You can absolutely find cases of companies getting in trouble for serving alcohol to minors. Or selling them cigarettes. Or running a secret casino/gambling business.
You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.
> You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.
This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true.
My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official.
The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease.
“It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family.
Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.
Pointing those out because in my current country (Australia), laws are being gradually introduced to - eventually - eliminate tobacco consumption.
eg plain paper packaging mandate, banning of smoking in more and more places, and potentially soon there will be banning of tobacco sales to people born before a point in time year (2005 maybe?) so they're never allowed to smoke
But it isn't illegal. The closest thing is that imports of nicotine vape products has been banned[1].
But you can still get them with a prescription and - more importantly - vaping itself is still legal with non-nicotine products. For example [2] is a story about how sweet flavored vapes are popular with schoolkids.
This is an interesting point, especially considering that people are born with various levels of self-control.
People with little to no self-control stand no chance, but there are many people I’m sure that would survive psychologists, especially knowing that they work in a field where almost nothing is reproducible :)
It's also data scientists, computer scientists, and plenty of other folks in fields which are considered "hard sciences", that are working together with the psychologists.
Plus, if it's "only" 20% of people we lose to these addictions, that's still a major tragedy.
The dig at psychologists was funny, but this is a super serious topic, unfortunately.
Personally I find social media so addicting that the only thing I could do is quit entirely. I occasionally have to use TikTok for trend research, and it's shockingly addicting... to the point where I think the algorithm should be legally required to be publicly accessible or explained in some plain language way (to some extent, there are a lot of logistical hurdles).
Self control is a weird thing, depending on the addiction. Self control can spawn from simply being self aware of how a thing affects you.
I'm willing to bet it's not immediately obvious how scrolling through social media makes a person feel, unless they have experience with it (something psychologists teach to help their patients deal with situations.)
So, if it's something that can be taught, does it affect how responsible someone is with their social media usage?
Is their environment equipt to impart such information? Are they equipt to learn? Do they just enjoy it anyway?
> I'm willing to bet it's not immediately obvious how scrolling through social media makes a person feel, unless they have experience with it
Right, and the scary thing from my perspective is that a company like Facebook has actually experimented with manipulating emotion on real users. People don't understand to what extent they're being manipulated, but the manipulators often harvest this data for their own purposes.
You stand far more than a chance - you have complete control over whether you use Facebook or not.
I've had, at different points in my life, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook installed on my phone. At no point did I ever feel like I was somehow compelled to use any those apps.
Android has operating-system-level controls on notifications. If you don't want to get Facebook notifications, and you turn them off, it is impossible for the application to notify you.
I have more of a problem checking Hacker News than I ever had with any of the above platforms, and there's no HN app, no notifications, no psychologists trying to control me. This clearly shows that Facebook-checking is purely a discipline problem.
Now, this obviously wouldn't be the case if, for instance, some big corporation was injecting some kind of addictive chemical into your food, and there was no way to limit your exposure to this chemical because, well, you have to eat. In that case, it's pretty clear that that company is doing something illegal and unethical and regulatory action should absolutely be taken.
But this isn't that. You can't survive without food. Facebook is entirely optional. You don't want to be addicted? Don't use Facebook. All of your relatives are on Facebook? Don't use Facebook; give them a call or text, invite them over, video call, share a meal, play a video game together.
Facebook. Is. Optional. If you get "addicted" to it, it's solely because you chose to repeatedly expose yourself to it without taking the proper precautions.
> You stand far more than a chance - you have complete control over whether you use Facebook or not.
Ah, but what is full control? If I miss out on events and face passive ostracization... do I really have full control? We do not live in vacuums and self-control isn't solely concerned with the self, there are myriads of external factors that can have significant impacts.
I have the control to not give my 13 year old a cell phone, but I do not have control over the social consequences that creates for them. Therefore... could I claim to have full control over that situation? no, just a narrow aspect.
> This clearly shows that Facebook-checking is purely a discipline problem.
Maybe... but we know that Facebook attempts to undermine self-discipline. The average user spends an hour a day on Facebook. Are they all conscious of how much time they're wasting? are they conscious of the ways that Facebook attempts to get them to waste more time? are they aware of what it's doing to them psychologically? can one be expected to exercise control when the stakes have been intentionally obscured?
> But this isn't that. You can't survive without food. Facebook is entirely optional. You don't want to be addicted? Don't use Facebook.
Is this not true of drugs as well? I don't need caffeine to survive, but if I stop tomorrow I'm going to have some serious headaches.
I don't need Facebook to survive, but not having it may harm me socially, and I might even feel a psychological absence. Do I have full control at that point?
Sorry if this is too abstract or philosophical... but I don't think it's a binary situation at all. Reality is much more complicated. It's hard to say that anyone living in society has full control over anything, especially when they're deceived.
I'm sure many obese people would prefer not to die young, yet they do. Should I only blame them for the lack of self-control? Is it not fair game to scrutinize the powerful societal mechanisms that undermine their self-control?
This trope of "personal responsibility" needs to go away.
Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught of determined, highly paid professionals, working together to basically harm them.
