liberties are not really at risk here, only the bottom line of social media platforms. However, theres enough money to protect the bottom line even if it costs civil liberties.
This 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.
For years "addictive" had been a positive and desired adjective in description of projects, jobs, and services. So it appears... they really are... addictive.
A 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.
It'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.
I 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.
Meta 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.
I 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.
I 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.
To me social media was more fun before the addictive patterns started appearing. And HN is one of the most fun social media sites there is and it doesn't have those addictive patterns.
Because 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.
To 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.
People dont have the power to control their own fate, only physics does.
But we’re never truly free, there’s a society already built so it’s not really the choice between freedom and oppression, it’s always a specific set of freedoms and a specific set of oppressions, so if you close off all the doors people can use and leave only the traps; it’s not freedom to choose whatever trap you want.
But really, you look around and you see freedom? Really? Sorry for thinking bigger than that.
Maybe the opposite of what I said is true, that we’re so not free right now people are holding onto whatever freedoms they can not realizing the way they impact the bigger systems
Maybe what we need is not just specific interventions but antritrus law. Less control by any big organization, governmental or otherwise.
Good. Zuckerberg fought common sense regulation, and now people are suing for what he did without those regulations. Let the chickens go home to roost.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
Good 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.
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.
Social 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.
It'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
Related: TikTok has a "heating" feature that can make a video radically more popular: https://archive.is/8YYcH
Early 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.
fediverse?
> 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...
It'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.
Hope they also go after the betting companies.
> 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.
My 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.
> 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.
30 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.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
That changed into watching youtube now.
The thing I noticed early on is going to VERY nice resorts and seeing families at dinner all on their phones.
I'm talking around $800/night at a beautiful hotel or island resort, perfect scenery, and a couple both scrolling videos.
This is what I keep in my head when I find the urge (and it happens) to pull out my phone and doom scroll around family.
I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
Remember when that type of behavior was rude? I had a conversation with a couple in 2011 and they had told me that they saw Steve Jobs and his wife at a restaurant and Steve was on his phone most of the time and how rude it seemed. I've thought about that periodically over the years as I've seen the addiction grow and become commonplace and especially as I've seen those same habits develop in myself.
I remember going on dates a few years later, 2014/15, and the phone usage during the dates seemed rude and slightly offended me. Now it's so common it's not even really noteworthy.
I 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.
Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients. If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.
From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.
I'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.
Europeans are shocked by the portion sizes in America. But they feel normal in the US. Frogs often don't know they are being boiled.
Frogs 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.
It’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
Interesting argument, but I think statistics about video game addiction & mental problems etc was never really serious, and with social media it is.
Having lived through those panics, fought against them, and then raised the alarm on Lootboxes and FarmVille the day they came out - these are not the same things.
This isn’t a moral panic.
Mortal Kombat did not result in changed behavior in its users. As I recall, The best study on video games only showed that there was some change in behavior for a short time after playing a game, and then children reverted to their baseline.
On the other hand, social media has not survived that scrutiny, with multiple studies show a causal link between anorexia, depression, anxiety, addictive design and social media.
People defended cigarettes too back in the day, and it took years for people to stop smoking cigarettes in public.
Tobacco was not a moral panic.
It'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.
I 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.
What 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.
It's not the screen, it's the format. It's an engineered gambling addiction where the currency is time and instead of the house taking your money the arbitrage your time to an advertiser, often surreptitiously.
Worse than that, often times the content that fosters the most engagement borders on propaganda that directly damages the social fabric over time. A lot of the extremist content (left, right, and otherwise) fits this description.
Screens 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.
So 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?
More or less, yeah. There might be some nuance about the threshold for maladaptive behaviour, but if it’s all or nothing I’ll take all.
How would you get around the First Amendment difficulties?
There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.
Even commercial speech regulations need a stronger basis than, “People spend a lot of time listening to it.”
The parent comment set up a false choice and then had to adapt to the response calling their bluff.
The issue isn’t with reading or consuming content, as was set up in the challenge above.
The issue is with designing feeds and surfacing content in ways that take advantage of our brains.
As an analogy, loot boxes in video games, and slot machines come to mind. Both are designed to leverage behavioral psychology, and this design choice directly results in compulsive behavior amongst users.
I live in New Zealand, so I don't have to.
I didn’t mention time? From Cambridge dictionary: ‘addiction: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.’ I am in support of regulating things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing
Like potato chips?
If a specially designed endless bag of such were aggressively marketed and chemicals to induce appetite added to them then sure.
None of those attributes are necessary beyond those of an ordinary bag of Lays to meet the definition:
“things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing”
It's a matter of degree.
I don't impulsively drive to the store to purchase another bag immediately after finishing the one I have whereas (for example) many people exhibit such behavior when it comes to tobacco.
In the case of social media the feed is intentionally designed to be difficult to walk away from and it is endless (or close enough as makes no practical difference). Even if it weren't endless, refreshing an ever changing page is trivial in comparison to driving to the store and spending money.
