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Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

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

#281

Post by wpietri »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #115
wpietri wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices. And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on…

It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling. In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those con…

That definition sounds plausible but breaks down in practice. Every Chicagoan has snowfall-related risk. And conversely, a lot of those guys legally traded where they were not exposed to risk. They were just gambling.

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

#282

Post by tzs »

ernst_klim wrote: post #163

> It could, for instance, do so on the grounds that it is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which safeguards platforms from legal liability for content posted by third parties. But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.

Section 230 has nothing to do with whether a platform is impartial or not. All it does is make it so they are not treated as the publisher or speaker of third party content.

So if I post something on Facebook full of libelous statements about you section 230 means you sue me, not Facebook, over that libel because that libel is my speech, not Facebooks.

If Facebook figures out that libels posts about you are engaging and starts pushing them in everyone's feeds section 230 would protect Facebook if you wanted to sue them for libel. I don't think section 230 would care though if you wanted to sue Facebook over their engagement seeking algorithm.

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

#283

Post by danfunk »

SwtCyber wrote: post #111
throwyawayyyy wrote: post #74

I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite…

The distinction between punishment and prevention seems important here. Meta's intent might matter when deciding liability or penalties, but if a design pattern is demonstrably harmful, "we only wanted more engagement" isn't much of an argument against regulating it

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

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

#284

Post by wpietri »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #243
wpietri wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices. And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on…

> My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the…

Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think of a clear answer in two minutes, there's no point in anybody looking at anything that harms people I don't care about."

But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.

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

#285

Post by seanicus »

bonzini wrote: post #170
atmavatar wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections. If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.

How do you distinguish engagement maximization and usability maximization?

I really have no idea how we can define most of this esp using the framework of previously established law but I do think that a definition of Dark Patterns could be tangentially worked into the psychological make-up of gambling.

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

#286

Post by wpietri »

jbstack wrote: post #255
mschuster91 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stock market investing - not gambling That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...

It's a common refrain, but I don't agree that it's correct. You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk: If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false; With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged…

I think a more effective definition involves socially productive activity. If support the creation of value to others in hopes of getting paid back over time through getting a fraction of the value created, that's investing. If I put money into something volatile in hope that I get more money out, that's gambling.

Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.

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

#287

Post by Scaled »

dev1ycan wrote: post #235

Hopefully META loses so they can stop this forceful age verification at OS level garbage being financed by META, f..k META.

Yes, but important to note that the prosecutors are pushing for AV (ID Checks) at the site level. Both sides of this fight are actively anti-privacy.

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

nonameiguess wrote: post #269
raffael_de wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the engagement argument could be applied to every commercial service or product. anything that is sold is getting optimized for appeal/attraction/engagement/adictiveness.

No, it isn't. Nobody evaluates a drill on how long a worker spends using it. If you can get the same job done faster, you'll go with that. Even in entertainment, not all products optimize for time of use. Nobody intentionally makes the longest possible movies. Products optimize for engagement specifically when they exist within the attention economy and their monetization model is serving ads and/or harvesting user d…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Brief summary

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

#290

Post by Dylan16807 »

skinfaxi wrote: post #275
StilesCrisis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government-backed bonds are the intended zero-risk option. You know exactly how much you will get and it is designed to track inflation (sorta). If you don't believe in that, precious metals are another way to go. I don't personally subscribe to that theory but that's the idea.

I think your parent's point is even larger than that. To be alive is to engage with risk. There are no stores of value that withstand all decay.

If everything is gambling then we lost track of what we were doing and need a new word for what we're trying to regulate. The answer is not to give up because it's a spectrum, it's to mark off thresholds.
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