> Meta, along with Snap, TikTok, and Google, now face hundreds of lawsuits claiming they are to blame for adolescents and young adults suffering anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and sleeplessness as a result of their addiction to social media. The companies also face scores of complaints by public school districts on behalf of students alleging that the platforms have created a public nuisance.
How often again do you hear billionaires say "Oh no, I wish I had been more ethical and not made mountains of cash off by shitty behavior", because I'm not having any recollections of this.
The fines are just a cost of doing business for them.
No member of the Sackler's ever went to prison. I can't speak to SBF, but Madoff made the crucial error of defrauding other rich people. I bet if he'd have stuck to old people and poor people he never would've been convicted.
Most businesses need to buy their raw materials to produce their products. With Meta, the raw material is consumer data, which users have been giving away to Meta freely.
The fines only slightly raise the cost of this raw material from $0, so it's unlikely to deter Meta's behavior until someone faces a more severe penalty there.
What people think and feel in private is often not what they admit in public. For many of these individuals, there is massive incentive not to admit such things.
Doesn't make it right, but we shouldn't assume the people responsible don't feel responsible simply because we aren't hearing about it.
I mean the same holds true for what people feel about what happens to them versus what happens to others. You are measured by your external actions not the internal "well maybe I shouldn't have murdered the world" voice the rest of us don't hear.
If we don't like how something works, we should understand the factors that shape it. If someone's internal preferences are contrary to their actions, that's worth knowing, as it says something about the strength of the incentive structures. This is true for any person of any status, not least the rich, who, ideally, should not be destructive forces in society.
Private preferences and feelings are relevant to the analysis.
This -- just ask Microsoft with their refusal to fix default browser behavior, even in the latest versions of Win11 which are supposedly fixed. I guess having Edge be the default is just too juicy to resist even with that €561 fine. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...
It'd be great if the USA had some kind of effective consumer protection agency, but I guess then we might have fewer billionaires here.
Kids have been having those problems well before social media came along, so it's quite a bold claim to say they know social media made them worse. But it's a fair bet to say not a dime from the lawsuit will go to a single victim. So I'd take a really skeptical look at both sides.
> Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study—when they were about 13 years old—and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults.
> Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in the risk of teenage suicide. Although several factors play a role in an individual’s choice to take their life, recent studies have established connections between mental health issues such as depression and suicidal ideation, and social media usage.
I'm going to call out this fallacy every time I see it. Maybe call it the dosage fallacy?
Yes, bullying has always been a problem. Yes, society has always been force-feeding kids dangerously unattainable body images. The problem is not that these things have just been repackaged into a different kind of book or TV show. The problem is that it takes much less effort than any time in history to fake a "community" all parroting the same dangerous lie.
The old adage went "If I run into one asshole today, then I ran into an asshole. If I run into 100 assholes today, then I am the asshole, and I should reflect", and it was pretty good advice. But if one asshole can create the illusion that you ran into 100 of them, what's the appropriate response. The whole problem with facebook and instagram is that it has made coordinating bullying campaigns much MUCH cheaper from a labor standpoint. Couple that with the constant drive to keep kids on the platform and you have a system that seems purpose built to drive already anxious kids to suicide.
I can 100% keep my kids off social media. But I can't keep their classmates from assembling pages impersonating them and driving bullying via that avenue. Facebook and Instagram's engagement algorithm plays a serious role in that operation.
There's been a significant increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents since ~2012. It's not just business as usual, and it's significant enough that the same increase is visible in hospital admissions for self-harm. Social Media seems to be the only explanation that fits the timing and scale of the issue:
> Meta, along with Snap, TikTok, and Google, now face hundreds of lawsuits claiming they are to blame for adolescents and young adults suffering anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and sleeplessness as a result of their addiction to social media. The companies also face scores of complaints by public school districts on behalf of students alleging that the platforms have created a public nuisance.
Oh I'm sure this particular lawsuit will be the one that solve these problems once and for all. Hint: it won't. This is performative politicking. Meta and co will continue to pay minuscule fines (not too much though, META is in alot of ETF and mutual funds), they'll continue to spread lobbying money around to both political parties, parents will point fingers (without taking any responsibility), young adults/teens will drone on about "mental health" because its fashionable (if social media is giving you an eating disorder or making you anxious, how about putting down the phone?), and nothing will change.
Things are in fact starting to change, though I wish they happened sooner. The FTC is currently looking to hire child psychologists in an effort to further investigate this kind of claim.
