US could ban 'addictive' autoplay videos and infinite scrolling online

Post by jjulius » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

Kaveren wrote: post #16

corodra wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search "social media mental health study". Theres a flood of universities that have pretty good evidence of social media causing a lot of mental health issues. Namely towards teens and young adults who grew up with it. Yes, it does seem silly, but the rise of anxiety and depression in society is linked to social media. Theres a good reason why people do the social media fasts and cleanses. A lot don't go back.

That's not because of infinite scrolling and autoplay.

Post by jjulius » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

tooop wrote: post #37

orbifold wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to a person in bed, scrolling through Facebook for hours on end. If the content stopped at some point they would do something else hopefully. Compared to TV the pacing is such that people get hooked like on slot machines.

I highly doubt that showing something like "There are X new great posts from blah blah blah, check them out" instead of using infinite scroll will resolve the problem. At the end of the day one could simply load a million posts (probably needs some code/data optimizations but we are talking here about billion dollar companies) and now it is a finite scroll (EDIT: seems that the bill addresses this case).

Post by _kxbd » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #26

The Republican Party in the US is famously anti-regulation of large corporations, and "pro-business," yet this is coming from the Republican side. Is there any sort of rationale provided for this seemingly massive ideological shift? Regulation of industry is usually off the table when this party is in control, at least when it comes to pollution or other consumer harms by business.

Post by wcoenen » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

duckqlz wrote: post #21

kragen wrote: post #2

I hope that if they ban addictive autoplay, they apply the ruling first to broadcast TV.

How exactly would you accomplish this? It’s not as though you chose the content that plays you simply choose a station on broadcast TV.

Post by vageli » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

Upvoter33 wrote: post #6

kragen wrote: post #2

I hope that if they ban addictive autoplay, they apply the ruling first to broadcast TV.

"addictive" being the key word, I think - which implies machine intelligence picking the next show, not network executives.