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Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

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Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#31

Post by jmathai »

zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

We block a number of online properties including Snapchat and YouTube using NextDNS.

We have different profiles for different devices to allow, for example, YouTube on the television but not on kids tablets or phones.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#32

Post by Nevermark »

The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago.

Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up.

Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as fentanyl.

And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue, actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating consequences isn’t going to work.

Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be illegal.

We could still have social media in healthier forms. They wouldn’t be “monetizing” viewers, they would be serving customers.

Facebooks army of servers isn’t required to run a shared scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook’s algorithms and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent possible.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#33

Post by WaitWaitWha »

I do want to note a tangential topic on social media harming children and young adults.

In my personal experience, kids and young adults particularly those who grew up immersed in social media (born after ~1995–2000), seem to struggle with recognizing appropriate, undistorted social cues and understanding the real-world consequences of their actions.

To Snapchat harming kids, I think it is more than just evil people doing "five key clusters of harms".

Even adults often expect the same instant reactions and flexible social dynamics found online, which blinds them to the more permanent, harsher outcomes that exist outside of digital spaces.

Anecdotally, the utter shock that shows on some people's face when they realize this is sad, and very disconcerting. (At an extreme think "pranksters", that get shot or punched in the face, and they are confused why that happened, when "everyone loves it online".)

How to fix this? the suggested solutions will not solve this problem, as it does not fit the "clusters of harms".

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#35

Post by spacechild1 »

basisword wrote: post #18
morkalork wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was harming kids on an industrial scale back when it was new, before Instagram et al cannabalized their audience

Was it? In Facebook’s early days you actually followed your friends and only saw their content. There wasn’t even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped showing the feed chronologically. It wasn’t perfect but it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.

Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and pretty similar to MySpace.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#36

Post by kennywinker »

rollcat wrote: post #26
zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.

Geofencing around schools is the kind of thing you might see if government attempted to regulate this

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#37

Post by Swenrekcah »

rollcat wrote: post #26
zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.

By this logic technological “progress” can not cause societal problems?

Which of course it can so why can’t a part of the solution be technological?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#38

Post by stickfigure »

cbruns wrote: post #34

Some readers here presumably work at Snap. How do you feel about this and your work? Do you sleep soundly at night?

I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough.

I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things.

This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monitoring for kids than adults, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the idea that technology platforms should be policing everyone's messages.

So I sleep just fine knowing that some kids (and adults) are going to have bad experiences. I send my kid to the playground knowing he could be hurt. I take him skiing. He just got his first motorcycle. We should not strive for a risk-free world, and I think efforts to make it risk-free are toxic.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#39

Post by ceejayoz »

glitchc wrote: post #24
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I never failed to recognize it. I just failed to be able to do anything about it. You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends. This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless. So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down…

We can always take the phone away. As a parent of a teenager, sometimes I have to make hard choices. This is one of them. Kids don't need cellphones. We want them to have one often because of our own insecurities.

> We can always take the phone away.

Kids are… resourceful.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...

Last week, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy looked at the smart fridge in her kitchen and decided to try and talk to it: "I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my electronics again." Sure enough, it worked. The message Dorothy said out loud to her fridge was tweeted out by her Twitter account.

(And before that, she used her DS, her Wii, and a cousin's old iPod. There's always a friend's house, too.)

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#40

Post by nancyminusone »

zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

At my college, someone got kicked out for yikyacking "gonna shoot all black people a smile tomorrow" and everyone quickly realized exactly how anonymous it really was after the guy was found a few hours later.

Thing is, there was a comma between "people" and "a smile" which made his poorly thought out joke read a lot differently. Dumb way to throw away your education.

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