I just worry we left no levers for the public to regulate these entities and this is the worst option of very few options. Who isn't liable under this kind of logic?
Imagine a feed that actually just ends when you run out of posts from people you follow instead trying to endlessly keep your attention by pushing stuff it thinks you might like
If I've read all of the posts from my friends I would prefer to not see anything else, but that doesn't maximize engagement for ad platforms so
Suggest Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It'll open your eyes.
If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. That doesn't work with digital products that started benign, then had the addictive qualities turned up to 11. That's malice, at scale. If every ice cream parlor, or link in the ice cream supply chain started adulterating ice cream with drugs, regulators would have dropped the hammer at the site of adulteration. Meta et Al have had no such presence forced upon them due to lack of regulation in some jurisdictions, or being left to self implement the regulation, thereby largely neutering the effort.
24-hour commercial cable news (in the US) is the original sin of addictive media.
People used to spend an awful lot of mindless time watching TV. They weren’t “addicted” in a clinically meaningful sense.
Also fwiw I'm not in favour of regulating social media, but I am in favour of bringing lawsuits to companies who engage in societally harmful behaviour, and punishing them financially.
“I’m so addicted to Firefly!”
That kind of thing?
If you're interested in the topic further, you could consider reading 'Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria', which should shine some more light on what people are referring to as "addiction" in this circumstance :)
If you're interested in the neuroscience, consider reading "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review".
Like, I dunno, really getting into running or yoga or fantasy football?
Where is the line, according to experts in addiction-like behavior?
That doesn't mean they are equivalent and must regulated the same way. Scale matters.
If cable television or restaurants or ice cream start causing harm that we want to deal with, we can vote on that when the time comes.
Everything else outside of reels is the usual social media fake life facade, and everything amplified to the max for engagement to get it pushed to feeds via "the algorithm" (note: Interactions don't need to be positive to promote it to feeds)
Rewind 30 years or so, how long did the typical New York Times subscriber spend with their paper every day?
Was the Times addictive?
And I won’t even get started on network television for half a century.
Lots of people can get drunk once a month and suffer or cause no real harm. Some people get drunk everyday which is slightly more harmful.
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?
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.
Good luck with that one. Somebody probably used 18th Century behavioral psychology to try to sell George Washington a horse!
Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.
This is the Netflix business model, right now.
Tiktok gets paid for every extra second you spend there.
Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!
"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.
You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.
There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.
I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.
Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.
We should not be passing judgements or making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.
We can't treat screens like drugs. It's a dangerous metaphor because governments kill people over drugs.
Without this distinction the leverage this "screens are drugs" perceptions gives governments will be incredibly dangerous as these cases proceed. If we instead acknowledge that it's corporations that are the problem and not something magical about screens then there's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to large entities acting as gatekeepers.
“things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing”
I don't impulsively drive to the store to purchase another bag immediately after finishing the one I have whereas (for example) many people exhibit such behavior when it comes to tobacco.
In the case of social media the feed is intentionally designed to be difficult to walk away from and it is endless (or close enough as makes no practical difference). Even if it weren't endless, refreshing an ever changing page is trivial in comparison to driving to the store and spending money.
Try to take away a kids tablet, a teen's phone, or an adult's phone. They will fight just like an addict.
And society as a whole. Even if you don't participate you don't escape the blast radius of the harm they've caused over the past 10-15 years.
I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out.
The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.
To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.
Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
Letting juries rob them just because the jury doesn't like it is nothing more than fascism.
If you're going to pick a law from one of the smallest states in the union, the least you could do is quote the relevant excerpts.
This is a pathetic rebuttal.
The outcome followed laws that enable the jury to conclude as they did! So there you go, laws passed.
Is this Zuckerberg's burner account?
There should be a law banning the addictive practices of these apps. Until there is, fining the companies that make these apps is unjust.
There are laws enabling the judiciary to operate as it has to give plaintiffs a platform in the first place, in the absence of specific laws because legislative bodies are slow to adopt new laws for various excuses.
For example; not hard to pay off a handful of legislators to vote no. Then what? People just suck up living at the mercy of the rich?
