Only tangentailly related, but, there is an option in Instagram to reset your algorithm. I highly recommend this if you find yourself doom-scrolling.
Not sure if it's also in FB on account of me not having an account there.
EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
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Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#12Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#13Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power. So, how do we…
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#14Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power. So, how do we…
> all citizens are invited to broadcast Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart.…
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#15Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power. So, how do we…
> Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. More outlandish conspiracy theories on hackernews... You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV. What messages are not being allowed to be 'streamed into the brains of the population'…
Speaking from the UK, the state controls the media.
There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.
And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.
UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#16Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power. So, how do we…
> all citizens are invited to broadcast Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart.…
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#17This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#18Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population. It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power. So, how do we…
> all citizens are invited to broadcast Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart.…
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#19And what about the addictive design of advertisements that keeps us hooked on consuming more and more stuff? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382310867_Methods_o...
Online advertisements should be forbidden as a whole. The attention-stealing and engagement-maximising internet with all it horribly effects only exist, due to advertising. And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#20Only tangentailly related, but, there is an option in Instagram to reset your algorithm. I highly recommend this if you find yourself doom-scrolling. Not sure if it's also in FB on account of me not having an account there.
Where, exactly? I browsed through the account settings and didn't see anything obviously relevant. (Could be that whatever option you're talking about is available only to mobile users, whereas I only ever visit Instagram on a desktop.)