Our brains have flaws. These people know those flaws and work actively every day of their working lives to exploit them. What hope can the always tired, always stressed out average person have of resisting, long term?
Personal responsibility is failing, just look at obesity rates in countries with reduced malnutrition rates.
We need systemic solutions, not blaming the poor idiot.
That's how we solved other collective problems like air travel safety and road fatality rates.
Your approach was the old, antiquated one, where we always blamed the pilot or the driver. Guess what? Even if the person is an idiot, we're all idiots. Let's make stuff that doesn't kill us even if we're idiots.
> Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught...
Is that true? Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media..I really don't buy the claim that people have literally no control over their actions. What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?
> Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media
Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.
Sure let's say it's 10%, is the conclusion you draw from that that free will doesn't exist? Do 100% of people need to give up the freedom of choice to lower that figure?
Not sure what you're getting at about elections, are you saying that's a reason to intervene? I don't really want the government making policy for the purpose of influencing election outcomes.
They aren't talking about bans, but other controls. Cigarettes are not banned outright, but cigarette companies are banned from advertising in a lot of mediums and cigarette cartons have a warning label about the harmful effects of smoking them. For a long time there were PSAs about how bad they were for you too, to counteract the damage already done by the tobacco industry's marketing. And we tax them pretty harshly. People still smoke, it is still legal to smoke. We could do similar things for food and social media without outright banning it.
Yeah that's fair. Like I alluded to in a sibling comment thread, though, I think doing the same thing for food is pretty dangerous given our still pretty limited understanding of what foods are actually bad for you. Eggs are still oscillating between healthy and unhealthy every few years (although I think we're settling on healthy? Who knows!). Cigarettes aren't needed to sustain life so there's not as much risk to meddling like that.
The only thing I can really get behind is stricter controls on individual ingredients that are very clearly unhealthy and obviously don't need to be part of your diet (BPAs, trans fats, etc). Once you start messing with society's macros though it's fraught territory and very easy to do harm IMO.
> What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?
There isn't "one solution". And bans generally are not a solution.
But we need to fight with the same weapons they're fighting, for example, let's take sugar and unhealthy foods.
They're presenting their food as fun and glamorous, let's blow that up, like we did for tobacco.
No more mass advertising for it, anywhere. Horrible labels showing disfigured obese people that are suffering because of their addiction to junk food.
The food is cheap because they use crap ingrediens? Let's tax food based on universal standards agreed upon not by the industry, but by healthcare specialists. The more you're off the mark from healthy food, the more you get taxed (excises, same as for alcohol and tobacco).
Heck, I'd earmark those excises as funding for subsidies meant for producers of healthy, bio foods.
These junk food companies are making their stuff cool, so let's prevent that and they're making it cheap by passing their externalities to us (diminished long term health) so let's make their food more expensive and let's make the healthy stuff cheaper.
Ah, more than that, quotas of healthy food in every place serving or offering food. Get rid of food deserts. Poor people with low mobility should have access to healthy food at decent prices.
Yes, this is all very complicates. Yes, it's very political.
But doing nothing achieves nothing. Worse than that, doing nothing actively degrades the situation since these actors are actively harming people in very subtle ways.
20 years ago the sugar lobby told everyone that sugar was good and fat was bad.
I'm all for banning specific ingredients and processes that are known poisonous (like BPAs for example are banned in many countries, deservedly) but unilaterally deciding what's healthy and having quotas for healthy foods is extreme. It will be the sugar vs fat thing all over and only the rich will benefit.
Just to make sure I understand what you’re proposing, taco trucks and ice cream shops would be illegal in your ideal world yeah?
I’m not a libertarian at all, I think taxes should be pretty high and there should be universal healthcare. Pretty silly I need to say that, though, and bringing it up is a non sequitur. I’m curious, do you think most non libertarians would agree with what you’re proposing?
But yeah, if you think forcing an ice cream shops to sell sides of broccoli (that nobody will order) to comply with some silly 20% law, we probably won’t get anywhere discussing. It takes a pretty active imagination to picture something like that having a positive outcome.
Oddly enough just yesterday, I was thinking of why alcohol and foods with low nutritive value haven't suffered the same fate as tobacco.
If you advocate for universal healthcare (like my country has), then it's ultimately in society's best interest to keep everyone as healthy as possible to avoid burdening the healthcare system, which does mean that government needs to step in and place limitations on advertising, sales to minors, laws, etc.
Just as a few examples, we (my country) currently has: no advertising to children under 13, seat belt laws, helmet laws, smoking packaging laws, alcohol advertising laws, and so on. It's odd that communities are spending millions on active living infrastructure, and simultaneously allowing companies to run ramshod marketing unhealthy and addictive products. And by 'odd', I mean that these organizations have enough backing to influence politicians to the detriment of society.
As I recall, tobacco companies only took action when laws changed or when they started losing lawsuits - given how destructive alcohol is for society it wouldn't be a stretch to make it less socially-acceptable to consume 'empty' calories. Some industries are mandated to spend part of their advertising budget on 'preventative' campaigns, but in almost 100% of the cases, these 'anti-whatever' messages are cleverly disguised to sell even more of their product (e.g., anti-gambling, soft drink recycling). There may be no perfect solution, but doing nothing isn't an answer either.
