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Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

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Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#301

Post by quickthrower2 »

katamarimambo wrote: post #292
codegeek wrote: post #262

As someone who is very pro Free Speech and hates censorships in general, banning these toxic social media especially for Kids is a good idea and as a parent, I am all in for it. If you cannot smoke/drink till 21, you shouldn't be able to do Social media till then. It is that bad especially for children.

A 20 year old person is already old enough to use Social Media, smoke and drink. By 2 years at least. Y'all insane.

As someone who drunk at 18, I think it is too young. Alcohol is a drug just like coke, cannabis etc. By holding off until 21 you can reduce the amount of long term addiction.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#302

Post by mike50 »

barbazoo wrote: post #47
gmiller123456 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids have been having those problems well before social media came along, so it's quite a bold claim to say they know social media made them worse. But it's a fair bet to say not a dime from the lawsuit will go to a single victim. So I'd take a really skeptical look at both sides.

> Kids have been having those problems well before social media came along Suicides seem to have gone up and social media use might have something to do with it. https://news.byu.edu/intellect/10-year-byu-study-shows-eleva... > Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study—when they were about 13 years old—and then greatly increased their use over time were at a hig…

Hyperbolic BYU press release. Link to actual paper. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-020-01389-6

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#303

Post by yodsanklai »

throwaway237289 wrote: post #253
yodsanklai wrote: post #245

I'm impressed by the strong negative reactions on this thread. Maybe because this is a US-centric forum, or because I don't have kids, but I fail to see the big deal with Meta. Facebook is mostly groups with little engagements. Nowadays, people really fight on Twitter which has less moderation. Then Instagram, I thought kids were on Tik Tok? Well, I can see how some people might be negatively impacted by this sites b…

There's an amazing subtlety here, which is that Governments are slow to function and rarely regulate well. That they're targeting Meta instead of what kids actually use (TikTok) highlights this fact. So not only will they fail to achieve their goal, they're not even going after the right player. But hey the cultural movement of Americans these days are to hate on big tech, and Facebook in particular. So here we go.

> the cultural movement of Americans these days are to hate on big tech

if only we could have such giants in Europe...

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#304

Post by ergocoder »

deegles wrote: post #272

My gut feeling is that nothing will change meaningfully as long as employee promotions are dependent on increasing engagement (either directly or indirectly). I believe that no single person sits down and says "let's make kids get addicted to our product," but they do run A/B tests or new features and keep the better performing variant. The end result of many of these cycles is the same.

It is not even about employee promotion.

You can't ban a communication tool. That is just absurd.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#306

Post by mptest »

wolverine876 wrote: post #299

Several comments say we should ban social media for people under 18. Such a blunt, indiscrimate, careless solution may indicate the typical ages of HN members! What do some people under 18 think of the problem and solutions? I'm not sure how many are here, but maybe some HN members could ask their kids.

I'm mid 20's and it's obvious what to do. Universal child care, housing, healthcare, etc, and parents would have more time to parent their kids instead of slaving away to make someone else enough money to buy their fifth yacht or passing their childcare off to an ipad. We have worse than gilded age inequality, 9 people own more wealth than 3.6 BILLION combined. Maybe address that first??? I'd wager we'd find 99% of problems are downstream of poverty and inequality.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#307

Post by edmundsauto »

haltist wrote: post #72

I remember when Facebook was restricted to folks with college domain emails. I used it for a year and decided I wasn't interested in algorithmic online stalking of people I barely knew and cared about. I'm still surprised social media turned out to be such a big hit. I guess people wanted some way to keep track of social news and the usual outlets like blogs and RSS feeds were too "nerdy" for the average internet con…

Minor nit, but when Facebook was limited to college domain emails it didn’t have an algorithmic feed.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#308

Post by balls187 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #299

Several comments say we should ban social media for people under 18. Such a blunt, indiscrimate, careless solution may indicate the typical ages of HN members! What do some people under 18 think of the problem and solutions? I'm not sure how many are here, but maybe some HN members could ask their kids.

I didn’t bother asking my kids what’s their opinion regarding cigarettes.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#309

Post by PenguinCoder »

codegeek wrote: post #262

As someone who is very pro Free Speech and hates censorships in general, banning these toxic social media especially for Kids is a good idea and as a parent, I am all in for it. If you cannot smoke/drink till 21, you shouldn't be able to do Social media till then. It is that bad especially for children.

When you treat people like children, they will act like one. Putting a law in place to _try and_ stop kids from being an adult, will result in even more grown up children. Part of being an adult is dealing with stuff you don't like and handling such, reasonably maturely. Let the kids learn not to touch the hot stove.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#310

Post by autoexec »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #148
glimshe wrote: post #129

Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR prob…

The mistake we are making here is to draw the problem along the boundary of age. The problem is not exclusive to children! Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.

Presumably adults are supposed to be old enough to know better than to use Facebook.
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