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Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#131

Post by jeffbee »

hash872 wrote: post #29

At least even money that an appellate court throws this verdict out entirely. Reminder that the US is the only developed country that uses juries for civil trials- everywhere else, complex issues of business litigation are generally left to a panel of judges. It's not that hard to rile up a bunch of randomly impaneled jurors against Big Bad Corporation. The US is kind of infamous for its very large, very unpredictabl…

Yeah there are so many reasons this could be reversed on appeal. Whether the judge correctly held questions of section 230, and the First Amendment, is not obvious.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#132

Post by cwmoore »

timmg wrote: post #124
nkrisc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. I don't think it's fair to ask children to resist social media through sheer willpower when there are legions of highly educated adults on the other side trying to increase engagement. It should be no surprise that children can be manipulated by highly intelligent adults.

> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.

Or assign responsibility to…parents and legal guardians…who are not children.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#133

Post by timmg »

cwmoore wrote: post #132
timmg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.

Or assign responsibility to…parents and legal guardians…who are not children.

Doesn't this lawsuit (essentially) prove otherwise?

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#134

Post by fraywing »

iamnothere wrote: post #130
fraywing wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature > But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment. I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it'…

Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling…

Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.

Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.

Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#135

Post by fdgfikgfv »

cwmoore wrote: post #132
timmg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.

Or assign responsibility to…parents and legal guardians…who are not children.

It would work if parents had legal course to seek justice against corporations that stalk, groom, and manipulate their children against their wishes.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#136

Post by andai »

pixl97 wrote: post #54
andai wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;) (If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)

This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there"…

Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other?

I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#137

Post by andai »

0x3f wrote: post #110
andai wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP. We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.

Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about. > We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's…

Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans.

We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#138

Post by Dracophoenix »

jmyeet wrote: post #121
timdev2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that "Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms"?

Section 230(c)(i) [1]: > (c) (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material > (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. This is a protection for being a platform for third-party (including user-generated) content. Some m…

This isn't good reasoning. According to your analysis, any website, ISP, or hosting provider that uses a firewall or Cloudflare is by definition a publisher, since they algorithmically shape traffic to prohibit suspicious IP addresses from accessing content.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#139

Post by twoodfin »

ses1984 wrote: post #92
twoodfin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t gamble, but if I did, I am fairly certain it would release little to no dopamine for me, win or lose. I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.

And yet, some people find themselves compelled to continue gambling long after they’re drowning in debt. If you don’t want to call that addiction, fine, but you can’t deny that it happens.

Right: They’re gambling addicts. That’s a distinct fact from, “Gambling is a physiologically addictive behavior for typical humans.”

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#140

Post by jraby3 »

When I was a kid, tv commercials were heavily censored and the tv channel could and would be fined immediately if something inappropriate was shown.

How is it that these days social media can circumvent all these safeguards and then somehow blame the parents if a kid is watching something inappropriate on an app designed for kids (like YouTube kids)?

The issue is that politicians are beholden to social media companies because they can literally get them or their opponent elected. After reading Careless People, I was amazed at how leaders of so many countries wanted to meet Zuck because he wields so much power.

I really hope this ruling is the beginning of the end of the free rein they've had.

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