>And why is having quotas for healthy foods extreme?
Because there is no such thing as a universally healthy food. "Healthy food" is a buzzword used to make people feel good about the food choices they make that (usually) don't taste that great.
The primary concern with healthy eating is to eat enough and in a decent balance of a laundry list of things: protein, fats, (carbs), vitamins, minerals and probably some more. You can't eat all of them at once either, because some of the vitamins and minerals can end up blocking each other from absorption. Missing any of these for long enough in large enough quantities (or large enough imbalances) is going to cause health issues.
Some people like calling foods that have few calories and little nutritional value as "healthy", but the value those foods provide comes from limiting the average person from eating something else. Eating a cucumber doesn't give you much, but you're less likely to have those fries after you've had the cucumber. But you certainly wouldn't be fine with only eating cucumbers long-term.
Younger, more libertarian-ish me would have disagreed.
But humans have changed. The information age has changed us in deep ways. When Facebook appeared, all of the problems that have manifested over the past 15 years or so were immediately apparent to me. Facebook was so clearly toxic that I never touched the service. And I was an enthusiastic first-on-the-bandwagon type back then.
Trying to warn others, which I embarrassed myself trying to do, was useless. It was senseless to try - I was under the assumption that people had control of their person. I was assuming that people had personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility implies control of your person, which we have inadvertently relinquished in the Information Age, as we outsource aspects of our minds and persons to the technology that 'makes our lives easier'. Add to this the fact that these companies have experts dedicated to undermine your control of yourself, and it's hopeless for most people.
Older, more exhausted me agrees with the parent comment. sigh
I'll reply on my own comment here to add that the same reasoning applies to gun rights. We need a critical mass of the populous to have personal responsibility, or we are missing parameters in the calculus of our right to bear arms.
Until we are generally intelligent enough to understand this, the gun rights issue, and any other related ones like the parent here, will be played out as a surreal dance of contrasting political interests.
It's not a trope. If you cannot learn to resist things and have a strong constitution, it will just be something else that swallows you up.
> Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught of determined, highly paid professionals, working together to basically harm them.
This sounds so dramatic, as if these pros have actual mind control abilities. You're being hyperbolic. Also, how do you know it's a minority? Sounds like you just made that up to suit your argument.
It is a trope, especially in American and and by extension libertarian circles promoted by the US groups around the world.
Personal responsibility is just one variable in this equation and a weak one at that.
What do all developed countries have in common? A large, well run (in comparison to developing countries) government and an active civil society that operates at scale, through various collective actions (voting, protests, etc).
Personal responsibility is maybe #5 on this list and is the number one thing being peddled by companies whose business interests are under attack.
Look up Ralph Nader and auto companies. Whistleblowers in tobacco companies and tobacco companies. Etc, etc.
What really needs to go away is this epidemic of emotionally-manipulative special pleading that has drastically increased in density on Hacker News over the past five years or so.
Comments like this one are antithetical to the goals of HN - curious, reasonable, intellectual discussion (including about topics that may be somewhat political in nature).
I used to think the same thing when it came to the obesity problem here in the US, but someone said something to me that made me rethink my position.
They said: if you have a few people that are obese, that’s an issue with them. If nearly half of society is obese, you have an issue with the society.
Macro issues need to be addressed at the macro level. Yes, an individual can choose to not participate and be better for it, but that still leaves us with the same macro issue and it’s likely worth addressing that issue.
When I take many-days breaks from HN it's nice to come back and just read through a few pages of the "Best" list available through the lists link at the bottom. In my experience the important stuff ends up there, so while I can't participate in active discussion of some of the older links, there's not much FOMO from time away. That's a nice feature.
I find FB and Instagram so unappealing that there isn't any risk of addiction, for me. The basic idea - sharing pictures and text telling your friends what you're doing - is brilliant, but in practice, most people I know are annoying, and their posts are tedious.
Hacker News, on the other hand, can be slightly addictive, because every time I load the front page, there's a chance there could be something interesting and not groan-inducing.
In my opinion, the addiction to Facebook is dependent of your oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genetics. It would be similar to the Dopamine 2 receptor (DRD2) genetics link with alcohol addictions.
I read a lot of books on personal finance, investing and very interested in psychology. I also read medical studies etc.
Facebook is quite interesting. There are few people who I know that are living in misery but are in complete denial. They work really hard on their image and showing off how perfect their family is on facebook. Showing off expensive cars when they are one large bill away from defaulting.
I find this fascinating.
Just yesterday one individual had a facebook story, showing the private message she was getting from her friends, that she looks young and so hot etc. It is so bizarre.
> Can [Meta] be sued for its algorithm, or is the content to blame for social media addiction?
Replace [Meta] with [Hacker News] and re-read it again :)
Personally, since I discovered HN about 10 months ago, I have to admit that I got addicted to it in a way that it totally replaced FB and in recent, maybe 60 days, it swallowed my YouTube time as well! Why? Because, every single day I visit HN (or just refresh), I learn something new from the community, whether it's a "spot on" question, an interesting article, some hacker built something cool and "Show HN'ed" it or.. that ”well-thought” comment with some links, otherwise undiscoverable.