How would you contrast social media with Netflix in this regard?
An amusing question. Episodes are much longer and most shows only have one or a few seasons. I don't get the sense that streaming services optimize for difficulty to walk away and do something else any more or less than a good book does.
Maybe autoplay and immediately popping up a grid of recommendations should both be legally forbidden as tactics that blatantly prey on a well established psychological vulnerability. I'd likely support such legislation provided that it could be structured in such a way as to avoid scope creep and thus erosion of personal liberties.
In short I think Netflix is closer to a bag of Lays and modern social media closer to the cigarette industry of yore.
Screens are drugs. They are uniquely and magically addictive.
Try to take away a kids tablet, a teen's phone, or an adult's phone. They will fight just like an addict.
This is not particularly insightful if you stop and think about it. Try to unilaterally snatch a book that someone is in the middle of reading and you will probably be met with a hostile reaction. Grab the tool someone is using to do a task, similar. What you're describing is the natural reaction to messing with someone else's possessions. Without further context it's blatantly toxic behavior even if you happen to have the authority to force the matter.
You aren’t reading or using a hammer for 6 hours a day. It’s hard to find a tone ppl aren’t using their phone that would be appropriate to take it away if it’s only while not using it
Phones and computers are used for more than one thing; in that sense they aren't analogous to a single item such as a book or hammer but rather an entire closet filled with odds and ends. Keeping in contact with acquaintances, checking traffic and looking up other day to day information, reading a book during down time, these are three completely distinct activities that have all been nearly entirely subsumed by screens for me.
Motherfucker you try to take my fork while I'm eating and you're going to get a stabbed hand. Are forks addicting?
so… choices, as you see them in this issue, the lenses through which on the one hand you think is extreme and the other appropriate… are either screens-as-drugs or sports fishing?
Some middle ground might be there somewhere. But if forced to choose… the choices for interpreting behavioral engineering funded by $billions in research for over a decade + data harvesting on a scale unprecedented, for the purpose of manipulating users:
Doesn’t sound a lot like fishing to me.
Maybe governments should stop killing people over drugs.
I keep seeing the phrase “the harm” as if we’re all supposed to know exactly what that means. What is it?
Depression, anxiety, suicide, wasted time, irritability.
My attention span is greatly reduced for example. I have a much harder time reading physical books than I did as a kid. It should be the opposite as you age
But 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?
The 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.
So 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)
Maybe. 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.
This 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.
This 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
And feeding toxic content to children while doing so.
> 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?
Show me one ice cream parlor that has license psychologists on the payroll for “persuasive design” or GTFO with your bad faith argument.
Any ice cream company that has ever hired a major ad agency.
Not even close and you know it.
You 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.
The 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.
> 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?
>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?
How about, "If it involves exploiting aspects of human psychology that have to be taught to be mitigated it's not allowed?". There. No more marketing. For anyone. As it should have been. My heart to the artists and creatives that'll have to find employment somehow els, because it's clear that we can't both allow for creative, artistic campaigns without big industry going and sinking a psych ward worth of researchers on making themselves indispensable.
Also, I don't find questions of fairness to come into play on the topic of "getting people addicted". If you set out to do that, that's not something we should condone. Also, if you've ever cooked, you damn well know the "oil, butter, and sugar" is not what keeps people coming back to those foods. It's that they're cheap and low cognitive load to generally make. So no, I won't even entertain the question you're asking by putting food manufacturers on the same level as bloody social media. Every time I've seen A/B or marketing tests/focus groups done by the food industry, they at least have a proper psych experimentation setup. Bloody Meta made a regular habit of A/B testing without even getting consent from the parties involved. As far as other stores with marketing and all that jazz? To be quite honest, if you bother to get a psychology degree, and you are weaponizing it against the public, I really think that deserves a life reconsideration. So refer to my first paragraph. You will find no sympathy from me for usage of psychological manipulation tactics against the unawares.
Yes, ice cream palors are famous for only using shades of gray and never adorning their products with things like sprinkles.
A 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.
This 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
The 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.
Ice 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.
I 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.
What 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.
I 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.
So what the heck are we talking about ITT?
“I’m so addicted to Firefly!”
That kind of thing?
No. It's been established that social media use can produce addiction-like behaviors, that it uses mechanisms similar to gambling and substance addiction, and that a subset of people experience significant impairment as a result of social media consumption. It's still debated if it should be classified as a form of Substance Use Disorder, which is what the term "clinically meaningful" refers to, but the debate is more a matter of classification and semantics, not if the issue exists at all. And not what people are referring to in the context of this case and discussion.
If you're interested in the topic further, you could consider reading 'Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria', which should shine some more light on what people are referring to as "addiction" in this circumstance :)
If you're interested in the neuroscience, consider reading "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review".
Ah. “Can produce addiction-like behaviors”!
Like, I dunno, really getting into running or yoga or fantasy football?
Where is the line, according to experts in addiction-like behavior?
