> “Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release.
If you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.
Have we gotten to the point where "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society"? It's both a good indicator for progress and a sad place to be as a community.
For sake of not letting a bogus argument go unanswered: Google and Microsoft offer generic tools that have very broad social benefit outside the monetization of user data.
That said, I would prefer it if the FTC would address data monetization practices at all tech companies--it is a fine business model, but it is troublesome as a necessary addition to my spreadsheet or the operating system for my desktop/laptop/phone-sized computer.
Snap is more of a messaging app afaict. I'm pretty sure the biggest harms from social media come from algorithmic targeting of content, echo chamber creation, and the ability to hugely amplify fringe opinions and destabilise debate.
If your only concern is data handling, though, then fair enough.
Children become addicted to Snapchat streaks and their peers in school shun them socially based on whether they have big streaks with popular kids or not. It's like Lord of the Flies mixed with an episode of Black Mirror.
Do you rephrase my comment reductively because you're okay with corporations monetizing children via addictive dark patterns, in defiance of recommendations from child psychologists? or
You’ve never encountered the explore tab, or the recommended projects sidebar, or read the news of users ‘star hacking’ to get more attention to their projects, or chosen one library over another because it had more ‘stars’, or seen the promotion of ‘fork me on GitHub’ banners, or seen examples of ‘link your GitHub account’ right next to ‘link your Twitter account’ as a means of self-promotion?
...Wait, so you thought there was ever a point when "good for Facebook" == "good for society"?
IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true.
It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, pull tons of people in, and will then start to make use of all that precious data.
It would boggle my mind if somebody was actually surprised by this.
Oh, even long after Facebook has turned sour as a company there have still been very good things running on top of Facebook as infrastructure for linking up disconnected local groups and individuals with shared interests.
But eventually they burnt so much goodwill trying to justify their stock valuation that at least were I am, all those informal groups have moved away from Facebook. Some managed to substitute the infrastructure quite well, some suffer quite noticeably. But none of them would consider going back. And openness to newcomers, discoverability, that has all suffered quite considerably.
To be fair, many, many corporations start out as a tiny kernel of something that solves a problem for people, and then metastasize into "extract maximum revenue from maximum number of people" cancer once Wall Street takes over. So, honestly, you can generalize this to "bad for corporations" ~= "good for society."
A topic for another discussion is why society allows corporations to become parasitic and cancerous without any checks or balances.
> ...Wait, so you thought there was ever a point when "good for Facebook" == "good for society"?
At least for a subset, 2005-2006, back when they had network pages. You'd gain access based on your email's domain, it has a shared calendar and worked as a planning location for everyone at the same college/university.
Considering that the precursor to Facebook was a site that ranked pictures of women obtained without consent whatsoever, it was inarguably evil from the very start.
That is a good point. We have to take wins when we get them. Getting the oligarchy to fight each other to our benefit is a nice turn of the tables. We should keep our eye on there competition as well though. Meta's whataboutism referencing tiktok wasn't baseless, it just isn't a valid excuse.
> If you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.
I generally agree.
FWIW, I just listened to an interesting CoRecursive interview with Facebook's Jason Gauci (February 2021) [0]. He addresses that question head-on at this point [1] in the interview.
> If you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.
^^ THIS !
I remember when Apple hardened iOS so that Facebook & co. could no longer mis-use the system do do evil things such as silently monitor pasteboard contents.
Facebook took out enormous billboard ads at the time in major cities on which they exercised their tiny woe-is-me violin, trying to pretend Apple was the evil one.
This comment should probably be included in the dictionary as an example under "strawman fallacy"
Who is arguing that facebook should be able to sideload their own app onto users iphones?
That's the antithesis of what user freedom advocates argue for. The argument is "it's my device, I should be able to run what I want on it." Not, "anybody should be able to do whatever they want on my device." The latter is more an argument for Apple's status quo where they have full control of the device (that they ostensibly no longer own) and the user does not.
What I'm most interested in is the redacted bits of the Order to Show Cause [1]
The scale of the remediation (no new launches) doesn't really match the scale of the accusation in the press release (Messenger kids once had a bug where kids could circumvent parental controls if the parents didn't pay attention).
The Order to Show Cause includes a comprehensive, in-depth review of FB's privacy programs - and it's almost entirely redacted. What did FB mess up so badly that the FTC feels this is the appropriate response?
Likely ads targeting. Twitter had a bug where they would track you around the web even if you opted out... this was obvious for years because you'd immediately start seeing ads for specific drugs if you searched for a medical condition in a separate browser etc.
Instead of actually fixing the issues, they removed the ability to opt-out of personalization (lol)
How is this legal? From my (granted, shallow) understanding of GDPR laws, isn’t it required for companies to allow users to opt out of personalization?
It seem like he would be fine with whatever restrictions they placed as long as it applied to all the companies equally. It seems like his major gripe was that it wouldn't affect tiktok
I mean that's broadly the state's argument. You can harvest American's data as long as that data stays under the exclusive control of the US. It's the macro-scale version of why self-hosted in-house applications can have more privileged access than 3rd party services.
How can a corporation be furious? After reading the article, they don't say anything about the company or people inside the company being furious. The closest thing I could find is that a Meta spokesperson said they plan to fight it vigorously and expect to win.
Maybe the headline should be "Meta opposed to proposed FTC ban on monetizing youth data".
One way is to train an AI on the entire collection of conversations every employee at Meta has had, and then after sufficient training ask the AI how it feels about this ban. It may then respond that it is furious!!! Thus we can determine the corporation is furious.
For some remote first companies that communicate primarily through platforms like Slack or email, this should be trivial to do.
The headline here is the government of the United States has alleged that Meta has violated an existing privacy order severely enough that they should not be allowed to retain data on children at all, that they've lied to parents about what they are doing with their kids data, and that bugs or mistakenly applied product features had enabled kids to message with strangers despite promises that the product was not able to do that.
Interestingly enough, that is in fact basically what the first few paragraphs of the article say pretty clearly. How this kind of headline exists in a tech driven publication who knows right.
PR can express emotion via press releases and interviews on behalf of the company. I would say it's just a way to say the board of directors is furious. Not that the company is sentient, and I don't think anyone thinks companies are sentient.
A rational person could interpret these spokesperson replies as being "furious" (but I agree that the headline is hyperbole)
> A Meta spokesperson told Ars that the FTC's proposed changes are "a political stunt," saying that the FTC gave Meta "no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory." Meta considers the FTC's proposed changes to the privacy order "a new low."
>How can a corporation be furious? After reading the article, they don't say anything about the company or people inside the company being furious. The closest thing I could find is that a Meta spokesperson said they plan to fight it vigorously and expect to win.
To be fair, the spokesperson's tone, and the insistence that they'll be fighting, does make them sound pretty pissed off.
Yet they continue to work there and contribute to the codebase which does such, so we should at least infer that they believe it is OK even if they might not think it is great (and if they don't want us to infer such they should either stop doing it or, at very minimum, speak out against it).
Facebook itself is has no vocal cords or thought membrane. It's often easy to forget because we like to personify companies, but a company is just a piece of paper for tax and legal purposes.
You can safely think "Facebook wants me to think it thinks this" when a Spokesperson speaks.
You can safely think "Part of Facebook thinks this" when an individual employee speaks.
You can safely think "Facebook Corporate wants me to believe this" when an executive speaks.
All of these individuals speak for Facebook, because they are a part of the collective that is Facebook.
"Collective" may not be the most accurate way to describe Facebook (er, "Meta"), given that its structure places it on the opposite end of the spectrum:
> “Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets." [1]
And forget about rank-and-file; Zuckerberg overrides decisions of senior management...