Thanks to all of the above and more, HN consumes about 70% of my free online time.
I’d be happy to know what my friends are doing, but that doesn’t seem to be a service Facebook offers anymore. When I am stupid enough to go load my Facebook feed, it’s about 2/3 ads, 1/3 “recommended for you” posts that I have no interest in, and very rarely something from someone I follow will show up in between, and then half the time it’s someone sharing a news article or a meme instead of actually talking about themselves. The signal to noise ratio for Facebook is essentially zero.
Fwiw, title editorializing has been enforced pretty lightly for a while, you can find editorialized titles daily which I guess in turn results in more people editorializing theirs. It feels like a lost cause to even bring it up since enforcement is so haphazard.
Thank you for your support. My response got downvoted to oblivion, so I deleted it. One day, people will be less angry and care more about what happened.
Thank you for your support. My response got downvoted to oblivion, so I deleted it. One day, people will be less angry and care more about what happened.
Many social media sites evolved from time sorted posts to algorithm sorted posts. The algorithms are data driven and designed to maximize engagement, as it improves revenue. This creates an incentive to push highly controversial topics over more casual content.
> Users must be able to opt out of having recommendation services via algorithms.
That one would be great, even better, it should be the default option. People should be able to opt-in if they feel like it, but it should not be the default.
Facebook algorithm hasn’t been optimised to maximise time spent on the site since 2014, and controversial topics have a well documented negative effect on both attention and engagement.
Their own leaked internal docs say that angry, love, sad, and wow reactions had 5x more weight than traditional likes. It should be easy to infer that this will promote more controversial posts than uncontroversial ones.
It seems like their attention & engagement tweaks are spent on Instagram. One frustrating recent change was the introduction of a non-algorithmic feed, but it's not on by default, and it hides stories from the view, which makes it unusable for most people.
Love, laugh, and wow aren't necessarily positive (and even hate can be positive in context). These are often used on clickbait posts that "dunk" on the other side, or uphold your controversial views, which then displays more of this content and helps contribute to society's political polarization.
Those are not reactions to controversial posts. Those are stong reactions to posts that you want to see and you generally agree with. 'lol' has been used either as it was meant (positive reaction to a joke) or negatively (mocking a sincere post).
If I call you a child-eating asshole, and every story is either about how much of a goat-fucking moron you are, or gruesome stories with graphic murders, will you want to stay on Hacker News?
This was not a strawman: nothing is when you talk about Facebook. There’s anything on that website: even the one in a billion thing happen several times a day.
Direct insults aren't what FB is promoting. FB promotes biased if not outright fake coverage of real-world events that stir up outrage and controversy and encourage people to "engage" by arguing in the comments or seeking more of such content.
First, that's not a citation. Where's the data that shows controversy reduces engagement?
Second, that's not at all what happens on Facebook though. On Facebook every other story is about how people outside of your tribe are child-eating assholes.
This very discussion is a counterfactual to your claim. Someone posts a topic that is somewhat controversial, and we're all arguing about it in the comments. That's engagement. That's what most social media optimizes for, and it's why most social media is cesspit.
Do you think that I want to contribute after I’ve been called names and downvoted for trying to provide an informed experience?
Yes, some people will pile up for a minute. As a user that’s what you see, but controversies are not gratuituous: if you are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, or anything heated, your friends, colleagues, family members who are insulted will see that and disengage.
I’ve had to look at how much that represent, and it’s a much stronger effect than the pile-up that you noticed.
Yes, everyone on HN knows this. But the usage of "algorithm" in the context of social media feeds has long had the colloquial meaning of "building a feed that is anything other than chronological."
>internal research showed that the app exacerbated mental health issues for teen girls in particular.
This is twisting the truth.
Specifically FB had found that for teenage girls with body image issues the ones they surveyed on average thought Instagram on average made it worse. 31% said worse, 22% said better, and 45.5% said it had no impact. For the other 11 other mental health issues they said Instagram made it better on average. For teen boys for 12 out of 12 mental health issues they said Instagram made it better.
They are not exercising when they are viewing social media though, so there is an health implication with social media. How long before we get social media induced deep vein thrombosis? The airlines took that seriously.
1. The article claims that Facebook's own internal research found that Instagram exacerbates mental health issues in teen girls. No surrounding context given. It implies that it's straight up harmful.
2. The actual research said that 31% of teen girls felt that Instagram made body image issues worse. 45.5% said Instagram had no impact and 22% said Instagram made it better. For the other 11 out of 12 mental health issues surveyed teen girls said that Instagram made it better, on average.
They somehow read number #2, but then wrote #1 based on that. And this type of statement been repeated over and over again online.
I had zero exposure to TikTok until about 60 days or so. I started seeing a lot of content from TikTok on my regular feeds, like YouTube and a few other media sites.
I don't have any social media accounts other than this one and YouTube, so it wasnt hard to stay away from it all, but now even on my news channels I see 'everything' TikTok content seeping in, and I have to say, I really hope the content I'm seeing is a curated list of what goes on in that place because its horrendous.
