Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 323 posts

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#51

Post by alvah »

select1 wrote: post #16
samtheprogram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> designed What?

"By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris scientists had discovered that ammonia could also be used to increase the free nicotine in cigarette smoke, providing a more powerful nicotine kick than the milder low-pH tobaccos traditionally used in American-blend cigarettes." They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it. This product that kills the users…

While that is terrible, it's still nowhere near proving your original assertion.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#52

Post by brookst »

matrix87 wrote: post #33
meowkit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.

Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time. Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is…

Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.

In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#53

Post by matrix87 »

didibus wrote: post #48
matrix87 wrote: post #25

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive? At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the gene…

You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.

But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#54

Post by darthoctopus »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #42
meowkit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people. Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#55

Post by matrix87 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #45
matrix87 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experi…

> What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. If you as a person engage with a product to a degree where it causes demonstrable, measurable harm to yourself or your life, you are addicted.

If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw? I think what matters is the intent of the design. E.g. if they design the product to make you need more of it (while it has an actively detrimental effect)

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#56

Post by brookst »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #42
meowkit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people. Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

In fully supportive of prosecuting wrongdoing in the food industry.

But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.

Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#58

Post by mslt »

lxe wrote: post #22

Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws. I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the…

I’d bet that an exceptional legal team could make a pretty solid case based purely on the volume and testimony of behavioral psychologists on their payroll

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#59

Post by zhoBEENG »

matrix87 wrote: post #14
select1 wrote: post #4

[flagged]

> Heroin is addictive, nicotine is addictive. Light and sound are fundamentally different. Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis

IIRC, the lovely book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas claims that gambling addiction was a concept pushed by the casinos, to put the blame onto individuals, rather than the machine.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#60

Post by curiousllama »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32
matrix87 wrote: post #25

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive? At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the gene…

It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.

> does it have to be answered in general?

100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.

Post reply on HN