Believe it or not, you might find the answer to that question inside the paper I shared with you called "Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285322...
I’m not asking about the criteria for establishing new disorders. I’m sure there are many.
I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Nobody’s ever written a paper about Candy Crush addiction?
Everyone seems very excited to throw Meta and others in the bucket with Big Tobacco, and I don’t see how in the world that makes sense without much stronger clinical evidence on the harms of social media to non-mentally ill people.
> I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Because of the scale of the observed harm.
There is plenty of documented evidence of the harms of social media to otherwise non-mentally ill people, particularly with vulnerable demographics like adolescents and teenagers. At this point you're just playing dumb because you most likely work for big tech and are running interference. They aren't gonna give you a raise for it man, cut it out.
> or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree
24-hour commercial cable news (in the US) is the original sin of addictive media.
I'm not seeing any signs of addiction even within an order of magnitude of social media.
Sure, 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.
Theres already laws that protect kids. Thats why they just lost in court.
Please provide a link.
http://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/99%20Regular/FinalVersions/SB013...
You'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.
Meta 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.
Lol @ "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?
No, there is no law banning anything these companies did. You know this; that's why you didn't link to the law in your comment.
There should be a law banning the addictive practices of these apps. Until there is, fining the companies that make these apps is unjust.
Not how the legal system works.
There are laws enabling the judiciary to operate as it has to give plaintiffs a platform in the first place, in the absence of specific laws because legislative bodies are slow to adopt new laws for various excuses.
For example; not hard to pay off a handful of legislators to vote no. Then what? People just suck up living at the mercy of the rich?
Judiciary has leeway to allow such cases and outcomes to bubble up useful context for changes to law. Longstanding precedent and in some cases is codified in law itself.
The lack of a specific legal language banning social media actions is also irrelevant because of similarities to other situations that are enshrined in law. That human biology is susceptible to psychological manipulation is already well understood. Tiny little difference in legal context does not invalidate known truth of biology.
Society doesn't exist in your head alone and has existed for some time. Much of this is not truly new territory.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
In what sense do you mean Instagram is “addictive” to a neurotypical adult?
I feel like this is a somewhat bad faith argument becuase its shifting blame onto the user.
Its addicting the same way gambling is addicting. Its ridiculous to say that people who get addicted to it are not neurotypical.
I don’t know a single person who after exposure to short form video has not had to exert special effort to regulate their consumption.
Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.
I watched my 78yo step mother become addicted to reels so older people are definitely not immune. But she was able to go cold turkey as she only communicated with her sister over instagram so it wasn’t a problem to just continue with WhatsApp. Young people real life networks are too enmeshed with instagram to have the same option.
Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!
Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)
Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.
Please, I beg you, stop and think about these things.
"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.
You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.
There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.
I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.
I find casinos unpleasant but plenty of people obviously don't. I also find games with a narrow FoV unpleasant; I was never able to enjoy DotA 2 because of this and League was only just barely tolerable. Similarly I detest modern web design and gravitate towards sites with an HN or spreadsheet style information dense layout.
I think that's all related, is at least partially a matter of what I'm accustomed to, but is largely just an inherent part of how I am.
Really? I watch a lot of long-form YouTube while doing the dishes, and occasionally poke at the Shorts. Some funny, mostly dumb and I move on.
Maybe a generational thing, but for most of the latter half of the 20th Century most folks had to “exert special effort to regulate their consumption” of network television. Should there have been lawsuits and regulation of couch potatoes?
If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.
Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.
Using behavioral psychology in commercial speech should be illegal?
Good luck with that one. Somebody probably used 18th Century behavioral psychology to try to sell George Washington a horse!
You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.
Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.
OK, sorry, so using behavioral psychology to encourage an audience to stay on the couch watching TV for prolonged periods should be illegal?
This is the Netflix business model, right now.
The difference is that the media is 30 seconds not 2 hours so the feedback loop is shorter and the content pool is far far far deeper because it is user submitted so the content recommendation algorithms become so effective , and the experience so compelling, that it becomes addictive. And as a wise man once said “a difference in scale is a difference in kind”
I’m actually strongly sympathetic to this argument, but I’d love to see some actual clinical research that suggests algorithmic short form video has mental and physiological effects that (say) video games do not.
Netflix makes the same profit whether you watch 30 minutes or 30 hours a month.
Tiktok gets paid for every extra second you spend there.
Netflix certainly doesn’t think about their subscriber audience that way.
Reels 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)
Some 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.
"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.
So any producer of X should be regulated or otherwise held liable for the injuries of unhealthy individuals who misuse X?
Depends. 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".
What do you mean by “be this way”?
There’s somebody out there who’s harmfully addicted to just about anything, from ultramarathons to World of Warcraft.
What’s the limiting principle on liability?
Are you intentionally being obtuse? It means whether or not the product was intentionally designed to be addictive. What was the intent behind the design? Why were the decisions made? Was there a reasonable alternative that was otherwise functionally equivalent?