> During a company meeting this month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said Zuckerberg made some hires over the “objections” of senior executives — and sometimes rebuffed their advice in order to fire people, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. [2]
It’s pretty subjective of a publication to speculate on the spokeperson’s emotional state, and projecting their assumption onto the entire corporation seems pretty silly to me. But I’m sure it sells more clicks…
Since there is bound to be a lot of Facebook bashing I’ll point out that they occasionally do some good. In the case of software they can be good stewards of FOSS.
I listened to this CoRecursive episode about the history of Zstandard compression algorithm and how FB allowed the author, Yann Collet, to fully open source it while other companies wanted to keep it proprietary.
This doesn’t justify or make up for the wrongs that happen because of the social network but the company, and the reasons they want to work there, can be more nuanced.
Good points, but it aligns with Shell, for example, making a big deal about investing a few hundred thousand dollars in setting up solar power at one of their least productive refineries.
That is a complicated question. They get marketing and a few more eyes delivering bug fixes. However they also get to deal with contributions going not exactly in the direction they want and either have to argue against or take maintenance burden on themselves. Also they limit the changes they can do. An internal framework they can change as they like. They know all users.
For different projects that works differently well.
But this way they get an “internal” framework that they get to exert a lot of influence over, with the added benefit of most of the labor market for those roles already being familiar with it. Building in house tooling adds a lot of cost to onboarding, but this way gets most of those benefits without having to accept that cost.
I don’t think it’s even a token gesture. Someone (the author) just cared enough to do the paperwork and set up the meetings + it couldn’t be monetized in a meaningful way. Most companies are mundane boring places.
If you spend time around the FOSS arms of most companies the value they see first is in PR, the second is recruiting, the third is free work. The engineers lead the projects out of passion but what the company sees is opportunity.
It may be a token gesture to the company itself and at company scale, but still a meaningful act at the scale of the person whose job it is and the community they serve.
If you love making an open source thing, and you love its users, at some level it doesn't really matter why Meta pays your paycheck. They're still paying your paycheck while you get to do something you love.
Every conceivable crime has been around since civilization began, including exploitation of children.
If your argument is that it's not a big deal or not a solvable problem, then what's the point of doing anything? Should we ignore every problem because it existed in the past?
I just don't understand what these types of comments are supposed to accomplish. It's anti-progress to the point of absurdity.
This isn't to refute your overarching point, but even the oldest of stories, the 'Epic of Gilgamesh', begins with the titular character accused of not "leaving maidens to their warriors", leading the gods (and people) of Ur to try to end his reign. I think the story makes it clear - this behavior was totally unacceptable for a king, even in what the Sumerians considered "those ancient days, when bread had been tasted for the first time".
All things in life is grey. But I think we should ask about is the MAIN thing they do net good or net bad. Most philanthropist spend their lives amassing massive fortunes built on exploitation and then leave a (large?) percentage of their ill gotten gains for good. As an extreme example, we shouldn't absolve a serial killer just because they volunteer for Meals on Wheels each week.
Facebook has revenue greater than the GDP of all but 67 countries. Allowing 10 engineers to give away some crap for free doesn't quite balance the scales imo.
I'm only there because FB requires a current photo of me alongside a picture of my government issued ID in order to "regain access" to my account in order to deactivate it.
Can't speak for OP but I haven't deactivated my FB to keep tabs on my elderly father. It's an enormously toxic force in his life and it gives me some sense of control when I know what's influencing him. Especially in the throes of the pandemic. He would have engaged in a lot more risky behavior had I not been able to steer him away from some of it.
In fairness, Flow is OSS in name only and almost all major adopters have switched to Typescript after they committed to ignoring the community. Jest was wildly neglected with serious issues for a long time. Yarn shipped with major issues that made it unusable for years, then was handed off to the community. Prepack was "shipped" and immediately killed. JSX has been stagnant despite the community wanting to move the (existing) JSX 2 spec forward. HHVM pivoted to ~abandon PHP and focus exclusively on Hack, leaving many companies to switch away (see: Box).
If you're a front-end engineer or dealing with web technologies, Facebook has repeatedly pulled the football away.
It's true that Facebook didn't commit to maintaining these projects on an ongoing basis, but that has nothing to do with the fact that they did release lots of major projects under an open source license, projects written by highly skilled engineers that could have been kept internal.
You're free to fork these repos and maintain them yourself if you'd like, and that freedom exists only because the code was made available under a FOSS license in the first place.
The alternative to this situation is not "open source code maintained in perpetuity", but "code that was never made open source in the first place".
There's no obligation for maintaining or ensuring that the open source code remains useful to you, so the criticism that projects are being open sourced and ignored might be valid, but the criticism that Facebook doesn't release major projects as FOSS is not.
We've all been spoiled by the hard work people have been putting in maintaining their FOSS repos, to the point where we now expect it. Most FOSS licenses include wording such as: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” and that's what these repos are: code provided to you as is, free of charge and no strings attached (other than what the license specifies).
What are you talking about? You can fork the code and go nuts. There's an open source license attached to the code. It's the definition of free and open source code. Jesus we're getting into demented territory here.
There’s a big difference between theory and practice though. If there’s not actually a community of developers, then the project dies.
We’ve all seen fauxpen source projects close up shop immediately after their corporate developer deems them useless. Or better yet, actively reject all external contributions.
Can people still fork the project and move it forward?
If they can do it, it's OSS through and through.
If the company decides to withdraw support and the project dies, it's not the fault of the company. The community was just not interested in embracing it.
The free software definition presents the criteria for whether a particular software program qualifies as free software.
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2)
* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
I guess even a psychopath might leave a tip at a restaurant. Things rarely are 100% bad but those nuances should also not distract from the big picture.
Not GP - While I think your question is polite and otherwise undeserving of a downvote, I don’t think it’s a fair question. I don’t read GP as defending Meta, and I think there’s substantial problems that arise if pointing out good things equates to defending associated bad things. IMHO it’s the strict inverse of disallowing pointing out the bad things within otherwise good things (afaik, a main component of toxic positivity)
I’m not sure I follow the last point but you are of course correct that the question itself is based on the premise that Meta is under scrutiny and the social “state” for lack of a better term (think state and transition) is “on public trial.”
So in that sense, yes it’s a loaded question, however I think it’s a valid contextual assumption given the context of the article and comments.
When people bring up the philanthropic endeavours of FAANG, Oil & Gas, Tabacco companies and their ilk, it just reminds me of the mobster that gives a turkey at Christmas to the families whose businesses they've extorted and family members they've killed.
Also, to the point of OSS, let's not forget all the free bug fixes and labour they get from the community at large for having open-sourced their software.
I don't know why my opinion is so out of the mainstream but I really think it's good that people's information is used vs not used... I think it's a great boon for ads to become more relevant instead of less relevant. Wasting time looking at ads that aren't for me sucks, it's much better if they could actually improve my life. Literally think making children have less relevant ads is doing them harm.
Ads, targeted ones even more so, make you buy things you don’t need. If you need them, you would go out of your way to buy them without requiring an ad manipulating you.
That’s not necessarily true because you might not have known about them. Some ads can be informative and provide you with consumer surplus. For example I recently went to a concert based on an ad and it was a great time. I would have never heard about it normally.
Actually the most manipulative ads are “brand” ads for things like Coke or BMW. These have no significant difference to their competitors so their only strategy is to manipulate you into associating them with more positive emotions.
