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California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

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Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#171

Post by Underphil »

monsieurgaufre wrote: post #18
dymk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just close the tab

You're basically saying "put the drink down" to an alcoholic or "put the cigarette out" to a smoker. This issue really is more complicated than you make it to be.

You'll be amazed at how little people understand the true nature of addiction. Even ex-smokers who manage to quit so quickly forget how hard it was.

This topic seems to be set into areas of black and white, just like every other political position. It seems like so few people appreciate the grey areas anymore.

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#172

Post by Underphil »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #149

California parents could soon sue somebody else instead of admitting they're bad parents.

Personally, I don't care what the majority position is regarding whether this is a capitalist issue or a parenting one, but any losses the predatory social media outlets endure is fine with me.

They do enough bad in the world that they can cry me a river.

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#173

Post by tintor »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #27
tintor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you do it (serious question)? I live in US, and like China's approach on this specific issue. 1) Disallow smartphone until certain age. Which age? 2) Allow smartphone, but with parental controls. Which ones? Many of them are hackable. 3) Allow smartphone, but with time of day/week restrictions that you enforce by taking away the phone?

1) We decided for highschool for the first phone. Some parents give smart watches so the kids are contactable but don't have a big screen. 2) I have the Google controls. That said, its as you say kids can circumvent controls so the best thing you can do is have this conversation. We've spoken a buch of times with the kids about how other kids will look at gore/porn out of interest/shock value but they should choose n…

Smartwatch seems like a good idea.

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#174

Post by prawn »

jmyeet wrote: post #32

What I've come to realize in recent years is there are an awful lot of people who have children who don't want to be parents. It's like they don't even like children but it seems like they're running down a Life checklist of things you should do. Or maybe they like the idea of having adult children? I really don't know. But I know so many people who don't actually like spending time with their children. I get some pe…

Having children is generally a timebound thing. As can be a career, often within the same time period as raising children. It's not like people can retire and think "OK, time to have kids!" This conjunction inevitably creates tension and exhaustion.

Being an engaged parent is great fun, but it's intensive. Trying to be an engaged parent while juggling a heavy workload is especially difficult; people find solace at the office because almost anything is easier. In an era where work follows you everywhere - I work past midnight most nights when the kids are sleeping and for parts of most weekends - the tension is hard to escape.

I don't think most people don't want or resent their kids, just that it's another thing pulling you in more directions.

Do you have kids of your own?

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#175

Post by Calvin02 »

tsol wrote: post #134
Calvin02 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why just limit it social media? Why not also include video games, streaming services, movies, etc.?

You can. You just have to make a strong enough argument to prove video games cause violence for a judge to let the case proceed. There's a reason it doesn't matter and it's not because video games are beyond banning.

Not for causing violence but for addiction. That’s a pretty easy argument and easy to prove causality (more game time = worse school/social life).

Why limit this logic to just social media sites and not other things that kids can be addicted to?

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#177

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #166
mc32 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is why the "metaverse" needs oversight as well. It will be a new frontier ripe for gamification, explication and general behavioral control.

No, every business optimizes yield. Smart businesses optimize UX for conversion. FREE with no revenue is loss. What's next? Suing vegas for the lights? You don't want to gamble? Don't go to Vegas. They already have "How much time have I spent in here?" features. You may not optimize yield because the children are compulsive addictive and it's the internet's fault. What's next? Suing the bar for allowing you to spend…

How about the movies? Are they allowed to optimize for engagement by screen testing, or no?

It's not Art it's Ari: You want to sell an art film? Take it to an art film festival.

How are they supposed to know that you don't want to be in the store anymore?

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#178

Post by Gigachad »

remarkEon wrote: post #155
Barrin92 wrote: post #146

I think the angle of these laws as well as the parenting response here in the thread are both wildly off because they both take a completely individualistic approach to something that's a systemic issue. The litigation culture of having individual people sue for damage doesn't go to the root cause and is a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. Delegating something that is effectively an environmental issue to the respons…

I agree with everything you’re saying up until this point: > What's necessary is clear rules that align the behavior of companies with social ends. If they can't square making money with keeping public discourse healthy or not making teens mentally ill they need to be culled, it's that simple. I don’t think it’s that simple, or simple in the way you may imagine. It’s impossible to come up with rules that even a plura…

I think what is needed is some kind of reactive and iterative restrictions. As well as analytics. Just like how companies measure addiction as a stat to optimise, this data should become public and used as a way to measure the effectiveness of new restrictions.

An idea I had is to set some kind of guideline like “users should on average spend no more than 1 hour on the platform per day” and then if the average user starts going over that, the company gets penalised until they bring the number lower.

This way you let the companies use whatever measure they find works best to keep addiction under control.

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#179

Post by hoseja »

mc32 wrote: post #86
czhu12 wrote: post #72

Creating regulations like this may end up acting as a regulatory moat for existing social network companies. This probably makes the overall social media pie smaller overall but guarantees incumbents slice of the pie. We've seen this happen in other highly regulated areas such as healthcare, telecommunications, etc. I suspect the way things are trending, in 10 years, very few entrepreneurs would be willing to start a…

On the other hand, we want to prevent new companies forming on the premise they can make money from gamifying their product so much it becomes addictive. Now, addictiveness has to have some definition to be useful. It can't be some odd random user who suffers from some kind of condition that prevents them from self-regulating their particular addiction whereas for example other people don't get addicted. There have t…

It's possible for an adult to enjoy these strongly addictive products responsibly, probably up until they figure out a way to audiovisually create heroin in your brain.

Re: California parents could soon sue for social media addiction

#180

Post by yardstick »

judge2020 wrote: post #150
yardstick wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They send notifications to your phone whenever someone messages you. Those unread icons are addictive, at least for me I always have to actively think to not open them immediately. That’s just the natural outcome of blurring chat rooms with social media.

That still applies for non-social media. My iOS IRC client connected to my znc bouncer also shows notifications. Same for iMessage which is more profile-like, since you can send memoji and stickers and play games with your friends (eg. GamePigeon), which is why the bill tries to exclude 'chat' apps and email apps.

How much different is IRC/Discourse vs Twitter? Hashtags are effectively channels. Twitter just has more subscribers and more individuals in each channel.
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