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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?

#81

Post by pmarreck »

nancyminusone wrote: post #40
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.

So basically, if he hadn't added the comma, he'd still be at college.

So he got kicked out because of an extra comma, which he added to make it even more edgy, at the cost of reducing plausible deniability to nearly zero.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#82

Post by rollcat »

palmotea wrote: post #55
rollcat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Ehhh, that's just a poorly thought out slogan whose "truth" comes from endless repetition. Societal problems can have technical origins or technical enablers. In which case a technical solution might work to make things better. So no, there's no technical solution to "people being mean to each other," but there is a technical solution to, say, "people be…

> Societal problems can have [...] technical enablers.

That was my point.

> [...] there is a technical solution to, say, "people being meaner to each other because they can cloak themselves with anonymization technology."

I've never used (or even heard of) YikYak before, but what solution are you suggesting exactly? De-anonymisation? How would you achieve that? Suppose you have a magical^W technological de-anonymising wand, how would that not cut both ways?

So YikYak enabled geofencing, to alleviate the problem they've caused in the first place? But let's suppose they didn't do that.

How could I, as an average parent trying to protect my child, employ such a solution on my own? Could my tech-savvy neighbor help me somehow? Is there a single person outside of YikYak who can build a solution that any parent could use?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#83

Post by LeifCarrotson »

sanarothe wrote: post #63
ViktorRay wrote: post #58

Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890 Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing. Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespr…

I take the opposite viewpoint as the criticisers -- they're too real, too foreseeable, that I would almost ask the Black Mirror writers not to give "them" any more ideas.

It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't Create the Torment Nexus":

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...

Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580

The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment. Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who can press "Play".

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#84

Post by nancyminusone »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #57
nancyminusone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand. The “joke” would be if there was no comma. Putting a comma seems like they wanted to cause panic, and feign ignorance later.

Yes, that's what he tried to argue (it was a joke bro) in the lawsuit that followed, to try to get back in. He lost.

Personally, I think he just flubbed it. At the time, memes like "I'm gonna cut you up some vegetables" were popular. Can't expect a dumbass edgelord to have good grammar.

Either way, it was a stupid thing to do and he paid for it.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#85

Post by pmarreck »

soperj wrote: post #47
jmathai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's only good for the devices using your internet though no? not if they have data.

why would you give a kid data? (as in cell data, presumably) I guess, to be able to helicopter them from anywhere...

Apple devices would still have parental controls in that case, though, I think?

Cellphone companies should really step up, here.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#86

Post by kgwxd »

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…

Geo fencing requires constantly sharing location data.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#87

Post by kgwxd »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #68
kennywinker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Don’t we geofence sale of alcohol and tobacco around schools?

You want every (any?) app knowing your exact location at all times? That's not how we "geofence" the sale of physical goods.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#88

Post by abletonlive »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #79
abletonlive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10% of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this article? This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some people in space. So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically pessimistic?

Yes. A large fraction of Snapchat's users are significantly harmed. First hand, I see it all the time in students. There's an extreme unhealthy obsession with social media that leads to serious inferiority complexes and depression. All of this wrapped in algorithms that compel people to participate in various ways, from streaks to points, etc. Quantitatively, everything from anxiety to depression to suicide has more…

> Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves.

You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the state of society and technology. It’s not the other way around. What you’re observing is not profound, it’s literally how the writers approach their process for the show.

In fact, you’re doing this weird thing where you make it seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all the observations about tech and society, when it was clearly the other way around.

The criticism from the thread you’re referencing is that their approach is too on the nose and the villains are cartoonish. There’s no subtlety or even anything interesting anymore in the latest seasons. A critique on software subscriptions? We’ve been doing that since it was invented.

Those are fair criticisms.

What’s missing from black mirror, this article, and your perspective is how much social media has benefited everybody. How many jobs has it created? How many brand new careers and small businesses exist only because of social media? It’s an entire economy at this point. The good and bad effects of democratization of information dissemination.

There’s hardly an interesting analysis or critique of the actual current state of tech & society because you’re out here looking for the bad and ignoring the good. Much like black mirror is doing. Its main goal is to be as shocking as possible. That’s why in the thronglets episode, which I did enjoy, there was so much pointless gore. Yes, the point was that the throng had to see what humans are capable of, but there’s no reason to show all the gore associated with drilling through your head or dismembering a dead body. All of that is bottom of the barrel shock value stuff, which is ultimately what black mirror has devolved into.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#89

Post by alwa »

pmarreck wrote: post #81
nancyminusone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So basically, if he hadn't added the comma, he'd still be at college. So he got kicked out because of an extra comma, which he added to make it even more edgy, at the cost of reducing plausible deniability to nearly zero.

I’m not sure which college was involved here, but if I were the person adjudicating this, I imagine the outcome would not have hinged on the comma.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#90

Post by aylmao »

itishappy wrote: post #44
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…

> 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. Actually, I remember the opposite. I had problems with screen time so my parents put a password on the computer. It wasn't 100% effective, of course, but it was closer to 90% than 0%.

> 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.

There might be bias here if one remembers one's own teenage years, because I'm sure many teenagers _think_ their parents don't have influence over them. If you ask the parents though I'm sure many would agree aren't fully in control, but do notice they have a lot of influence still.

Personally, the older I grow, the more I realize how much influence in general my parents actually had over me.

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