Being able to manipulate what 100s of millions or billions of people see every day on their screens is an unprecedented amount of power.
Democratic nations are not going to tolerate these companies much longer.
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Being able to manipulate what 100s of millions or billions of people see every day on their screens is an unprecedented amount of power.
Democratic nations are not going to tolerate these companies much longer.
I'm all in for suing the shit out of faceplant, goggle and twerk tick... But I have to say, they're basiacally just exploiting an existing weakness. The modern youth mental health "crisis" is fundamentally caused by a willingness to believe that an instagram avitar is "real life". Being lost in an electronicly hosted make believe land is really the root cause of the giant increase in "mental health" issues. Why do pe…
> The modern youth mental health "crisis" is fundamentally caused by a willingness to believe that an instagram avitar is "real life". I'm not familiar with this argument, as I've never heard it. Could you provide some examples or a study or similar showing this is widespread?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97804...
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These lawsuits are from the actual states by their Attorney Generals in federal court. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
AGs are elected politicians they campaign on this kind of stuff, so them being behind this particular suit doesn't legitimize it but probably the opposite.
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How does Instagram re-socialise people with physical handicaps?
Allowing them to find friends which have similar positions/situations who understand what they live with.
"harmful youth marketing" ? Adults are just as dumb as kids, and can actually impact the rest of the world with their dumbness. We should be suing them for harmful marketing, period. I have had adult friends have literal emotional breakdowns because of social media's harmful effects.
AKA: Dozens of states' attorney generals could petition legislatures to pass laws saying under-18's are not allowed to use Facebook in their state, knowing it'd probably fail because of freedom of speech trespasses, but instead would rather sue the deep-pocket corporation for profit and reelection-time bennies.
> but instead would rather
It sounds like you are implying something wrong with the very line of thinking you have presented.
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What about in the rest of the world where the first amendment doesn't apply?
These are US-based companies (and there's a reason for that.) If they voluntarily choose to subject themselves to the laws of other countries without constitutional free-speech protections, that's on them.
Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR prob…
The problem is not exclusive to children!
Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.
"In our A|B testing, we're able to show that making a small portion of teens suicidal increases app engagement by 0.05%. We were unable to calculate the dollars of profit per teen life lost, because our research teams keep quitting."
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We market IAP almost exclusively to kids. They buy em up like candy, and by the time parents realize it we’re gone.
Who is "we" and how do you sleep at night?