The limiting principle on liability is quite complicated. You'd have to go ask a lawyer. At least in the US (and I believe most of the western world) it has to do with manufacturer intent, manufacturer awareness, viable alternatives, and material harm among other things.
This is begging the question.
Doritos are designed to taste good and encourage you to eat them to your satisfaction.
The latest Mario game is designed to be playable & fun for as long as you have time and energy to play it.
My Instagram feed is designed to engage me with interesting and relevant content for as long as I have time to scroll.
All three can be used in unhealthy ways, and would be less likely to be so used if they were designed less well to their goals.
Which is “designed to be addictive”?
No, it is not begging the question. Can you point to where I presupposed my own conclusions? You are (I suspect disingenuously) pretending not to understand intent.
It doesn't matter if the outcome is the same here what matters is the intent behind the design when considered in the context of the intended usecase. That's in addition to lots of other factors (some of which I listed) plus any relevant legislation plus any relevant case law and that will all be examined in great detail by a court. At the end of the day what is legal and what is not is decided by that process. A large part of the point of employing corporate lawyers is to prevent a situation where your past behavior is examined from arising in the first place.
I'd suggest the essay "what color are your bits" if you're genuinely struggling to understand this concept.
You said it mattered if a product was “designed to be addictive”.
I’m asking what that means.
If your answer is, “Only the lawyers can tell us,” then that’s not particularly satisfying if we want to live in a world where how we choose to spend our time is not under the supervision of some elect.
The line between "addictive" and "fun" is tricky. That doesn't make it umimportant or nonexistant.
It's hard to explain black holes, especially in a hackernews text box, but that doesn't make them irrelevant.
At the end of the day it doesn't truly matter if there was intent before we regulate it. If I mix random chemicals/foods/etc and end up with an addictive drug like alcohol, we don't need to try to prove it was intentional before we start considering the harm it causes to society.
Reminds 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.
its called freedom, do we really need the government to protect us from everything they deem bad or unhealthy?
At 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.
But an adult is and should be allowed to develop a nicotine addiction. The reason why people do above all else is that nicotine is an intoxicant and (to most people) pretty pleasant. It's a rational choice.
It's addictive, but the price of quitting is a few weeks of cravings. It's not like alcohol (which is relatively uncontroversial) or opiates.
Don't let them sell to kids. Include scary images on the box. Whatever you do, the truth is that human beings like their drugs and this one isn't really that bad.
Should an adult be allowed to develop a heroin addiction? Why or why not?
>But an adult is and should be allowed to develop a nicotine addiction.
Says who? Addiction is never rational, that's what makes it addiction. Ffs.
I won't use new Reddit because of its infinite scroll but old Reddit you have to press next which I find doesn't keep me as addicted
I wish all companies had to provide a non infinite scroll option for their products, YouTube, Facebook, Google, Tiktok
Both 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.
Yeah. I think we should let the free market decide if our children do heroin too. Whatever happens, at least it'll be economically efficient
I mean, I think they should at least be required to display its negative effects on your health prominently on the product.
I 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).
> I also really don't like the idea of the government regulating how apps are designed
I agree with this whole heartedly, but the government works on mass-scale patterns. It's essentially their entire job to regulate such things. Wind the clock back 20 years and the regulation seems insane. With how prolific computers have become? How they've been shoehorned into everyone's lives, whether or not they have any business or interest in actually interacting with one? It's a logical necessity.
I don't like it and I don't think this is a real solution. We should instead be looking to wind things down. Less people using less computers in a smaller fraction of their day. That's it. Unfortunately it looks like instead we're just going to be losing all of our computing freedoms while doubling down on the bullshit because Grandma needs email or something.
It'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)
The big difference is that in many cases the people who support this are the same ones that are addicted. You’re telling addicts to stop their moral panic over their own addiction
Weve stopped worried what unaccountable social media ceos might be doing to manipulate the media environment with mark Z as an advisor to Trump? How is legacy media oppressive but social media algorithms freedom?
Social media is a regulated space, it’s not a free market of ideas, it’s a particular viewpoint shaped by like 5 people. How can you be so skeptical of everything else but be like “stop it guys, Zuck’s got our best interests at heart”
How would like regulating more transparency in social media algorithms violate your right to free speech?
What if we just made it so social media companies had to give you more control of the algorithm?
It's very maga-coded moment, but tech not government: a transcendent rage demanding only things be broken.
Perhaps but then you get stuff like this https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabit...
They need to play fair or GTFO
You get stuff like... obnoxious notifications?
Duolingo's notifications are borderline emotional blackmail ("don't make the owl sad!"), and Duolingo is a vastly profitable company that expressly targets school-aged children. But because it's not social media, it's... fine?
What does playing fair even mean in this context?
It's not just that, it's also outright black hat behavior like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
At some point we limit your freedom of expression to do things like dump toxic waste up river. This ought to be no different. The poisoning of the american mind for profit.
The traditional solution to speech you don’t like is more speech you do like.
No one is trying to regulate speech. And actually, the traditional solution was a duel to the death.