They say 4chan is the cesspool of the internet but by God... I mean, I can't even begin to address all the mental issues that seem to be glorified by the platform. To these standards even a /b/ post might seem academic in nature.
You probably started seeing it because of the Johnny Depp civil suit. Most of the content in my feeds claiming to cover it seemed to be more about TikTok, which was frustrating as someone unfamiliar with the case.
The mental health glorification is particularly insidious and there's already been some studies on the harm done to people who self diagnosis on the platform. Even if you avoid all the content it recommends you on the subject it still messes with your dopamine receptors.
Have packaged food and fast food manufacturers been sued for deliberately making their products addictive, knowing full well that the addictive substances cause physical and mental harm?
No, not that I'm aware of, but I'm also surprised they haven't: they'd just need to follow the model proven to work by the case against Big Tobacco. Any business model that depends on exploiting their customers is inherently illegal and following the established case law to this conclusion is the only sane outcome.
The only reason we haven't is that Big Sugar (or whatever it ends up being known as when they write the history books) has more money than Big Tobacco and has been laying out their defenses against it.
Well, maybe they should, unless their food is clearly labeled as a dessert, and if their servings also have clear and obvious markings of how much of the daily intake is covered by them.
More than that, food for which the average servings exceed the daily needs of the average person should have danger warnings. Maybe not that far off from what cigarettes show as health damage caused by them.
Edit: Why is this downvoted? Come on, I want some arguments. The same system has worked for tobacco, and we know food with excess sugar is as bad if not worse. Why shouldn't we do the same thing?
I didn't downvote, but I think your solution isn't particularly effective. Part of the problem is food is more fundamental than tobacco; nearly everyone finds some kind of sweet treat appealing. Slapping labels on all the poptarts saying they are 'desserts' doesn't fix the fact that we are almost all hardwired to seek out fats and sugars.
I think I agree with you in some ways. You may be being downvoted because "clearly labeled as a dessert" is too strong. Maybe we need categorization for quantity of sugar per serving, eg. 1-10g, 10-20g, 30g+ or whatever with different colors or labels. It's very easy to fall for feel-good marketing (eg. healthy/low-fat/organic or whatever) and not realize how full of sugar something is.
You're just asking for ineffective labels (eg California prop 65) or corruption.
Coca-cola has 10.6g of sugar in 100ml. Apple juice has 10g of sugar. Breast milk is about 7g of sugar. Cow milk is about 5g. Coke zero has 0g of sugar. Which of these would you label as dangerous?
French fries, hamburgers, pizzas etc tend to have relatively little sugar in them. Apples have about 50x the sugar content of McDonald's French fries. They're high in carbs, but not necessarily "sugar". Will they escape the label or will they get it for general carb content?
OK, but "Big Tobacco," is still around and still makes an ass-load of money from its customers. Wherever taxes made consumption too expensive within the US, the companies were more than able to make up for it with new overseas customers.
Most governments around the world also actively exploit their own people. Should these governments be made illegal, too? And if so, what, pray tell, would we ever replace them with that would be better?
Cigarette companies certainly have, and successfully. Social media is starting to become as easy of a political target as cigarettes once were, so IMO there’s reason to be hopeful.
On the other hand, I despise opportunistic class action lawyers. These articles are always titled as if people are going after someone, when in reality the lawsuits are solely driven by the lawyers behind them who collect huge fees.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadYou could say the same thing about illegal substances.
https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/08/texas-man-wins-5-5...
You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.
This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true.
My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official.
The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease.
“It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family.
Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.
Pointing those out because in my current country (Australia), laws are being gradually introduced to - eventually - eliminate tobacco consumption.
eg plain paper packaging mandate, banning of smoking in more and more places, and potentially soon there will be banning of tobacco sales to people born before a point in time year (2005 maybe?) so they're never allowed to smoke
Minor typo: the ban will be for people born after a particular year, not before.
Also, vaping in Australia is illegal, making the ban even more impressive.
Don't you mean "legal"?
https://www.tga.gov.au/blogs/tga-topics/nicotine-vaping-laws...
Good. :)
I assure that it isn't. (I'm Australian)
But it isn't illegal. The closest thing is that imports of nicotine vape products has been banned[1].
But you can still get them with a prescription and - more importantly - vaping itself is still legal with non-nicotine products. For example [2] is a story about how sweet flavored vapes are popular with schoolkids.
[1] https://www.tga.gov.au/blogs/tga-topics/nicotine-vaping-laws...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/qld-ecigarettes-vapes...
People with little to no self-control stand no chance, but there are many people I’m sure that would survive psychologists, especially knowing that they work in a field where almost nothing is reproducible :)
Plus, if it's "only" 20% of people we lose to these addictions, that's still a major tragedy.
The dig at psychologists was funny, but this is a super serious topic, unfortunately.
I'm willing to bet it's not immediately obvious how scrolling through social media makes a person feel, unless they have experience with it (something psychologists teach to help their patients deal with situations.)
So, if it's something that can be taught, does it affect how responsible someone is with their social media usage?
Is their environment equipt to impart such information? Are they equipt to learn? Do they just enjoy it anyway?