You could make ads relevant the old fashioned way: asking people what they are interested in or actually doing consumer research, instead of simply using their data they "give up" with a freemium service to make ads more "relevant". I used quotes on 'relevant' because I have never, ever, felt that advertising has suddenly become wildly more relevant or successfully targeted with the advent of social media or google. Most ads are still garbage and completely irrelevant to my interests; the targeting is usually pretty pathetic. I find more relevant advertising in a magazine or when it's self managed by a blog (the owner straight up just selling adspace old-school style) than online these days.
It's not like it needs to work the way it does online right now or it can't work at all. Facebook just likes the way it works because that's their business model.
Agreed. I subscribe to a jazz magazine partly for the ads - I want to know about album releases and jazz festivals. Maybe FB has improved in the years since I deleted my account but I never received ads as relevant to my interests as what I see in magazines.
Just as a tear I opened Facebook at looked at the ads (I usually skip them subconsciously). They are actually quite specific to me. For example there is one for a cooking gadget (I love cooking and trying new techniques), one for a children’s art kit (I might buy this), one for jigsaw puzzles (one of my hobbies), and one for productivity software (I might check it out).
That’s just the first four I saw and I’d say that’s actually phenomenal targeting. It’s some very niche things that apply to me quite well.
I visited a friend a couple of years ago. His son was about 3, and they put on a movie while he was eating dinner. The kid’s fork had food on it and it froze halfway to his mouth while he watched the movie. He held it there for half an hour or something, hovering in the air while his eyes were glued to the screen.
Do you think kids are smart enough to understand advertising? Or resist the temptations they bring?
Personally I think all advertising targeted at children should be banned completely. Little Jimmy doesn’t need to be bombarded with ads for Peppa Pig merch. Especially if those ads are targeted just for him. Gross!
Why does it matter? It’s not like non advertising TV is going to be good for Little Jimmy either. In your example story it’s not even an ad!
I think parents have some responsibility to teach their children how to interact with the world. I’ve been teaching mine about the difference between ads and non-ad content. That will prepare them for life as adults. Childhood is actually a great time to learn about ads because your parents prevent you from wasting too much money on it.
Why do you feel this way for under 18? I think it’s particularly weird to target people who likely don’t have disposable income and that income should be influenced through targeted advertising that’s trying to not only to cause you to shift your spending but also on increasing your overall spend, usually on useless shit you don’t actually need and scams.
I would in fact encourage this go the other way and ads become more highly regulated/banned outright because mass propaganda feels unhealthy but this might crash our economy and the economics of the internet considering how so many business plans and large amounts of revenue in large businesses don’t work without that (and all that would be also politically infeasible / and the US’s free speech amendment might prevent it in America so it would have to come out of the EU and Canada first). It would be offset by businesses running more cheaply but I suspect that’s not much compared to a potentially reduced amount of income overall from consumers on “frivolous shit they don’t need”.
Not only that, affordable effective ad targeting makes niche businesses more viable. It's really great to see a business that provides a widget or a service that I particularly value much more than the mainstream does. Those businesses are often only possible due to the effectiveness of this targeted advertising.
Mark Zuckerberg himself seems to understand the importance of privacy very well, taping over the microphone and camera on his MacBook Pro, keeping his trash can from being scavenged by others, and FB spending heavily to protect his security, so why does he have the exact opposite attitude towards others?
He isn’t forcing you to use Facebook. If you go into a store and they have a security camera that records you is that also violating your privacy?
Not saying everything FB does is ok but I think we are going too crazy with the government intervention. I don’t exactly see that FB was committing deliberate fraud based on this latest report (but a lot is redacted). It seems more like there were just some bugs? As a dev I worry about a world in which we expect perfection from all software.
> He isn’t forcing you to use Facebook. If you go into a store and they have a security camera that records you is that also violating your privacy?
Maybe not in America, but WhatsApp is basically mandatory in some countries. Schools will send out communications exclusively over it and many businesses exclusively use it for payment. 92% of Israeli phones have it installed. For some, the option is Facebook or not participating in society.
>He isn’t forcing you to use Facebook. If you go into a store and they have a security camera that records you is that also violating your privacy?
A closed circuit camera system that exists for the purpose of helping to prevent or resolve any criminal issues and is otherwise not used for anything else is far different from tracking non-FB users (eg, "he isn't forcing you to use Facebook") and profiling them via trackers embedded on websites that you may use even without a FB account.
You don't have to actually use Facebook in order to have your privacy violated by Facebook.
This came out years ago in Congressional hearings. It's also why lots of people who never had Facebook accounts got privacy-violation money from Facebook — it created profiles of people in the backgrounds of photos.
Unless you are constantly on guard and take defensive measures, Facebook spies on you even if you don't use it. So he is forcing you to contribute to Facebook.
Facebook is founded on 3 pillars of unethicalities.
1. Data Privacy - They will try to find every possible way to sell your data and not get noticed. An easy example of that is when fb started throwing fits when apple didnt let it track users activity across all apps by default. They tried to hide behind the fact that it would "severely" affect small businesses.
2. Depleting Mental Health - They will try to find every possible way to keep you engaged on the platform. That is often done by algorithmically promoting content that inspires extreme emotions in you. Emotions such as anger, jealousy, lust etc. Experiencing these emotions for an extended period of time EVERYDAY is not healthy for maintaining a good emotional balance.
3. Fake News - They will try to find every possible way to shrug off responsibility for spreading fake news. This affects politics by creating echo chambers, healthcare by preventing people from believing in the correct diagnostics and other areas.
I agree that nobody is stopping you from opening facebook, but facebook is like smoking. Everyone only wants to try it once, and then many fall into the downward spiral.
I was reading somewhere that how resisting facebook and all of facebook products everyday is not possible with the will power reserves that an average human has.
This is because he is competing with psychologists and researchers employed by facebook who have been studying human behaviour for years.
I do not have any sources to back my claims. Social Media has personally affected me a lot so I keep reading about the phenomena out of curiosity.
Here's one little article that breifly describes what I am talking about.
https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peop...
Not being forced is the wall behind which every un-ethical tech company hides.
- Nobody is forcing me to use youtube, but youtube has years of collection of important tutorials and educational material.
- Nobody is forcing me to use facebook (and its products) but fb has gathered users over the years that forces me to use the product in order to remain a part of the social sphere. Kids feeling left out in high-school because of not using instagram is an example.
- Nobody is forcing me to use Netflix, but if I want to watch the trendy movie that my friends are talking about, I do not have a choice.
If you see the pattern, tech companies by the virtue of their money have created a social effect where they might not "force" me to use their product but I have to use it if I wish to remain a part of the society.
It is difficult to swim upstream and the companies by the virtue of their deep pockets have shifted the flow that helps them make the most money.
You can’t look at the regulation of every other industry and be surprised. I can’t think of a single one in which the government has done a competent job. Remember when you couldn’t get covid tests for like 6 months because the fda had to personally inspect every single one?
I would caution against believing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” when that would make the government your friend. Yes, Facebook has been awful and done great harm in some ways, but crucially it is not the case that Facebook was only able to do such harm because the FTC lacked the ability to unilaterally and without oversight deploy extreme powers like “you may not monetize this data” or “you may not release features or products without our permission”. The FTC has some insane thumbscrews now, and though it may be satisfying to see them use their thumbscrews to make Facebook squeal, you still shouldn’t be happy that the FTC has thumbscrews.
The FTC has no power to create law, just interpret existing laws. Any “bans” would already need to be illegal based on current law enacted by congress. In the past Chevron Deference used to assume executive agencies had broad authority on law interpretation, but that seems to be a crumbling precedent.