What else could “at some point we limit your freedom of expression” possibly mean?
Yes, such a coherent argument: "no one is trying to restrict your speech, and if they were it would be good actually."
There are people who just can't admit to themselves they actually hate free speech. Because they're people who've never needed it. They've never been abolitionists speaking against slavery, or civil rights leaders speaking against apartheid - whether in South Africa or the American South. They've never been gay people fighting for equality, or trans people fighting to survive. They've never been an unfavoured minority - ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic, what have you. They don't need free speech, so why should you? Everyone else already has all the rights that they could possibly want or need, so as far as they're concerned, all these people are needlessly disruptive to the public order. So they maintain a fiction of collectivism, in reality a majoritarian hegemony, while silencing anyone who'd speak out against it. They can't quite bring themselves to say they oppose free speech, but they act in practice to undermine it.
It is a contemptible stance.
Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online. And the majority is as ever ready to throw the most vulnerable under the bus, so that they, the majority, don't need to take a modicum of responsibility for their own idle doomscrolling. And if they need to whip up a moral panic to do so, fine. More efficient that way, helps override people's rationality.
> Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online..
The real problem is, the oppression of these people is already happening. Mark Zuckerberg is not your friend and he’s come out saying he wants to make it harder for LGBTQ+ youth to find each other and be safe online.
Idle doomscrolling is not the problem, monopolization and the lack of real choice is.
You really want young women looking for information on abortion to be connected to anti-abortion support groups? Young gay folks to be sent conversion therapy literature, that young lesbian in Russia to be turned into the police? This isn’t speculation, it’s happening now.
Your ideals are noble, but you’re trying to protect something we’ve already lost. The days when social media was owned by folks pretending to be in the left are long gone.
I’m not one of those people, I hate free speech.
Also, wtf are you on about, none of the people you mentioned need infinite scroll and addictive algorithms to connect with eachother.
Aside from the fact that these social media companies have LITERALLY put their finger on the lever to prevent the kind of people you’re talking about from connecting with eachother! If you want to defend those people then what we need is better protocols and platforms, not giant trillion dollar companies with three people in control of speech.
There is zero excuse to defend addictive algorithms with “but won’t you think of the underprivileged”
Sure, kiddo. I'm sure sweeping regulations of social media won't have any consequences on people's ability to express themselves. I'm sure all these regulations will be well tailored and have absolutely no overreach. And I'm sure a pliant, non-E2E-encrypted, non-anonymous social media will be super safe for oppressed minorities in the hands of the Saudi, Russian, etc authorities. (Or authorities closer to home, if things go even more pear-shaped for minorities than they already are.)
> I’m not one of those people, I hate free speech.
Cool. Then we have nothing to talk about. I'm not trying to win you over in some fetishistic 'debate me bro' manner. Your stated ideology is deeply hostile to my existential needs, as part of a fragile minority that exists at the sufferance of the majority. If you're openly seeking to destroy free speech, then I don't require your agreement, I require your defeat. "Debate me bro" is a luxury reserved for privileged teenagers on Reddit with nothing at stake, including you, as is apparent from your blithe dismissal of civil rights that made it possible for me to exist in the modern world at all.
Social media is already in the hands of all those folks. Saudi Arabia was an investor in Twitter. Zuckerberg is literally an advisor to the president. All your worst fears are coming true! You’ve already lost your freedom of speech. Fight to get it back!
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/facebooks-discriminat...
At some point I think we’re going to regulate these social media companies and it won’t be perfect, but similar to cigarettes we’ll figure it out and it will be largely fine. Have we all become reaganites internalizing his "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"?
We’re going to start needing a definition of freedom of speech that includes corporations, because we’re already in a world where they don’t need the states help to censor you. I’m not even confident the governments monopoly on violence is long for this world if Peter Thiel gets his way.
The traditional solution worked for traditional problems.
I suspect most people don’t remember WHY free speech itself is valued. It’s often treated in a talismanic sense.
At least in America, a good part of the value of Free speech comes because it is a fundamental building block to having a vibrant market place of ideas.
Since no one has a monopoly on truth, our best model is to have a fair competitive market place that allows good ideas to thrive, even if they are uncomfortable.
The traditional risk to the free exchange of ideas was government control; the suppression of trade.
However, in the era we live in, we have evolved to find ways to shape the market through market capture. Through overwhelming the average user, instead of controlling speech. Bannon called this “flooding the zone”.
The traditional solution ensured a working and vibrant marketplace for its era. I don’t know what tools we will develop for the modern era.
Do note, we depend on content moderation to keep forums like HN running. The fundamental power of content moderation is censorship. Without the exercise of these censorial powers, we would not be able to have this discussion.
Toxic waste is harmful to everyone all the time, social media is maybe harmful to some people some of the time, kinda like peanuts, should we ban peanuts? I'll further add that social media is beneficial to many people as well.
And at some point we limit Japanese American freedom of movement for general public safety during a war with Japan. Still no different?
Bad take. Civil liberties matter.
