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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

#411

Post by another-dave »

bknight1983 wrote: post #313

When you put something out there, there's a question of ownership for how people end up using it. - Some think that "if you use it incorrectly, it's your fault" and probably agree with the statement that Palantir is not an evil software and that one must "change the administration". - Some think that "if you use it incorrectly, it's the creator's fault" and then you have safety labels on everything (see Prop 65). It'…

If you deliberately design your platform to be addicting then you can't say people who become addicted are "using it wrong" though.

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

#412

Post by guywithahat »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #241

How is any app/website that 1) appeals to kids, 2) sells attention, 3) does A/B testing and/or has a self-learning distribution algorithm NOT guilty of this?

It sounds like an adult was awarded $6 million because she watched a lot of youtube/instagram as a kid. Literally any social media site would be guilty of this; I hate to say it but we need better corporate protections if cases like this are allowed to enter court.

At least legal experts are critical of the decision: '“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law'

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

#413

Post by alex1138 »

prepend wrote: post #145
dzink wrote: post #47

Read the book “Careless People” if you have a chance - according to the book, social media companies figured out they have real leverage with politicians since they can influence elections. As a result they are actively pushing for far right candidates to reduce their own taxation and regulation.

That book was so lame and the author leaves out how she profited millions and then only complained after she was fired. Its also funny how they “discovered” they were influencing elections after they influenced the 2008 and 2012 elections. How did the author not know this when she sought out and joined the company in like 2013! The parts about playing Settlers of Catan with Zuckerberg was funny. I wonder what his sid…

I'm not going to attack you but I do just want to highlight analogous comments of "she could have left"

- She was trying to work to change things

- She was pregnant and otherwise had young children and needed the money

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

#414

Post by foobiekr »

bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #290

The solution to this would be a law forcing these sites to allow third-party suggestion algorithms, so that you can choose who and how content is being suggested to you. It could be perhaps as simple as allowing third-party websites and apps for watching Youtube on your phone. And it's okay if this would be a premium paid feature, so there's no counter argument that "it costs them money to host videos". This is not a…

99.9% of these would just be malicious spyware that people are tricked into agreeing to.

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

#415

Post by cphoover »

malfist wrote: post #386
freshtake wrote: post #352

Short form video is a different beast altogether, and much more concerning. The fact that these platforms don't offer a way to avoid short form altogether is a big issue. YouTube allows you to "show fewer shorts" but what if you don't want them popping up at all? AI Slop is the best thing to happen to these platforms - because it will lower trust and engagement as people (hopefully) become tired of inauthenticity. Ra…

That "show fewer shorts" button doesn't do a damn thing. I click it, refresh the page and whala, shorts.

Previously I made a chrome extension that removes them from web... But I haven't updated it in a while. Basically just inspects the HTML/CSS patterns of the shorts components and removes them from the page. You could probably code/vibe code a similar extension in 10m.

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

#417

Post by which »

guzfip wrote: post #246
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #241

How is any app/website that 1) appeals to kids, 2) sells attention, 3) does A/B testing and/or has a self-learning distribution algorithm NOT guilty of this?

It probably helps when you suppress research that shows you’re harming children and allow human traffickers to fester on your platform with 17 warnings or whatever.

The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face. The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day. The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress" (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?). The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press. Lastly, it ignores that many platforms have actually responded to research about potential harms of social media by implementing safeguards on teen accounts.

Look at the plaintiff in this case: it's a mentally unstable person who blames her life problems on social media. Never mind the fact that she had been diagnosed with mental illnesses as an early teen, or that an overwhelming majority of people who use social media don't develop eating disorders or other mental illnesses as a result of it (and in fact the incidence of say bulimia peaked 30 years ago in spite of almost universal social media adoption among young people). This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer.

And due to some absurd legal reasoning the plaintiff was allowed to pseudonymously extort $3 million out of tech companies. Worst of all I see people on a technology forum applauding this out of some sort of resentment towards large companies!

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

#418

Post by pjc50 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #343
ramon156 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place? I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it…

> Why are we allowing this in the first place? Exactly what I keep coming back to. For me, it feels like you could cut this problem down substantially by eliminating section 230 protection on any algorithmically elevated content. Everywhere. Full stop. If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement. You want that content to be seen, for whatever odd reason,…

> If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement

Yes. People make free speech arguments about this, but the list and order of stuff returned by algorithmic non-directed (+) lists is clearly a form of endorsement. Even more so is advertising, which undergoes a bidding process. Pages which show ads should be liable if those ads are fraudulent, especially if they're so obviously fraudulent that casual readers suspect them immediately.

(+) Returning a list of stuff in a user-specified query, on the other hand, is not endorsement. Chronological or alphabetical order or distance-based or even random is fine.

Note that section 230 is, of course, US specific and other countries manage without it.

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

#419

Post by greenhearth »

ramon156 wrote: post #260
sampullman wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a little more nuance than that, but it seems roughly correct. Wouldn't it be better if apps/websites targeting kids didn't use A/B testing to be more addictive?

They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place? I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it…

"Free market" and "entrepreneur spirit" fetishism and fear of collective social action against individual drives.

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

#420

Post by robinanil »

I'm a former Google engineer, now running a children's mental health startup (Emora Health), and my toddler is already on YouTube Kids.

So this verdict hits on every axis for me.I wrote up my full take here [1], but the short version: I don't think the "Big Tobacco moment" framing that NYT is pushing actually holds up.

Litigation is negative reinforcement, and if you've ever tried telling a toddler "no" you know how well that works long-term.The families in this case absolutely deserve to be heard. The harm is real. But courts can only punish — they can't redesign a recommendation algorithm.

The change has to come from people who understand these systems building better ones.

Haidt has been saying for years what this verdict just confirmed. The evidence was never the bottleneck. The will to design differently was.

I will give you a simple experiment. Try blocking Blippi from YouTube Kids, man, it's crazy, even if you block the main Blippi and Moonbug channels. 100s of channels have Blippi content cross-posted. And it keeps popping up. I know it's easy to build a Blippi block feature using AI that blocks across channels.

Thats the kind of solutions we need. I know we have the tools. Just need intent and purpose

[1] https://www.emorahealth.com/clinical-insights/social-media-v...

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