If there are already existing laws that cover this, the FTC is just doing their enforcement job.
If that was the criteria I would also be comfortable! However, it is not; the FTC has taken action* against many entities smaller than Facebook, and in point of fact Facebook might actually be one of the biggest entities the FTC has taken action against (I don’t think this puts an upper bound on the size of entity the FTC will take on, my point is that it certainly doesn’t put a lower bound on it).
* Not necessarily actions I would call “thumbscrews” like their current proposed penalties for Facebook, and mostly actions I think are appropriate, but it is still an indicator of who they’re willing to take action against.
If it's not the government's job to ensure privacy protection, whose is it? I'm also cautious about ham-fisted internet regulation, but privacy doesn't give any of the entrenched social media players an advantage and I can't imagine the market correcting this problem.
Not a good framing. The government is not static to be loved or hated. It is rather like a cyborg who has behavior modifications and parts added and removed over time. It's a mess and a kludge and it does things we don't like, does contradictory things, because of how we change it to suit ourselves.
When the cyborg does something I like, I am happy and say "good cyborg, nice cyborg". I do not call the cyborg a friend, but rather I approve its current behavior. That is what democracy is: it's living with a cyborg that you don't fully control. It's not a friend, its not an enemy, its vast complex slow machine that is a thing we put up with because it's better than nothing.
The primary alternative is a coherent cyborg fully owned and operated by one person. Humans are always tempted by this vision of a government that is finally all good, all friend. Yet we have learned time and again that this almost always is even greater misery. (The exception is when the scale is smaller and the autocrat is capable and the need is immediate and finite. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew comes to mind. Startup leaders can also fall in this category.)
I mean, I endorse your framing and don’t think it disagrees with my framing. I thought my comment contained a lot of “good cyborg, nice cyborg” for punishing a known bad actor while also cautioning against thinking government is “all friend” now that they have punished Facebook. Perhaps it comes off like I think government is all enemy? I’m not sure.
I am very, very happy the FTC has tools to ensure fair business competition and the protection of US consumers. It has been woefully absent from regulating data monetization for three decades to the point that any regulation seems like deploying extreme powers to the data-addicted.
Regulators should not procrastinate as this only prolongs the agony and the multifaceted damage. Damage to society as it has no protection against such hyperscale, algorithmic, private-data slurping intermediaries. Financial and economic damage as the entire tech sector, while predictably lured by the abnormal profitability of adtech, is long-term undermined by a business model that may actually have no right to exist in a decent, democratic society.
Why just Facebook? Also, this is 10 years too late. Kids are using Discord, Tiktok and probably some services I've never heard of. This should include them all or it's silly or even outright harmful.
According to hacker news Facebook is dead, everyone deleted their account and only racist grandparents use it. And at the same time all the kids in the world are using it.
It is insane to me that we allow any advertising to young children at all, whether online, on TV, or anywhere else. I think deliberately manipulating kids is heinous and I genuinely don’t understand why this isn’t the consensus opinion.
(That said, I do agree that we need boundaries on the manipulation of younger minds. I've seen others make this analogy before: We don't let kids buy cigarettes in stores -- why should they have the full force of addictive algorithmic social media unleashed on them? [for that matter, why should adults, but that's another story])
I'm no fan of organized Religion, but I think there is a clear distinction here. Religion is opt-in (by the parents) where most advertising to kids isn't. You could argue that parents could take away their access to [phone|youtube|instagram|etc.], but kids will get access at school, or through their friends one way or another. The internet is too ubiquitous at this point to actually opt-out.
Religion isn't opt-in where I live, it's a mandatory part of the school system for every student of any background, students can only opt out once they are 18 and basically finished with school anyway. I'd understand if it was some ethics class that in part educates about religion, but in elementary to middle school it's 100% Jesus and angel stories. Separation of church and state my ass.
"Deliberately manipulating" is a biased term that negatively taints your statement. With the bias removed, the statement's ambiguity is revealed. You must unpack what you mean by "deliberately manipulating".
For example, teaching and parenting is a form of deliberately manipulating. Picking my kid up when he's about to fall down a slide is deliberately manipulating. Handing him a banana is deliberately manipulating. We are deliberately manipulating children constantly and for critically good reasons.
You have a good point. I really meant deliberately manipulating with the intent of making them want to buy things, and especially manipulating their emotions to make them think their lives will be so much better if only they had the product being advertised, which is exactly what advertising aimed at kids tries to do
Upon a second reading I can see more specificity due to the focus on "advertising". I still think that unpacking what is good and what is bad advertising is a difficult line to draw.
Statements like "manipulating children is bad" are kinda worthless statements. They are simply inflammatory. We need to speak more precisely and with more clarity in order to elevate each other's understanding. We cannot simply make simple statements for decades and expect things to progress in any meaningful way. The conversation itself needs to change.
Correct. But I think the intention is conveyed in the wording itself. When somebody says "deliberately manipulating", you can fill in the extra "for one's own benefit and with no regard to the well-being of the manipulated party" automatically.
I really hated growing up with Transformers and He-Man and all of the other TV shows that were animated versions of toys I played with. Wait. I didn't hate that at all.
How is that possible? Don't long ads cost the advertiser more? It doesn't seem reasonable that you could launch someone into a 44 minute tangent of your choosing.
They're skippable; I don't know the YouTube costing, but I presume they're not much more expensive (because everyone skips) - the real expensive rolls are the shorter non-skippable ones.
I've mostly seen them on kids shows (kids are unlikely to skip an ad at all anyway, though they should probably be taught how to) but one or two on other shows. There was a five? ten? minute chick-fil-a ad over Christmas if I remember correctly, about a girl and her grandfather making shoes or something.
I wish the FTC would also look at Roblox more carefully. So many parents blindly let their children play Roblox allowing them to get sucked into pay 2 win schemes, NFC trading and advergames.
I can’t really think of harms I suffered as a child from watching ads. It probably made me want to buy more stuff but since I was a kid I had to ask my parents and they usually said no. I was slightly sad but then I got over it. So if anything it probably taught me to be a more discerning consumer that wouldn’t buy anything just because of an ad.
If we hide the real world from children too much then how do we expect them to learn to deal with it all at once? They will turn 18, get a credit card, and be bombarded with ads they haven’t learned to control.
Unless you want to argue that ads shouldn’t be shown to adults either (which has major free speech issues) I think it’s better for kids to learn to deal with them responsibly.
If they featured celebrities and cartoons and vegetables came with toys, as well as stopping the ads for garbage food...I'd guess more likely than not, we would go back to more typical levels of child obesity.
In these kinds of moments I wish we had a parallel universe simulator because I would put pretty much any amount of money on that not being true.
The fact that kids crave fat, protein, and sugar and don't like vegetables isn't some mystery or a product of Cap'n Crunch and is as old as refined sugar. What do you think those visions of sugar plums were all about? They're growing and their bodies are sending them the "more calories" signal 24/7. When I was in HS I could put down two Chipotle burritos without breaking a sweat. When I bake for my nephews I have to make them sickeningly sweet to my own pallet but they practically unhinge their jaws to eat it faster. Little kids also haven't developed a taste for bitter and sour which adults for some reason forget and act shocked they don't like broccoli. It stopped being bitter to you.
I put all my chips on the fact that I had nowhere to expend all the excess energy. My neighborhood didn't have a park, I got a 30 minute recess, and the only entertainment that was readily available growing up was books, tv, and video games.
Are the kids the ones buying the cereal and candy?