TLDR: This isn’t a moral panic, and this has been building up for a decade plus now.
Heck no. Year after year after year these issues have been brought up and ignored.
I worked in this damn domain, and have seen better people than me try their best to avoid exactly this outcome, for these exact same firms.
I can give credit to the people at these firms who try to do the right thing, but the firm itself needs to answer in terms of revenue and growth figures.
The fact is that your policy and T&S teams are cost centers, while the quarterly shareholder report is God. There is only one way these incentives line up.
It’s been YEARS of teams within these firms raising the issues of user harms and getting no where.
I remember having T&S folks cry on MY shoulder about how they couldn’t get engineering resources even while working at a FAANG company.
Others talked about how, out of sheer repetition, they developed a protocol for the times an engineering team would inevitably come in to “fix” T&S issues. They knew they would get sidelined, till eventually the PM/engineers/Savior would run into the same problems they had been dealing with forever, and then ask for help.
Public research also has issues - If you want to do actual research on tech, you can’t even get the data.
If you get the data, you also get the NDA, which means your results need to make tech look good, or the report becomes an internal report that will never see the light of day.
This is a completely false equivalence. No one’s trying to regulate an activity they’re trying to regulate the unhinged behavior of trillion dollar companies.
How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!!
The closest thing would be cigarettes. And while I think cigarettes should be legal normalized and plentiful, I’m aware enough not to attack the movement that marginalized them.
No one is talking about content here, and to emphasize the point, I think no one is really defending social media, for all the examples you gave it was an activity no one understood except the small group of people whom it gave meaning. Everyone understands social media and most people hate it.
And in fact, I might go so far as to say you’re directionally incorrect. Social media is the force that killed speech, that killed the things that made DND and punk music and transgressive video games possible. Social media is the victory of those people who wanted to normalize the abnrormal.
>> How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!!
Lol. Tell me you weren't around for the D&D panic without saying you weren't around for the D&D panic.
This was precisely the argument used. "These kids should be out, running around, climbing trees! They're missing their childhoods! Here's Becky, age 15, to tell us how much happier she is now that she's hanging out with her girlfriends at the park, instead of summoning demons in her parents' basement."
And everyone bought it in exactly the same way that they buy the social media teen panic now. There were developmental psychologists on TV to explain how harmful D&D was to the kids' sensitive developing brains, how it was a gateway drug to all sorts of destructive self-behaviours, how parents were just so gosh dang powerless to do anything about it (all their friends are doing it!), and how the state needed to step in NOW! Sound familiar?
Honestly, you've seen it once, you've seen all there is to see. The social media panic has all the characteristics of any other moral panic. Some unpopular thing is alleged to be hurting children, and if you support it, then you're probably some kind of child abuser. Because we're all so perfectly rational, we all know our suspicions are 'directionally correct', to borrow your beautifully Orwellian turn of phrase. Certainly nothing to do with the ceaseless drum of narratives directed against social media that we imbibe from every external conduit - films, TV, newspapers - and live and breathe and occupy as though it were reality. Hey did you see that Netflix show Adolescence, about the harms of social media? It's fiction, but it really <strike>creates</strike>captures the moment. It's just so directionally correct, you know?
Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop. No need to build up any defenses against that sort of thing. Grab those pitchforks.
In not sure who you’re arguing against, but you’re arguing against the opposite point I made, the satanic panic of the eighties is like a special interest of mine. Also lol @directionallly correct.
And I’m not asking anyone to ban social media, maybe just regulate some of the behaviors by companies who are creating products 60% of users say that wish were less addictive. The key distinction is insiders. If people playing DND overwhelmingly reported they thought it was harmful, I would say we should ban that too, but they don’t. With DND the only people worried about the harm were outsiders.
https://www.stagwellglobal.com/what-the-data-say-60-of-gen-z...
Maybe just the ever so slightly tiniest bit of friction to the experience, nothing that prevents those from loving the products to continue using them.
Als, I think I would liken my objection to social media less as a moral panic and more in Marx’s “opiate of the masses” framework. But I’m also maybe a bit contrarian here. I think medium-centered moral panics (as opposed to content-centered) were mostly correct. That is to say, going as far back tot he Greeks worrying that the written word would have a negative impact on memory, the fears around television reducing social ties were largely correct.
But here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: with all the previous moral panics you mentioned, the distinction was usually generation. Older generations didn’t understand the new thing and feared it and as the younger generations grew older it was more integrated into their culture.
But social media doesn’t have that pattern, the younger generations seem to hate it as much or more than the older generations. So what is going to change in twenty years to show social media is not that bad, if young people see the harms, maybe even more than older people.
Another argument, just because I’m having fun — ask all dnd players what policies or laws the government should put in place to prevent the harm caused by dND and I think consrervstively 99% of them say “what the fuck are you on about.
Ask a similar question to just the folks who say that social media is a net benefit to their lives, and I think you get a litany of responses.
