Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theres already laws that protect kids. Thats why they just lost in court.
Please provide a link.
Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
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Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#72>The verdict has forced those inside the companies to grapple with the fact that many outsiders do not view them as favourably as they have come to view themselves. I'm not sure this rings true to me. Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right? If anything they are just afraid of endless litigation while they are struggling to gain…
> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right?
Facebook is dwindling, but Instagram is still thriving.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#73I propose a Neotemperance movement. The original Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century were not just against alcohol but all sorts of social ills, including gambling. The Neotemperance movement would be anti engineered addiction, anti gambling, anti misinformation, anti ads, and anti corruption.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
More or less, yeah. There might be some nuance about the threshold for maladaptive behaviour, but if it’s all or nothing I’ll take all.
How would you get around the First Amendment difficulties?
There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#75I have no love for social media, but I also really don't like the idea of the government regulating how apps are designed, or trying to circumnavigate online privacy to "protect children" which where I see this whole thing going. On another note, personally I'm not sure I buy the "addictive" argument with social media, maybe its just me but I find social media pretty boring, but I think for a lot of younger people it…
It's wild to me how many people are willing to throw basic civil liberties overboard because they don't like the other guys.
Today's media circus is about addictive social media. Before that it was video games and rock music and D&D clubs. Before that it the Satanic panic of the 80s, gay 'recruitment', Soviet spies. Much before that it was witches and heretics. And so on and so on, forever.
If you have a choice, maybe don't be part of the pitchfork wielding mob? The people with the pitchforks always think they're warriors of justice. They generally aren't. They just tend to make everything worse.
(Plus the economic motivations are so clear here - traditional media hate social media because social media ate the traditional media's cosy entrenched profits, so now social media are to blame for Russia, for Trump, for anxious teenagers... and must immediately be regulated out of existence)
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#76The fact that I couldn't turn off shorts recommendations on youtube is just so, so annoying. It's such a time sink and I'm glad that the tides are finally shifting against addictive algorithms like these.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you get around the First Amendment difficulties?
There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.
Even commercial speech regulations need a stronger basis than, “People spend a lot of time listening to it.”
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#78We all know they're addictive, they're designed to be addictive, and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. The individuals who are profiting from the harm are clearly identifiable. And that harm directly targets children. That this is allowed to continue is a symptom of a sick society.
I absolutely do not know they're addictive. I've lived through this entire story before in the video game wars. People said exactly the same things with exactly the same urgency about Mortal Kombat - what kind of sick society do we live in, where greedy corporations sell you the experience of shooting people and ripping their heads off? Perhaps we have to let adults buy these "murder simulators", but only a disturbed…
Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients.
If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.
From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know a single person who after exposure to short form video has not had to exert special effort to regulate their consumption.
Really? I watch a lot of long-form YouTube while doing the dishes, and occasionally poke at the Shorts. Some funny, mostly dumb and I move on. Maybe a generational thing, but for most of the latter half of the 20th Century most folks had to “exert special effort to regulate their consumption” of network television. Should there have been lawsuits and regulation of couch potatoes?
If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.
Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.
Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
#80We all know they're addictive, they're designed to be addictive, and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. The individuals who are profiting from the harm are clearly identifiable. And that harm directly targets children. That this is allowed to continue is a symptom of a sick society.
It's also that this is not a function of their nature, but of the way that they've been designed to function. Things were not this bad 15 years ago, and the fact that social media existed and functioned the way that it functioned back then was incredibly important in allowing movements like MeToo and BLM and Dreamers and many others to build momentum.
When social media is a tool of regular people, it's an awesome, awesome tool. But when the companies and people that own the platforms start to see users as tools themselves, for their own sociopolitical ends, that's when they become destructive forces. And there was a clear enshittification line drawn about this time 10 years ago, when the transition from one state to the other got underway.
I fear that we're looking at an attempt to manufacture consent to destroy the tool and not just the malicious function.