I got cornflakes, oatmeal, etc. If I wanted sweet, I got a few berries thrown in. Up to the point that the kids start earning their own money, parents decide what they eat.
The sticking point for me is informed consent. We don't consider children to be capable of giving informed consent, which is why they generally can't enter into contracts. It feels like advertising has become so omnipresent that we don't even consider that to be entering a contract, but it is.
They're handing away their data or having their desires manipulated, and I don't think children can be reasonably asked to make a judgement on whether that's a good decision for them or not.
I do see the point that you're making about turning 18. Fortunately, I think that's somewhat of a self-limiting problem. If kids turning 18 genuinely can't withstand the ads, they'll start filing for bankruptcy and credit card companies will stop issuing them lines of credit.
You're right; I saw booze ads (Cinzano comes to mind - and Tia Maria). I don't remember seeing cigarette ads; but I remember a memorable ad for Hamlet cigars.
Nintendo and Disney are the most egregious for this. I see the effects on adults, people completely obsessed with their corporate mascots.
Seems like every Zelda game is described by their fans as the 'Greatest Game of All Time', despite flaws that would be called out if the corporate mascots were not in the game.
On a similar note, seeing the iphone use in teens due to the bubble color makes me think this is manipulating people with in-group bias which is extremely strong among teens. I personally remember begging my mom for clothes that were popular(abercrombie/american eagle).
I'm not sure the solution, but as an adult, I hate these companies for manipulating people.
> Seems like every Zelda game is described by their fans as the 'Greatest Game of All Time', despite flaws that would be called out if the corporate mascots were not in the game.
The first (and only) Zelda game I played was Breath of the Wild, and it was indeed one of the best games I've ever played. Certainly Nintendo is guilty of peddling mascots as monetary vehicles, but there is substance in the occasional great video game they develop, so I wouldn't necessarily put them in the same category as Disney...
But Disney, on the other hand...they are a merchandise company -- full stop. Everything they do funnels directly into the licensing and selling merchandise (and not just to children -- those Loungefly backpacks are basically a contagion for adults). This made them $56.2 _billion_ in 2021.
If you have young kids, it's incredibly hard to avoid the gravity well of toys, apparel, and all the other merchandise that Disney vomits out. And the funnel is the entertainment they produce, which is often feel-goody to the point where you begin to pass them off in your head as benign.
> I think deliberately manipulating kids is heinous
Agreed. It's also extremely lucrative, and far predates the Internet. Manipulating kids is one of the most lucrative things a business can do, because getting the kids to ask the parents to buy something is far far more effective than even a close friend suggesting they buy something.
99% of what I buy my kids based on their requests is not from ads. It’s stuff like they see an ice cream shop or whatever. (I guess you could consider that a form of ad)
I think they are exposed to far less ads than I was actually because TV ads are mostly gone. I never hear them asking for some random toy like the kind I remember from my youth.
Facebook (and much of social media) is the modern day Philip Morris peddling addictive experiences...except the harm is way less obvious. Folks arent getting cancer, but they are wrecking their mental health. The difference is social media falls under the first amendment and is much harder to regulate.
I think it’s a plausible argument. But shouldn’t we regulate the whole industry then instead of going after a single company?
Also there are clearly some benefits from social media so I wouldn’t want to get rid of all of it. For example messaging doesn’t seem so bad in terms of harm vs value. Or things like Facebook Groups that are more like discussion forums (even HN itself falls under this!)
Yeah I agree. Singling out the largest player is silly. We've basically given different nations the ability to control the thoughts of society. Social media hasnt been organic for a long time. Organic social media grows until it is consumed by bots and bad actors.
I dont think removing social media is a solution. I do think some sort of realID for social media that could identify every user is real & a certain age would be beneficial (think Worldcoin but not done by a private entity). I think this alone would solve a large issue around social media. The other requirement that should exist is some balanced discussion to remove the echo chamber effects. Amplifying only certain thought patterns is dangerous.
Take reddit for example. A single bot farm with 100 or so accounts can effectively manipulate entire communities.
I keep waiting for someone to scream this out in one of the committee hearings. Going after one company and attempting to ban them from the country is pretty clearly Constitutionally dubious. But passing strict data privacy laws isn't. They must know this.
It also helps that the company they started with is the largest in the industry, and that any regulations targeted at them will affect a couple billions people.
The content of social media is protected by the first amendment. Any specific business model isn't. You're not entitled to make money off of other people's speech... or data.
For sure. I sincerely hope we look back in 5-15 years (sooner the better) and are aghast at letting children and teens having unrestricted total access to social media. Hell, even adults I hope it is frowned upon - at least social media in its current state. It feels like it will be looking back at smoking and being like what the hell "you just LET people receive push notifications from the worlds largest companies who have teams of PhD data scientists optimizing the content delivery tho maximize your engagement (ie addiction) !?!? Fucking irresponsible!"
The government is THE entity entrusted with creating personal property rights, amongst a lot of other things. (Assuming colonial debt as a national debt being how the revolutionaries bought their new country legitimacy.) So it’s about time for government to grant people sovereignty over their data and attention by creating some new personal property rights and protections. Keeping PII should be billable hours. Attention should be billable hours. If not that then something similar.
I really wish I could get rid of my FB account. It's so pervasive in my social life that it would things difficult and I would miss out on events with my friends. My family uses it for video chat, my friends use it to organize social activities, I'm on a recreational kickball team that uses it for team communication, etc.
I recently deactivated and a few weeks later a friend asked if I was going to an event he invited me to. I had no idea anyone invited to me anything. I had my invite me to an event and it let her invite and didn't tell either of us I was invited to something... If you invite a deactivated account there's apparently no indication the person won't see it.
Weird, in my circle no one uses it anymore. Although to be fair I’m not convinced that most of the alternatives are likely to be much better. I don’t see why Google wouldn’t be doing exactly the same stuff.
At least there is Signal. I’ve moved most of my messaging there.
Just rip off the band-aid. Your friends can't invite you to things on Facebook if your account is fully deleted, and they'll be forced to reach out in different ways. The first 6-12 months are hard, but if you can make it past that, you won't miss it. I setup a Discord server for my family, and we're enjoying a "semi-private" social network that way -- it works well, even for grandparents. I wrote a bot that let's them save photos posted in Discord to their digital picture frame in their living room, and they love it.
There was a point in time where you could sign up for just Facebook Messenger without making a Facebook account, but of course they removed that cause they want everyone to have a Facebook account.
Not to defend Facebook, but this headline is misleading.
FTC proposes banning Facebook from launching any new products, which is a huge deal. Also from monetizing youth data, which is likely not a serious revenue stream.
It’s clickbait to claim it’s the youth part that made company furious, no matter what you think about Facebook.
Also: it is curious that the FTC is acting this way now considering it just got a whole lot easier to take them to an Article III court under Axon vs FTC et al.
Truly disgusting to allow an under-13 to talk to an unapproved friend.
Companies were never meant to have incentives to provide products to such people and not their guardians. There is a reason we make it illegal for that underclass to own or earn capital, and the ability for companies to circumvent this and provide services anyway through indirect revenue is unpalatable. Cutting that off is necessary, as any good-thinking small-person-owner will know.
It's a slippery slope we have to cut down on now, lest small people start expecting to go outside without parental overseers or questioning their owners' authority.
And to clarify in a child comment, yes I dislike Facebook and think it has huge harmful externalities, yes I dislike advertising and think it has huge harmful externalities, but I also dislike that the justification from the FTC I read in this article and in the others I checked against lacks respect for basic human liberties and has huge harmful externalities and I don't feel obligated to overlook that on the basis of any other dispreference.