Right, and the scary thing from my perspective is that a company like Facebook has actually experimented with manipulating emotion on real users. People don't understand to what extent they're being manipulated, but the manipulators often harvest this data for their own purposes.
I've had, at different points in my life, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook installed on my phone. At no point did I ever feel like I was somehow compelled to use any those apps.
Android has operating-system-level controls on notifications. If you don't want to get Facebook notifications, and you turn them off, it is impossible for the application to notify you.
I have more of a problem checking Hacker News than I ever had with any of the above platforms, and there's no HN app, no notifications, no psychologists trying to control me. This clearly shows that Facebook-checking is purely a discipline problem.
Now, this obviously wouldn't be the case if, for instance, some big corporation was injecting some kind of addictive chemical into your food, and there was no way to limit your exposure to this chemical because, well, you have to eat. In that case, it's pretty clear that that company is doing something illegal and unethical and regulatory action should absolutely be taken.
But this isn't that. You can't survive without food. Facebook is entirely optional. You don't want to be addicted? Don't use Facebook. All of your relatives are on Facebook? Don't use Facebook; give them a call or text, invite them over, video call, share a meal, play a video game together.
Facebook. Is. Optional. If you get "addicted" to it, it's solely because you chose to repeatedly expose yourself to it without taking the proper precautions.
Ah, but what is full control? If I miss out on events and face passive ostracization... do I really have full control? We do not live in vacuums and self-control isn't solely concerned with the self, there are myriads of external factors that can have significant impacts.
I have the control to not give my 13 year old a cell phone, but I do not have control over the social consequences that creates for them. Therefore... could I claim to have full control over that situation? no, just a narrow aspect.
> This clearly shows that Facebook-checking is purely a discipline problem.
Maybe... but we know that Facebook attempts to undermine self-discipline. The average user spends an hour a day on Facebook. Are they all conscious of how much time they're wasting? are they conscious of the ways that Facebook attempts to get them to waste more time? are they aware of what it's doing to them psychologically? can one be expected to exercise control when the stakes have been intentionally obscured?
> But this isn't that. You can't survive without food. Facebook is entirely optional. You don't want to be addicted? Don't use Facebook.
Is this not true of drugs as well? I don't need caffeine to survive, but if I stop tomorrow I'm going to have some serious headaches.
I don't need Facebook to survive, but not having it may harm me socially, and I might even feel a psychological absence. Do I have full control at that point?
Sorry if this is too abstract or philosophical... but I don't think it's a binary situation at all. Reality is much more complicated. It's hard to say that anyone living in society has full control over anything, especially when they're deceived.
I'm sure many obese people would prefer not to die young, yet they do. Should I only blame them for the lack of self-control? Is it not fair game to scrutinize the powerful societal mechanisms that undermine their self-control?
Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught of determined, highly paid professionals, working together to basically harm them.
Our brains have flaws. These people know those flaws and work actively every day of their working lives to exploit them. What hope can the always tired, always stressed out average person have of resisting, long term?
Personal responsibility is failing, just look at obesity rates in countries with reduced malnutrition rates.
We need systemic solutions, not blaming the poor idiot.
That's how we solved other collective problems like air travel safety and road fatality rates.
Your approach was the old, antiquated one, where we always blamed the pilot or the driver. Guess what? Even if the person is an idiot, we're all idiots. Let's make stuff that doesn't kill us even if we're idiots.
Similar principle here.
Is that true? Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media..I really don't buy the claim that people have literally no control over their actions. What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?
Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.
Not sure what you're getting at about elections, are you saying that's a reason to intervene? I don't really want the government making policy for the purpose of influencing election outcomes.
100% of people will need to give up some luxuries so that everyone can benefit, and especially <<vulnerable groups>> can benefit.
Taxes work the same way. Laws in general work the same way (otherwise we'd assume everyone is smart, fair and calculated heck, perfect, all the time).
The only thing I can really get behind is stricter controls on individual ingredients that are very clearly unhealthy and obviously don't need to be part of your diet (BPAs, trans fats, etc). Once you start messing with society's macros though it's fraught territory and very easy to do harm IMO.
There isn't "one solution". And bans generally are not a solution.
But we need to fight with the same weapons they're fighting, for example, let's take sugar and unhealthy foods.
They're presenting their food as fun and glamorous, let's blow that up, like we did for tobacco.
No more mass advertising for it, anywhere. Horrible labels showing disfigured obese people that are suffering because of their addiction to junk food.
The food is cheap because they use crap ingrediens? Let's tax food based on universal standards agreed upon not by the industry, but by healthcare specialists. The more you're off the mark from healthy food, the more you get taxed (excises, same as for alcohol and tobacco).
Heck, I'd earmark those excises as funding for subsidies meant for producers of healthy, bio foods.
These junk food companies are making their stuff cool, so let's prevent that and they're making it cheap by passing their externalities to us (diminished long term health) so let's make their food more expensive and let's make the healthy stuff cheaper.
Ah, more than that, quotas of healthy food in every place serving or offering food. Get rid of food deserts. Poor people with low mobility should have access to healthy food at decent prices.
Yes, this is all very complicates. Yes, it's very political.
