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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

#181

Post by dsauerbrun »

pow_ext wrote: post #71

Apps like instagram and YouTube should be required at least to give an option to disable reels and shorts

one of the benefits of being on android and being able to sideload apps. Look up "revanced youtube" and you'll be able to turn off shorts.

ublock origin for blocking them on desktop. If you're on an iphone... uninstall youtube?

my quality of life has increased substantially... although sometimes the app bugs out and shorts still make it on my home page. I spend like 10 minutes scrolling through shorts and get a weird shock "how the fuck did I end up here?", restart the app and boom shorts gone again.

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

#182

Post by randycupertino »

Barbing wrote: post #109
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.

>[There are] legions of highly educated adults [at Meta] trying to increase [child] engagement Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life? Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?

I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger.

Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never prioritized actual lab research or clinical advancements.

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

#183

Post by thin_carapace »

mrintegrity wrote: post #65
joecool1029 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine. Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.

How does that work when nicotine products that are every bit as addictive as tobacco exist, maybe you're just not aware of them? Sitting here with non tobacco snus (Swedish nicotine pouch) under my top lip, something I have been utterly unable to quit. I believe "nicotine free" tobacco would be completely non addictive.

tobacco contains MAO inhibiting compounds, which potentiate nicotine and increase addiction potential. that doesnt mean nicotine on its own isnt insanely addictive, i have no idea what the guy youre responding to is talking about. however, MAOIs were withdrawn as antidepressants for a good reason - they have a terrible withdrawal all on their own.

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

#184

Post by lokar »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #180
lokar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case was brought under product liability law. If I sell you gizmo, and I know, or should know, that using the gizmo could seriously harm you, and I don't tell you or do anything about it, I am liable for damages you incur.

I’m not sure the plaintiff’s mental harm was caused by Meta and YouTube. You can be just as depressed without social media and online videos. And even if they were, other cases that are kind of similar to this have not found the corporation responsible. The parents of Sandy Hook didn’t get any money out of Remington, and their product is much more directly linked to harming people than an app. McDonald’s was not held…

I was just pointing out that the basic framework of the case is not some novel new idea, and a jury just decided to stick it to a big company out of the blue. There is a long history of this sort of case, and a jury did hear a lot of evidence from witnesses and instructions on the law from a judge.

Some of your examples are not very compelling.

In the case of Remington, there was another party that (presumably) the jury found was more directly responsible. Also, the victims of sandy hook were not Remingtons' customers.

Apple does not make you install instagram on your phone. And I doubt that you could find really compelling evidence that Apple knew in great detail the harms that were being caused, and rather then seek to mitigate them, instead made them worse in order to earn more money.

I'm not sure there a requirement that a product be paid for in order to be subject to product liability law.

I think I agree that these product liability cases are not the best way for a society to deal with these problems. I would prefer to see the democratic process arrive at some reasonable solution, based on the desires of the majority of the population. But there has been almost no movement in that direction, and I have my doubts there will be (in the US).

And I think it's important to see that this is about 16 (and younger) year old children, not adults.

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

#185

Post by pixl97 »

andai wrote: post #136
pixl97 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean do you remember what p2p turned into for things like downloads? "Some_popular_thing.mov.exe"

They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.

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

#186

Post by underlipton »

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…

>There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable.

You might be blaming the wrong people. Looking at a lot of those "shockingly large verdicts", in that they would have bankrupted the company and forced it to be dissolved and reformed as perhaps a less objectionable version of itself: cool, shoulda done that. Sad we didn't.

Are we conflating matters of merit with matters of judgment, here?

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

#187

Post by slibhb »

strongpigeon wrote: post #12

There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?". Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your…

The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.

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

#188

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bsimpson wrote: post #148
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…

The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline). Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you. Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… bei…

> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).

Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies.

I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and the Wikipedia article gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... . Yes, the plaintiff received horrific third degree burns when she spilled the coffee on herself, but lots of products can cause horrible harm if used incorrectly - people cut fingers off all the time with kitchen knives, for example.

I find the headline "Woman sues McDonald's for their coffee being too hot" a completely accurate description of what happened, with no hyperbole and no "ridiculousness" at all.

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

#189

Post by gzread »

dymk wrote: post #176
seydor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we need more social activism (remember that?) to stop people falling into this kind of addiction. I remember anti-drugs campaigning , they were everywhere. Phone addictions are not taken nearly as seriously.

Using the war on drugs as an example as a successful social movement is kinda hilarious

People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? And only the ones that were included in the war on drugs (not nicotine, alcohol, caffeine)? So it was a success.

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

#190

Post by gzread »

dmitrygr wrote: post #86
gusgus01 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally in an article about arresting or sentencing a drug dealer, people don't bring up that the drug users are actually to blame. Now if we're in a discussion around the cartels, plenty of people do bring up (and there's also those that get annoyed by it) that the drug users are actually the ones funding the cartels via their drug use. Along these lines, I think another fun comparison might be opioid use and Purd…

I think that that is actually an oversight. One needs to consider the entire chain. For example, with proper parenting, there would be a lot less youth demand for drugs. It doesn’t make what a drug dealer does any less bad, nor does it make the efforts of the police to arrest the drug dealer any less important. But it’s suboptimal to consider a small piece of a system, without thinking of the whole.

It's also suboptimal to jail parents for not convincing their child that drugs are bad.
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