Why is FTC making sure the biggest social media company plays by the rules that they continue to break? I find it hard to believe that this question is in good faith.
TikTok is currently being considered for a total ban in the US isn’t it? And it’s banned on US government devices? Not the greatest example to use for your point.
This is the equivalent of someone complaining to the policeman that pulled them over for speeding that another car just sped past them and he's not giving them a ticket too.
Haha. targeting one specific car plate at each turn while never saying a word to every other car speeding up (to other companies doing the same stuff as well as other big monopolies).
It is because Facebook has lots of money and users just like TikTok today, but Facebook was the biggest at the time when they got fined in the billions.
If the FTC is getting upset at Facebook over privacy issues, then they should equally apply this to all social networks, especially TikTok which is just as equally as bad if not worse today and should also be fined in the multi-billions of dollars if the are to continue to operate in the US with a worse track record of privacy violations. [0] [1] [2]
A massive multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok is much better than a total ban.
318 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadIf you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.
There is just no big benefit to justify the amount of damage done to mental health and privacy.
For sake of not letting a bogus argument go unanswered: Google and Microsoft offer generic tools that have very broad social benefit outside the monetization of user data.
That said, I would prefer it if the FTC would address data monetization practices at all tech companies--it is a fine business model, but it is troublesome as a necessary addition to my spreadsheet or the operating system for my desktop/laptop/phone-sized computer.
If your only concern is data handling, though, then fair enough.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lets-talk-tween/2017...
IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true.
It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, pull tons of people in, and will then start to make use of all that precious data.
It would boggle my mind if somebody was actually surprised by this.
It had a purpose, it solved it better than previous options, and (critically!) it had a ceiling on total addressable userbase.
Once it metastisized into "extract maximum revenue from maximum number of people," I think its soul was lost to greed.
But eventually they burnt so much goodwill trying to justify their stock valuation that at least were I am, all those informal groups have moved away from Facebook. Some managed to substitute the infrastructure quite well, some suffer quite noticeably. But none of them would consider going back. And openness to newcomers, discoverability, that has all suffered quite considerably.
A topic for another discussion is why society allows corporations to become parasitic and cancerous without any checks or balances.
Germany would probably be the best counter-example to look at? Re: how to create and maintain medium-sized businesses that are still efficient.
You mean, when it was a sort of amihotornot for Harvard students?
At least for a subset, 2005-2006, back when they had network pages. You'd gain access based on your email's domain, it has a shared calendar and worked as a planning location for everyone at the same college/university.
I'd say there is a case for it being neutral for society for a fair chunk of time in its early days. Things don't have to be good/bad binary.
I generally agree.
FWIW, I just listened to an interesting CoRecursive interview with Facebook's Jason Gauci (February 2021) [0]. He addresses that question head-on at this point [1] in the interview.
[0] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/
[1] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/#the-soci...
P.S. I don't listen to many podcasts, but CoRecursive is great. I highly recommend other software developers check it out.
^^ THIS !
I remember when Apple hardened iOS so that Facebook & co. could no longer mis-use the system do do evil things such as silently monitor pasteboard contents.
Facebook took out enormous billboard ads at the time in major cities on which they exercised their tiny woe-is-me violin, trying to pretend Apple was the evil one.
Who is arguing that facebook should be able to sideload their own app onto users iphones?
That's the antithesis of what user freedom advocates argue for. The argument is "it's my device, I should be able to run what I want on it." Not, "anybody should be able to do whatever they want on my device." The latter is more an argument for Apple's status quo where they have full control of the device (that they ostensibly no longer own) and the user does not.
The scale of the remediation (no new launches) doesn't really match the scale of the accusation in the press release (Messenger kids once had a bug where kids could circumvent parental controls if the parents didn't pay attention).
The Order to Show Cause includes a comprehensive, in-depth review of FB's privacy programs - and it's almost entirely redacted. What did FB mess up so badly that the FTC feels this is the appropriate response?
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/C4365-Commissio...
Instead of actually fixing the issues, they removed the ability to opt-out of personalization (lol)
If you keep pointing out how toxic Tiktok is to the young you can expect people to start looking into other apps that the young use as well.
Maybe the headline should be "Meta opposed to proposed FTC ban on monetizing youth data".
For some remote first companies that communicate primarily through platforms like Slack or email, this should be trivial to do.
https://i.imgur.com/abRLZYO.png
Interestingly enough, that is in fact basically what the first few paragraphs of the article say pretty clearly. How this kind of headline exists in a tech driven publication who knows right.
In the same way that an agency can propose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
Corporations can act through their agents. Corporations cannot feel their agents’ emotions because they are unable to feel.
> A Meta spokesperson told Ars that the FTC's proposed changes are "a political stunt," saying that the FTC gave Meta "no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory." Meta considers the FTC's proposed changes to the privacy order "a new low."
To be fair, the spokesperson's tone, and the insistence that they'll be fighting, does make them sound pretty pissed off.
That's why I don't work there though. Don't think the "rank and file" have much leg to stand on, its a decade of this shit.
You can safely think "Facebook wants me to think it thinks this" when a Spokesperson speaks.
You can safely think "Part of Facebook thinks this" when an individual employee speaks.
You can safely think "Facebook Corporate wants me to believe this" when an executive speaks.
All of these individuals speak for Facebook, because they are a part of the collective that is Facebook.
Treat Corporate as the brain, the PR department as the voice, and that's "what the corporation thinks"
The rest of the collective doesn't matter basically at all for this.
> “Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets." [1]
And forget about rank-and-file; Zuckerberg overrides decisions of senior management...
> During a company meeting this month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said Zuckerberg made some hires over the “objections” of senior executives — and sometimes rebuffed their advice in order to fire people, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. [2]
[1] http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/45290cc0...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-mark-zuckerber...
I listened to this CoRecursive episode about the history of Zstandard compression algorithm and how FB allowed the author, Yann Collet, to fully open source it while other companies wanted to keep it proprietary.
https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann-collet/
This doesn’t justify or make up for the wrongs that happen because of the social network but the company, and the reasons they want to work there, can be more nuanced.
Like, that's great, but...
Does FB really care about React’s contribution to the community? Or is it just happy to pay a few salaries to look good?
For different projects that works differently well.
If you love making an open source thing, and you love its users, at some level it doesn't really matter why Meta pays your paycheck. They're still paying your paycheck while you get to do something you love.
And where would we be without React? Chaos, chaos everywhere…
If your argument is that it's not a big deal or not a solvable problem, then what's the point of doing anything? Should we ignore every problem because it existed in the past?
I just don't understand what these types of comments are supposed to accomplish. It's anti-progress to the point of absurdity.
In medieval times you could rape children, and suffer no consequences. There was no age of concent. Somehow society has survived.
Feudal lord had the right to fuck your wife before you, and take her virginity, somehow society has survived.
Nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, somehow society has survived.
1/3 of Europe has died of the plague. Somehow society has survived
Facebook has revenue greater than the GDP of all but 67 countries. Allowing 10 engineers to give away some crap for free doesn't quite balance the scales imo.
---
Facebook's utility for me is now near zero, possibly negative. I'm only there because mom is there. Mom's only there because her friends are there.
Moving out of that morass - at least, until mom stops using computers is impossible.
At least with Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, etc, I (currently) have meaningful alternatives.
Network effects suck.
Why should that keep you there, though? She's your mother. Surely, you can talk with her directly even if she is on Facebook.
How this is legal is astonishing.