But doing nothing achieves nothing. Worse than that, doing nothing actively degrades the situation since these actors are actively harming people in very subtle ways.
I'm all for banning specific ingredients and processes that are known poisonous (like BPAs for example are banned in many countries, deservedly) but unilaterally deciding what's healthy and having quotas for healthy foods is extreme. It will be the sugar vs fat thing all over and only the rich will benefit.
Just to make sure I understand what you’re proposing, taco trucks and ice cream shops would be illegal in your ideal world yeah?
And we're 20 years from that and now we know better. Which lobby is it this time, the healthy living one, that's lying to us? ...
> Just to make sure I understand what you’re proposing, taco trucks and ice cream shops would be illegal in your ideal world yeah?
Did I stutter? Did I propose bans anywhere?
And why is having quotas for healthy foods extreme? Sell 20% healthy foods out of your entire stock. How hard is that?
We have quotas for all sort of things <<all>> the time. The roof hasn't fallen.
Separate note: I guess this is the risk of arguing with libertarians :-) I'd venture you're one.
But yeah, if you think forcing an ice cream shops to sell sides of broccoli (that nobody will order) to comply with some silly 20% law, we probably won’t get anywhere discussing. It takes a pretty active imagination to picture something like that having a positive outcome.
If you advocate for universal healthcare (like my country has), then it's ultimately in society's best interest to keep everyone as healthy as possible to avoid burdening the healthcare system, which does mean that government needs to step in and place limitations on advertising, sales to minors, laws, etc.
Just as a few examples, we (my country) currently has: no advertising to children under 13, seat belt laws, helmet laws, smoking packaging laws, alcohol advertising laws, and so on. It's odd that communities are spending millions on active living infrastructure, and simultaneously allowing companies to run ramshod marketing unhealthy and addictive products. And by 'odd', I mean that these organizations have enough backing to influence politicians to the detriment of society.
As I recall, tobacco companies only took action when laws changed or when they started losing lawsuits - given how destructive alcohol is for society it wouldn't be a stretch to make it less socially-acceptable to consume 'empty' calories. Some industries are mandated to spend part of their advertising budget on 'preventative' campaigns, but in almost 100% of the cases, these 'anti-whatever' messages are cleverly disguised to sell even more of their product (e.g., anti-gambling, soft drink recycling). There may be no perfect solution, but doing nothing isn't an answer either.
Because there is no such thing as a universally healthy food. "Healthy food" is a buzzword used to make people feel good about the food choices they make that (usually) don't taste that great.
The primary concern with healthy eating is to eat enough and in a decent balance of a laundry list of things: protein, fats, (carbs), vitamins, minerals and probably some more. You can't eat all of them at once either, because some of the vitamins and minerals can end up blocking each other from absorption. Missing any of these for long enough in large enough quantities (or large enough imbalances) is going to cause health issues.
Some people like calling foods that have few calories and little nutritional value as "healthy", but the value those foods provide comes from limiting the average person from eating something else. Eating a cucumber doesn't give you much, but you're less likely to have those fries after you've had the cucumber. But you certainly wouldn't be fine with only eating cucumbers long-term.
But humans have changed. The information age has changed us in deep ways. When Facebook appeared, all of the problems that have manifested over the past 15 years or so were immediately apparent to me. Facebook was so clearly toxic that I never touched the service. And I was an enthusiastic first-on-the-bandwagon type back then.
Trying to warn others, which I embarrassed myself trying to do, was useless. It was senseless to try - I was under the assumption that people had control of their person. I was assuming that people had personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility implies control of your person, which we have inadvertently relinquished in the Information Age, as we outsource aspects of our minds and persons to the technology that 'makes our lives easier'. Add to this the fact that these companies have experts dedicated to undermine your control of yourself, and it's hopeless for most people.
Older, more exhausted me agrees with the parent comment. sigh
Until we are generally intelligent enough to understand this, the gun rights issue, and any other related ones like the parent here, will be played out as a surreal dance of contrasting political interests.
> Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught of determined, highly paid professionals, working together to basically harm them.
This sounds so dramatic, as if these pros have actual mind control abilities. You're being hyperbolic. Also, how do you know it's a minority? Sounds like you just made that up to suit your argument.
Personal responsibility is just one variable in this equation and a weak one at that.
What do all developed countries have in common? A large, well run (in comparison to developing countries) government and an active civil society that operates at scale, through various collective actions (voting, protests, etc).
Personal responsibility is maybe #5 on this list and is the number one thing being peddled by companies whose business interests are under attack.
Look up Ralph Nader and auto companies. Whistleblowers in tobacco companies and tobacco companies. Etc, etc.
Comments like this one are antithetical to the goals of HN - curious, reasonable, intellectual discussion (including about topics that may be somewhat political in nature).
We have obesity rates reaching 50% in many countries. Morbid (morbid comes from the Latin word for death...) obesity in the US is 7% and growing.
Pray tell, how are you going to solve this epidemic through personal responsibility?
They said: if you have a few people that are obese, that’s an issue with them. If nearly half of society is obese, you have an issue with the society.