It's ridiculous that you're getting downvoted, you're 100% right. Though it's not unexpected given the forum. Many people here are either directly employed by social media companies and Big Tech, or are inside that bubble. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The parallels between social media and cigarettes are undeniable. Nicotine and chemicals in tobacco are addictive on their own, yet tobacco companies made cigarettes as addictive as they possibly could. They also advertised to children, and deceived the public with false advertising and disinformation for decades. They were prosecuted for all of this, which put a stop to it in first-world countries, at least. There are still countries with lax regulation where the tobacco industry is engaging in the same tactics they used decades ago, and business is booming. Cigarettes didn't go away. People can still smoke if they want, but it's much more strictly regulated, as it should be.
Nobody was against regulating Big Tobacco, as it was obviously doing more harm than good. And yet whenever regulating social media and Big Tech is brought up, it is a civil liberties and government overreach issue. Give me a break.
Just for the record, I am neither directly employed by social media, nor big tech, nor am inside that bubble. And I never have been. My salary includes precisely zero dollars linked social media in any way. But hey, don't let the facts stop you from spinning a good yarn, built on many fine cliches.
Social media sucks. I used to use it, and I do not use it now. And yet regulating it, off the back of a moral panic, is going to be significantly worse than not regulating it. The laws will overreach. This is a sensitive area where the government greatly benefits from overreach, and there's not enough public pushback to prevent it, on account of the moral panic whipped up by traditional media, who also stand to greatly benefit from overreach.
I am completely consistent in my beliefs on this. I was against all the anti-terrorism legislation too, being absolutely confident it would overreach - and I was completely correct, which brings me no satisfaction at all. Terrorism is obviously far more dangerous than all this 'teenagers seeing images online that harm their self-esteem' nonsense.
It's the traditional media that have a direct pecuniary interest in defeating social media, and no one questions their motives. I'm just some guy, but apparently I'm the ExxonMobil Chairman of Cigarettes and Opioids, just because I dare disagree with the narrative being peddled.
It's much easier to pretend like I'm some paid shill than accept that you're taking a huge gamble with your civil liberties when you push for social media laws. If I could somehow segment reality so you get to live in your restricted world, and I get to live in my free one, I would. But unfortunately I'm trapped in this world with you, and your pitchfork mentality consistently affects me, so I have to take on the utterly thankless task of convincing the mob to take a goddamn second to think about the obvious consequences of their own actions.
And then they don't listen. And then ten years later they come back with their tails between their legs, acknowledging I was right, but by then it's far too late to do anything about it. Deeply unsatisfying cycle.
I think I would agree with you outside of the specific context we’re living in. I’m not advocating for a patriot act. I’m advocating for arresting or punishing the terrorists who are documenting their acts in e-mail!
I’m not saying you can’t organize an anarchist group, but when you start hoarding weapons of war the FBI should investigate.
I don’t quite understand the fear you have that maybe putting a limit or two on a company who’s market cap rivals small nations is terrorism, because that market cap may start rivaling big nations, and Mark Zuckerberg is already an advisor to the president.
So I’m taking a second to consider the “obvious” consequences of my actions, but we’re living through the consequences of inaction. And if we don’t start taking small steps now, the Orwellian future you fear is coming, and governments will start taking big steps later.
By saying “there’s nothing we can do” you’re forcing the very future you’re trying to prevent, which by the way is already in the works in the form of age verification laws and social media bans for under-18s.
So maybe consider there are some valid concerns folks have before the people with invalid concerns take over.
Notice that I said "many people". I have no way of knowing what your affiliation or agenda is, or even if you're human. That doesn't change the fact that many people here are indeed biased in favor of Big Tech, and at the same time would never admit it. You may simply be a fervent social media user, or have your own reasons for being wrong. :)
Look, do you think that I somehow don't care about my civil liberties? That I wish to live in a nanny state where the government gets to control every facet of my life? Obviously not. But at the same time, it would be foolish to look at the current state of the world without coming to the conclusion that social media has played a significant role in creating it.
FWIW, I'm not opposed to social media in principle. I think it creates spaces where cacophony dominates which ironically does the exact opposite of "connecting people", so I wouldn't be a part of it even if it weren't controlled by giant corporations. But if someone else feels differently, it's their own choice and I respect it. The real problem is the weaponization of these platforms to corrupt democratic processes, spread disinformation, and serve as a playground for companies to conduct mass psychological experiments, and do all kinds of devious shit we're not privy to, which should make it very clear that this technology is doing much more harm than good.
Which brings me back to the core of my argument, and what GP brought up: the undeniable parallels between social media and cigarettes. Do you think that regulating Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other industries, was government overreach? Would you rather live in a world where cigarettes are marketed towards children, are pumped full of addicting chemicals (beyond some "safe" limit, whatever that is), and where the Zuckerbergs, Sacklers, and Johnsons of the world get to do what they want? That seems objectively much more harmful to society than whatever erosion of your "liberties" you think is taking place. Governments don't need some big excuse to erode your liberties; they'll do that behind your back regardless. This "free" world you think you live in is an illusion.