React
PyTorch
Flow
React Native
Folly
RocksDB
llama
HHVM
Relay
Fresco
zstd
Buck
Sapling
Redex
JSX
infer
If you're a front-end engineer or dealing with web technologies, Facebook has repeatedly pulled the football away.
You're free to fork these repos and maintain them yourself if you'd like, and that freedom exists only because the code was made available under a FOSS license in the first place.
The alternative to this situation is not "open source code maintained in perpetuity", but "code that was never made open source in the first place".
There's no obligation for maintaining or ensuring that the open source code remains useful to you, so the criticism that projects are being open sourced and ignored might be valid, but the criticism that Facebook doesn't release major projects as FOSS is not.
We've all been spoiled by the hard work people have been putting in maintaining their FOSS repos, to the point where we now expect it. Most FOSS licenses include wording such as: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” and that's what these repos are: code provided to you as is, free of charge and no strings attached (other than what the license specifies).
We’ve all seen fauxpen source projects close up shop immediately after their corporate developer deems them useless. Or better yet, actively reject all external contributions.
If they can do it, it's OSS through and through.
If the company decides to withdraw support and the project dies, it's not the fault of the company. The community was just not interested in embracing it.
The free software definition presents the criteria for whether a particular software program qualifies as free software.
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2)
* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
So in that sense, yes it’s a loaded question, however I think it’s a valid contextual assumption given the context of the article and comments.
I completely don't follow this - I think you're referencing something I'm unfamiliar with?
It’s reasonable to assume criticism in that context
I think it was made very clear int their own words that their intention was to defend Facebook in anticipation of comments critical of FB.
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/enron-s-philanthropy...
Also, to the point of OSS, let's not forget all the free bug fixes and labour they get from the community at large for having open-sourced their software.
Generally effective means manipulative. Screening children from this seems quite beneficial at first glance.
Actually the most manipulative ads are “brand” ads for things like Coke or BMW. These have no significant difference to their competitors so their only strategy is to manipulate you into associating them with more positive emotions.
The goal of companies like Facebook and Google is to know everything about you while you only know what they want you know.
It's not like it needs to work the way it does online right now or it can't work at all. Facebook just likes the way it works because that's their business model.
That’s just the first four I saw and I’d say that’s actually phenomenal targeting. It’s some very niche things that apply to me quite well.
Do you think kids are smart enough to understand advertising? Or resist the temptations they bring?
Personally I think all advertising targeted at children should be banned completely. Little Jimmy doesn’t need to be bombarded with ads for Peppa Pig merch. Especially if those ads are targeted just for him. Gross!
I think parents have some responsibility to teach their children how to interact with the world. I’ve been teaching mine about the difference between ads and non-ad content. That will prepare them for life as adults. Childhood is actually a great time to learn about ads because your parents prevent you from wasting too much money on it.
I would in fact encourage this go the other way and ads become more highly regulated/banned outright because mass propaganda feels unhealthy but this might crash our economy and the economics of the internet considering how so many business plans and large amounts of revenue in large businesses don’t work without that (and all that would be also politically infeasible / and the US’s free speech amendment might prevent it in America so it would have to come out of the EU and Canada first). It would be offset by businesses running more cheaply but I suspect that’s not much compared to a potentially reduced amount of income overall from consumers on “frivolous shit they don’t need”.
Define the word "target".
I would argue that for the likes of Facebook and Google, they consider anyone fair game.
Of course they would never use the word "target", but ...
Not saying everything FB does is ok but I think we are going too crazy with the government intervention. I don’t exactly see that FB was committing deliberate fraud based on this latest report (but a lot is redacted). It seems more like there were just some bugs? As a dev I worry about a world in which we expect perfection from all software.
Maybe not in America, but WhatsApp is basically mandatory in some countries. Schools will send out communications exclusively over it and many businesses exclusively use it for payment. 92% of Israeli phones have it installed. For some, the option is Facebook or not participating in society.
A closed circuit camera system that exists for the purpose of helping to prevent or resolve any criminal issues and is otherwise not used for anything else is far different from tracking non-FB users (eg, "he isn't forcing you to use Facebook") and profiling them via trackers embedded on websites that you may use even without a FB account.
You do not expect a stranger to track everything possible about you and then go on to sell that data from a casual interaction.
You don't have to actually use Facebook in order to have your privacy violated by Facebook.
This came out years ago in Congressional hearings. It's also why lots of people who never had Facebook accounts got privacy-violation money from Facebook — it created profiles of people in the backgrounds of photos.
Browser fingerprinting is how they are able to track you across the internet despite having no connection with facebook.
One way to fix this to stop your PC from communicating with any facebook servers.
- Firefox provides an extension for this.
There must be other methods that I am not aware of but if anybody knows.
Unless you are constantly on guard and take defensive measures, Facebook spies on you even if you don't use it. So he is forcing you to contribute to Facebook.
Tell that to anyone who needs to use an Oculus device for work. Facebook required, friend!
1. Data Privacy - They will try to find every possible way to sell your data and not get noticed. An easy example of that is when fb started throwing fits when apple didnt let it track users activity across all apps by default. They tried to hide behind the fact that it would "severely" affect small businesses.
2. Depleting Mental Health - They will try to find every possible way to keep you engaged on the platform. That is often done by algorithmically promoting content that inspires extreme emotions in you. Emotions such as anger, jealousy, lust etc. Experiencing these emotions for an extended period of time EVERYDAY is not healthy for maintaining a good emotional balance.
3. Fake News - They will try to find every possible way to shrug off responsibility for spreading fake news. This affects politics by creating echo chambers, healthcare by preventing people from believing in the correct diagnostics and other areas.
I agree that nobody is stopping you from opening facebook, but facebook is like smoking. Everyone only wants to try it once, and then many fall into the downward spiral.
I was reading somewhere that how resisting facebook and all of facebook products everyday is not possible with the will power reserves that an average human has. This is because he is competing with psychologists and researchers employed by facebook who have been studying human behaviour for years.
I do not have any sources to back my claims. Social Media has personally affected me a lot so I keep reading about the phenomena out of curiosity. Here's one little article that breifly describes what I am talking about. https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peop...
- Nobody is forcing me to use youtube, but youtube has years of collection of important tutorials and educational material.
- Nobody is forcing me to use facebook (and its products) but fb has gathered users over the years that forces me to use the product in order to remain a part of the social sphere. Kids feeling left out in high-school because of not using instagram is an example.
- Nobody is forcing me to use Netflix, but if I want to watch the trendy movie that my friends are talking about, I do not have a choice.
If you see the pattern, tech companies by the virtue of their money have created a social effect where they might not "force" me to use their product but I have to use it if I wish to remain a part of the society.
It is difficult to swim upstream and the companies by the virtue of their deep pockets have shifted the flow that helps them make the most money.
Because his income depends on it, of course. Not giving a shit is table stakes for these companies.
If there are already existing laws that cover this, the FTC is just doing their enforcement job.
Fuck combinations (to use the original 1900s phrasing); restore competition.
* Not necessarily actions I would call “thumbscrews” like their current proposed penalties for Facebook, and mostly actions I think are appropriate, but it is still an indicator of who they’re willing to take action against.
Can you explain this? What about courts, and the President, and Congress?
When the cyborg does something I like, I am happy and say "good cyborg, nice cyborg". I do not call the cyborg a friend, but rather I approve its current behavior. That is what democracy is: it's living with a cyborg that you don't fully control. It's not a friend, its not an enemy, its vast complex slow machine that is a thing we put up with because it's better than nothing.