Macro issues need to be addressed at the macro level. Yes, an individual can choose to not participate and be better for it, but that still leaves us with the same macro issue and it’s likely worth addressing that issue.
Hacker News, on the other hand, can be slightly addictive, because every time I load the front page, there's a chance there could be something interesting and not groan-inducing.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-oxytocin-rec...
http://www.fastcompany.com/1659062/social-networking-affects...
Facebook is quite interesting. There are few people who I know that are living in misery but are in complete denial. They work really hard on their image and showing off how perfect their family is on facebook. Showing off expensive cars when they are one large bill away from defaulting. I find this fascinating.
Just yesterday one individual had a facebook story, showing the private message she was getting from her friends, that she looks young and so hot etc. It is so bizarre.
Replace [Meta] with [Hacker News] and re-read it again :)
Personally, since I discovered HN about 10 months ago, I have to admit that I got addicted to it in a way that it totally replaced FB and in recent, maybe 60 days, it swallowed my YouTube time as well! Why? Because, every single day I visit HN (or just refresh), I learn something new from the community, whether it's a "spot on" question, an interesting article, some hacker built something cool and "Show HN'ed" it or.. that ”well-thought” comment with some links, otherwise undiscoverable.
Thanks to all of the above and more, HN consumes about 70% of my free online time.
Thank you hackers for this awesome community!
But I hope you get away with it, because I'd like to see a discussion around this :)
- China is already regulating this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/china-to-regulate-tech-giant...
> Users must be able to opt out of having recommendation services via algorithms.
That one would be great, even better, it should be the default option. People should be able to opt-in if they feel like it, but it should not be the default.
It seems like their attention & engagement tweaks are spent on Instagram. One frustrating recent change was the introduction of a non-algorithmic feed, but it's not on by default, and it hides stories from the view, which makes it unusable for most people.
If love, laugh, wow, all positive carry the same as sad and angry why would that mean more controversial?
People love having angry content as viral sire, but that’s human nature and existed much before the angry reaction was added.
Those are not reactions to controversial posts. Those are stong reactions to posts that you want to see and you generally agree with. 'lol' has been used either as it was meant (positive reaction to a joke) or negatively (mocking a sincere post).
Citation needed.
>strawman provided
Dictionary needed?
Second, that's not at all what happens on Facebook though. On Facebook every other story is about how people outside of your tribe are child-eating assholes.
This very discussion is a counterfactual to your claim. Someone posts a topic that is somewhat controversial, and we're all arguing about it in the comments. That's engagement. That's what most social media optimizes for, and it's why most social media is cesspit.
Yes, some people will pile up for a minute. As a user that’s what you see, but controversies are not gratuituous: if you are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, or anything heated, your friends, colleagues, family members who are insulted will see that and disengage.
I’ve had to look at how much that represent, and it’s a much stronger effect than the pile-up that you noticed.
Citation needed.
This is twisting the truth.
Specifically FB had found that for teenage girls with body image issues the ones they surveyed on average thought Instagram on average made it worse. 31% said worse, 22% said better, and 45.5% said it had no impact. For the other 11 other mental health issues they said Instagram made it better on average. For teen boys for 12 out of 12 mental health issues they said Instagram made it better.
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
(Part of my confusion is that I don’t think the stats imply anything at all.)
1. The article claims that Facebook's own internal research found that Instagram exacerbates mental health issues in teen girls. No surrounding context given. It implies that it's straight up harmful.
2. The actual research said that 31% of teen girls felt that Instagram made body image issues worse. 45.5% said Instagram had no impact and 22% said Instagram made it better. For the other 11 out of 12 mental health issues surveyed teen girls said that Instagram made it better, on average.
They somehow read number #2, but then wrote #1 based on that. And this type of statement been repeated over and over again online.
The mental health glorification is particularly insidious and there's already been some studies on the harm done to people who self diagnosis on the platform. Even if you avoid all the content it recommends you on the subject it still messes with your dopamine receptors.
The only reason we haven't is that Big Sugar (or whatever it ends up being known as when they write the history books) has more money than Big Tobacco and has been laying out their defenses against it.
More than that, food for which the average servings exceed the daily needs of the average person should have danger warnings. Maybe not that far off from what cigarettes show as health damage caused by them.
Edit: Why is this downvoted? Come on, I want some arguments. The same system has worked for tobacco, and we know food with excess sugar is as bad if not worse. Why shouldn't we do the same thing?
Coca-cola has 10.6g of sugar in 100ml. Apple juice has 10g of sugar. Breast milk is about 7g of sugar. Cow milk is about 5g. Coke zero has 0g of sugar. Which of these would you label as dangerous?
French fries, hamburgers, pizzas etc tend to have relatively little sugar in them. Apples have about 50x the sugar content of McDonald's French fries. They're high in carbs, but not necessarily "sugar". Will they escape the label or will they get it for general carb content?
Most governments around the world also actively exploit their own people. Should these governments be made illegal, too? And if so, what, pray tell, would we ever replace them with that would be better?
aaaand checkmate
On the other hand, I despise opportunistic class action lawyers. These articles are always titled as if people are going after someone, when in reality the lawsuits are solely driven by the lawyers behind them who collect huge fees.