Judiciary has leeway to allow such cases and outcomes to bubble up useful context for changes to law. Longstanding precedent and in some cases is codified in law itself.
The lack of a specific legal language banning social media actions is also irrelevant because of the amount of similarities to other situations that are enshrined in law. That human biology is susceptible to psychological manipulation is already well understood. Tiny little difference in legal context does not invalidate known truth of biology.
Society doesn't exist in your head alone and has existed for some time. Much of this is not truly new territory.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
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, evil person could possibly argue for letting kids do it.
If that sounds crazy to you, the moral panic over social media will sound just as crazy in a decade or two.
That's why we call it addiction when folks struggle with stopping even though they can see the harm in their own actions.
Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.
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.
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.
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 an AI foothold.
Do you have a source for that? I don't think it's true when looking at global Meta numbers across _all_ Meta social platforms (FB+Instagram+Threads) combined.
If that were true, they would be going somewhere and that somewhere would be visible. The last "new" thing that got any traction was TikTok and that is almost 10 years old at this point.
For a while, the Fediverse stuff (specifically Bluesky) seemed to be getting some traction, but apparently the Fediverse wasn't ready for the influx and people have started leaching back.
The social media sites have things pretty well carved up between them. If you want competition that doesn't suck as bad, you have to break them up.
Facebook is dwindling, but Instagram is still thriving.
Instagram doesn't make Zuckerberg "successful". He's a black hat that deserves jail
Yes. I know corps do what they can to keep us engaged. I read HN too. I didn't say it was a big part.
I mean, if that's where your confidence comes from...
People will give excuses for this. Guess what, meta and Google have their own too.
> "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."
They quote one unnamed insider for this characterization. I recall from my stats 101 class that n=1 is not a strong basis from which to make broad claims about a population of 10s of thousands.
Feeds without options should be illegal.
Not every interaction needs to be your self control vs 30 years of professional marketing psychology doing A/B tests. It’s not a fair fight.
Pokemon cards are the same too.
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 is something that fills a need for meaning and connection to the world that has been diminished due to a loss of community in our society (which does predate social media).
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)
Bad take. Civil liberties matter.
At any given time it seems like whatever is defined as the most addictive is just the one with most market share? For me personally I think most addictive is actually hacker news (god bless you all)
Core to all of this is what's colloquially become known as The Algorithm. Google in particular has sucessfully propagandized this idea that The Algorithm is a neutral black box over which we have no influence (for search). But every feature and behavior of any kind of recommendation or ranking or news feed algorithm is the result of a human intentionally or negligently creating that behavior.
So one thing most of us here should be aware of is to get more distribution for a post or a video or whatever is through engagement. That is likes, comments, shares, reposts, quotes and so on. All these companies measure those and optimize for engagement.
That sounds neutral and possibly harmless but it's not and I think it's foreseeably not harmless and no doubt there's evidence along the way to demonstrate that harm.
We've seen this with some very harmful ideas that get a lot of traction online. Conspiracy theories, antivaxxer nonsense, doxxing queer people, swatting, the manosphere and of course eating disorders. ED content has a long history on the Internet and you'll find pro-ana or "thinspiration" sites and forums going back to the 1990s.
So I think social media sites are going to have three huge problems going forward:
1. That they knowingly had minors (and children under 13, which matters for COPPA) on their platforms and they profited from that by knowingly or negligently selling those audiences to advertisers;
2. They knew they had harmful content on their platforms but hid Section 230 in particular as simply being the host for third-party content. I believe that shield is going to fail; and
3. They knowingly or negligently pushed that content to children to increase overall engagement.
One clue to all this is you see Mark Zuckerberg who wants to push age verification into the OS. Isn't that weird? The one company that doesn't have an OS thinks the OS should handle that or, more specifically, should be liable for age verification? That's so strange.
In an era where we have LLMs (and the systems that came before) that can analyze posted content (including video) and derive features about that content you don't get to plead ignorance or even user preference. These companies will be held liable for the harm caused by content they distribute.
Let me take half a step backward from that provocative stance. Of course we don't need to outlaw all fun, but we perhaps we really do need to outlaw some fun, to prevent people from overindulgence. Maybe a sin tax could be the way to go.
slopinthebag•1h ago