The primary alternative is a coherent cyborg fully owned and operated by one person. Humans are always tempted by this vision of a government that is finally all good, all friend. Yet we have learned time and again that this almost always is even greater misery. (The exception is when the scale is smaller and the autocrat is capable and the need is immediate and finite. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew comes to mind. Startup leaders can also fall in this category.)
Religion has entered the chat.
Parenting in general has entered the cat.
(That said, I do agree that we need boundaries on the manipulation of younger minds. I've seen others make this analogy before: We don't let kids buy cigarettes in stores -- why should they have the full force of addictive algorithmic social media unleashed on them? [for that matter, why should adults, but that's another story])
For example, teaching and parenting is a form of deliberately manipulating. Picking my kid up when he's about to fall down a slide is deliberately manipulating. Handing him a banana is deliberately manipulating. We are deliberately manipulating children constantly and for critically good reasons.
You knew exactly what they meant, why pretend otherwise?
Statements like "manipulating children is bad" are kinda worthless statements. They are simply inflammatory. We need to speak more precisely and with more clarity in order to elevate each other's understanding. We cannot simply make simple statements for decades and expect things to progress in any meaningful way. The conversation itself needs to change.
Not sure what I feel about it.
I still feel a bit different about cartoons that were toy ads vs pure toy ad, somehow.
I've mostly seen them on kids shows (kids are unlikely to skip an ad at all anyway, though they should probably be taught how to) but one or two on other shows. There was a five? ten? minute chick-fil-a ad over Christmas if I remember correctly, about a girl and her grandfather making shoes or something.
If we hide the real world from children too much then how do we expect them to learn to deal with it all at once? They will turn 18, get a credit card, and be bombarded with ads they haven’t learned to control.
Unless you want to argue that ads shouldn’t be shown to adults either (which has major free speech issues) I think it’s better for kids to learn to deal with them responsibly.
The fact that kids crave fat, protein, and sugar and don't like vegetables isn't some mystery or a product of Cap'n Crunch and is as old as refined sugar. What do you think those visions of sugar plums were all about? They're growing and their bodies are sending them the "more calories" signal 24/7. When I was in HS I could put down two Chipotle burritos without breaking a sweat. When I bake for my nephews I have to make them sickeningly sweet to my own pallet but they practically unhinge their jaws to eat it faster. Little kids also haven't developed a taste for bitter and sour which adults for some reason forget and act shocked they don't like broccoli. It stopped being bitter to you.
I put all my chips on the fact that I had nowhere to expend all the excess energy. My neighborhood didn't have a park, I got a 30 minute recess, and the only entertainment that was readily available growing up was books, tv, and video games.
I got cornflakes, oatmeal, etc. If I wanted sweet, I got a few berries thrown in. Up to the point that the kids start earning their own money, parents decide what they eat.
Nintendo and Disney corporate mascots appear to be classic characters.
Apple makes products that make you look cool.
Bud Light is the beer of young, good looking people at parties and watching sports.
Ads aren't just selling you a product, they are brand marketing and brand positioning.
They're handing away their data or having their desires manipulated, and I don't think children can be reasonably asked to make a judgement on whether that's a good decision for them or not.
I do see the point that you're making about turning 18. Fortunately, I think that's somewhat of a self-limiting problem. If kids turning 18 genuinely can't withstand the ads, they'll start filing for bankruptcy and credit card companies will stop issuing them lines of credit.
Nor me. But in those days, they couldn't push cigarettes, booze and gambling at us.
So I'm wrong (forgetful old man!)
Seems like every Zelda game is described by their fans as the 'Greatest Game of All Time', despite flaws that would be called out if the corporate mascots were not in the game.
On a similar note, seeing the iphone use in teens due to the bubble color makes me think this is manipulating people with in-group bias which is extremely strong among teens. I personally remember begging my mom for clothes that were popular(abercrombie/american eagle).
I'm not sure the solution, but as an adult, I hate these companies for manipulating people.
The first (and only) Zelda game I played was Breath of the Wild, and it was indeed one of the best games I've ever played. Certainly Nintendo is guilty of peddling mascots as monetary vehicles, but there is substance in the occasional great video game they develop, so I wouldn't necessarily put them in the same category as Disney...
But Disney, on the other hand...they are a merchandise company -- full stop. Everything they do funnels directly into the licensing and selling merchandise (and not just to children -- those Loungefly backpacks are basically a contagion for adults). This made them $56.2 _billion_ in 2021.
If you have young kids, it's incredibly hard to avoid the gravity well of toys, apparel, and all the other merchandise that Disney vomits out. And the funnel is the entertainment they produce, which is often feel-goody to the point where you begin to pass them off in your head as benign.
Agreed. It's also extremely lucrative, and far predates the Internet. Manipulating kids is one of the most lucrative things a business can do, because getting the kids to ask the parents to buy something is far far more effective than even a close friend suggesting they buy something.
I think they are exposed to far less ads than I was actually because TV ads are mostly gone. I never hear them asking for some random toy like the kind I remember from my youth.
Yeah, i hate religion too.
It's a borderline national security issue, too.
Also there are clearly some benefits from social media so I wouldn’t want to get rid of all of it. For example messaging doesn’t seem so bad in terms of harm vs value. Or things like Facebook Groups that are more like discussion forums (even HN itself falls under this!)
I dont think removing social media is a solution. I do think some sort of realID for social media that could identify every user is real & a certain age would be beneficial (think Worldcoin but not done by a private entity). I think this alone would solve a large issue around social media. The other requirement that should exist is some balanced discussion to remove the echo chamber effects. Amplifying only certain thought patterns is dangerous.
Take reddit for example. A single bot farm with 100 or so accounts can effectively manipulate entire communities.
The problem with what Worldcoin was doing wasn't that they were a private entity.
Yes. The only problem I have with the government going after TikTok is that they should be going after the entire industry.
You go after one company to establish legal precedent. Then you go after the whole industry.
You are the one who wants to visit my website because it provides you with value and I am now obligated by force to pay you?
I recently deactivated and a few weeks later a friend asked if I was going to an event he invited me to. I had no idea anyone invited to me anything. I had my invite me to an event and it let her invite and didn't tell either of us I was invited to something... If you invite a deactivated account there's apparently no indication the person won't see it.
At least there is Signal. I’ve moved most of my messaging there.
FTC proposes banning Facebook from launching any new products, which is a huge deal. Also from monetizing youth data, which is likely not a serious revenue stream.
It’s clickbait to claim it’s the youth part that made company furious, no matter what you think about Facebook.
Also: it is curious that the FTC is acting this way now considering it just got a whole lot easier to take them to an Article III court under Axon vs FTC et al.
Companies were never meant to have incentives to provide products to such people and not their guardians. There is a reason we make it illegal for that underclass to own or earn capital, and the ability for companies to circumvent this and provide services anyway through indirect revenue is unpalatable. Cutting that off is necessary, as any good-thinking small-person-owner will know.
It's a slippery slope we have to cut down on now, lest small people start expecting to go outside without parental overseers or questioning their owners' authority.
If the FTC is getting upset at Facebook over privacy issues, then they should equally apply this to all social networks, especially TikTok which is just as equally as bad if not worse today and should also be fined in the multi-billions of dollars if the are to continue to operate in the US with a worse track record of privacy violations. [0] [1] [2]
A massive multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok is much better than a total ban.
[0] https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2021/dutch-dpa-tik...
[1] https://www.scmagazine.com/news/privacy/uk-tiktok-16m-fine-c...
[2] https://fortune.com/2022/12/22/tiktok-data-privacy-blunder-c...
It doesn’t, exclusively.
Lots of social media companies have had run ins with the FTC.