Besides, which civil liberties are you particularly defending in regards to social media? Your rights to publish and consume content on platforms controlled by giant corporations? These are not some "public squares", as its CEOs would lead you to believe. Your "free speech" on them is heavily regulated by opaque algorithms and very specific terms of service. There are plenty of other channels you can use to communicate with people without being exploited and manipulated, while enjoying actual freedoms, so why is social media so sacred?
Regulation is a double-edged sword that needs to be carefully balanced. I share your own concerns about government overreach. But it's foolish to have the viewpoint that social media, and Big Tech in general, shouldn't be regulated. This is not "off the back of a moral panic"—it's based on hard evidence of the harm it actually causes. Do these companies actually have to commit genocide before you agree that something has to be done? Which has effectively already happened if you consider Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide.
Do you never wonder if we’ve gone too far though, out of fear of relatively accountable governments manipulating the flow of information, we’ve put like five capitalists in charge of the flow of all information. Sure, there is a danger in giving the government more power, and that danger is not theoretical. But we’re in a dangerous situation right now!
It feels like we’re free soeeching ourselves into the most constrained and controlled free speech environment in history.
If freedom of speech is supposed to do something like create an environment where people can present alternate ideas and speak out against the government, social media is raising the noise floor so much that’s basically impossible.
Aside from that that know one seems concerned that Zuckerberg is on like an advisory panel on AI reporting directly to Trump? The fox is in the hen house.
>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.
> 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.
Also 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?
> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right?
Facebook is dwindling, but Instagram is still thriving.
I hate that they own it. The case for antitrust is less than in the case of Whatsapp (though with Instagram Zuckerberg had to hasily backpedal in an email, probably because his lawyer furiously told him not to say certain things about buying up the competition) but they tried merging all the backend systems for messaging once
Instagram doesn't make Zuckerberg "successful". He's a black hat that deserves jail
> 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.
That’s different. A friend at one of the SM platforms didn’t think they were the “bad guys”. Even now if you talk to people at Meta, they will point out the good they do.
I am sympathetic, because there is actual good that Meta does and teams that still try to fight the good fight.
But this is different from the way they are perceived in the broader public, which includes more than teens.
This is ignoring the strong America centricism that permeates decision making at an American firm. The emotions in the rest of the world are not even given the same degree of consideration.
The 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.
I 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...
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...
Uninstall the app and use it in a browser that lets you disable them. It’s the only way.
if you're on android, advanced is a blessing to de-shorts your YouTube.
Did you mean revanced?
Yeah 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.
It's a major disservice to me as a paying user too.
Isn’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.
It'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.
Yes, 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!
I 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.
Dunno 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.
Does 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?
Why 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.
What 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)
I 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).
What "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.
Why 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.
> 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.
“Education worked to cut cigarette use”
I mean, they banned it from most public locations first.
The same methods that are used for gambling are a good start.
I know lootboxes in video games are regulated in some countries. Not sure if they are banned in some places, but I do know that they have to show the odds in some places, and in others they have to be deterministic.
The crux of the issue is personalization and behavior psychology. If you move to a boring feed design, you end up addressing most of the current issue.
Another option is to allow for interoperability between social media platforms, which is a competition respecting way of giving people the ability to move to platforms that “work” for them better.
I’d hazard that Civil liberties are not really at risk here, only the bottom line of social media platforms. However, theres enough money to protect the bottom line even if it costs civil liberties.
This 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.
For years "addictive" had been a positive and desired adjective in description of projects, jobs, and services. So it appears... they really are... addictive.
https://archive.ph/dixqB
A 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.
It'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.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair
I 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.
Crocodile tears.
Meta 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.
I 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.
I 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.
To me social media was more fun before the addictive patterns started appearing. And HN is one of the most fun social media sites there is and it doesn't have those addictive patterns.
or 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.
Why tho, are you really just a nihilist?
How is respecting peoples freedoms nihilistic?
Because 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.
To 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.
now that, my friend is truly a nihilistic world view, do you actually believe people can not be trusted to control their own fate?
People dont have the power to control their own fate, only physics does. But we’re never truly free, there’s a society already built so it’s not really the choice between freedom and oppression, it’s always a specific set of freedoms and a specific set of oppressions, so if you close off all the doors people can use and leave only the traps; it’s not freedom to choose whatever trap you want.
But really, you look around and you see freedom? Really? Sorry for thinking bigger than that.
Maybe the opposite of what I said is true, that we’re so not free right now people are holding onto whatever freedoms they can not realizing the way they impact the bigger systems
Maybe what we need is not just specific interventions but antritrus law. Less control by any big organization, governmental or otherwise.
> "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...
Good. Zuckerberg fought common sense regulation, and now people are suing for what he did without those regulations. Let the chickens go home to roost.
I 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.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I 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.
I 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.
May it have similar success!
ah the good ole nanny state, yes that will work out fine I'm sure.
Not 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.
Good 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.
I 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.