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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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".
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 the amount 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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)
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 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. Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop.
No, I'm sure that's never happened before, is not happening now, and won't recur in the future. No need to build up any defenses against it. Grab those pitchforks.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Motherfucker you try to take my fork while I'm eating and you're going to get a stabbed hand. Are forks addicting?
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.”
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.
Maybe governments should stop killing people over drugs.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
Yes, ice cream palors are famous for only using shades of gray and never adorning their products with things like sprinkles.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 the amount 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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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).
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)
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 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. Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop.
No, I'm sure that's never happened before, is not happening now, and won't recur in the future. No need to build up any defenses against it. Grab those pitchforks.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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)
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”
I mean, they banned it from most public locations first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair
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.
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.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Crocodile tears.
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.
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.
> "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 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 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!
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.