You don't need 'experts' to realize that social media is bad for young people. They are just going to suggest regulating content. I can see it now ... young girls cannot see content showcasing skinny or 'classically beautiful' women, because it gives them a skewed perspective of 'beauty' that may lead to eating disorders. The FTC pats themselves on the back, job well done, and nothing changes. Regulating the internet isn't going to change anything, the genie is out of the bottle. Change starts at home and at school. Put wifi and cell jamming technology in public schools. How many ads are kids shown on public school property? Kids are spending 5 hrs a day on social media. That is insanity. That time needs to be replaced doing productive things; reading books, playing sports, building things.
I agree about the parenting piece. But social media usage spiked for youths when children were given powerful computers in their pockets they have 24/7 access to. I'd argue it's a technical problem as much as a social one. Geofencing social media in public schools seems appropriate. My comment on wifi or cell jamming was hyperbolic.
Stop posturing. You know perfectly well that screens present true as well as false information and media literacy is a matter of distinguishing between the two rather than making categorical assumptions.
Frankly you come off a lot more like Diogenes than Plato.
cell and wifi jammers are illegal (with some very good reasons), so yeah you're going to need some experts
we know what happens when the government creates uninformed regulations, so I think it's worth supporting them when they appear to take a reasonable approach
kids need to be able to operate within the world that technology has created, and parents need informed guidelines and tools to enforce them
the all or nothing approach probably isn't the way to go... how's abstinence only sex education going, for example?
> how's abstinence only sex education going, for example?
Id say that access to Instagram isn't a biological function and normalizing it will lead to it ever entrenched in our lives. Make 18 the age requirement. I don't care about privacy concerns because you have no privacy if you participate with these companies.
> I can see it now ... young girls cannot see content showcasing skinny or 'classically beautiful' women, because it gives them a skewed perspective of 'beauty' that may lead to eating disorders.
Do you actually have any real exposure to the kind of things that are targeted to women on social media? It's more like young girls shouln't get sold that it's reasonable for them to achieve with a full schoolday and budget of a teenager the same appearance as a wealthy woman who has access to time, dieticians, personal trainers, and a plastic surgeon, except the wealthy woman tells you her one secret trick is actually a 75$ green powder she takes in the morning (the powder making company is paying her of course).
yes, I've watched my wife and female friends/family scroll Instagram ... every 3rd post is an example you provided. Body image/beauty issues for women were a thing before Instagram and social media so I don't think regulating the nature of advertisements would change much, at least in any measurable way. There are infinite influencers creating similar content as the advertisements.
If you've seen your wife and female friends scroll Instagram then you know you were inaccurately describing the scenario as trying to ban "classically beautiful" women. The problem is you think it doesn't change anything, maybe because you're ignorant that Instagram knows they are measurably worsening, on a mass scale, the self esteem and body image of young girls. Instagram has the data on all these girls and knows they have a causative relationship with negative body image.
My comment was in regards to what the FTC appointed child psychologists will inevitably suggest: that particular ad content is "bad". It will change absolutely nothing.
I'm not as pessimistic as you. There is more and more evidence (https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...) that social media companies have essentially engineered a harmful addictive drug - at some point they will be held accountable. I do think we are going through the tobacco company phase, where the CEO's will stand before Congress and solemnly state they think their product is not harmful, and even if it is, it is a matter of "freedom" or something.
"Just put down the phone" is this generation's Nancy Reagan "Just say no" moment. It was a joke amongst my young peers back in the day. But the real war on drugs, the War on Tobacco, has been incredibly effective - smoking used to be ubiquitous in the US, now it is just about gone. Social media, with attention-engineered timelines, is tobacco.
> young adults/teens will drone on about "mental health" because its fashionable (if social media is giving you an eating disorder or making you anxious, how about putting down the phone?)
To be fair, for many young adults and teens the parents are demanding the kids have their phones so that the parents can track their location and other surveillance shit.
Additionally, we know for a fact that these social media companies are hiring tams of people with full doctorate degrees in keeping you online and responding. How is a 13 year old's underdeveloped brain supposed to compete with that when most adults can't even do it?
See my second point: how is a young teen supposed to handle something designed by teams of psychologists to keep them engaged in? It's why we don't let children play slot machines or don't allow tobacco advertising to children... they're children. Literally don't have the kind of judgement capacity as adults.
There's a thin line to be walked between privacy and regulation, but Facebook's own research has pointed at the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of children... so I think some scrutiny here is overdue.
> Facebook's own research has pointed at the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of children
Facebook’s own research has found both positive and negative effects, depending on the child’s status among their peers.
The Verge is quick to point out that:
> Instagram makes teen girls feel worse about their bodies
but more discreet in reminding people that fashion magazines, including The Cut (also published by Vox), have the same negative effects and none of the positive ones, like helping gender minority find a safe space, re-socialising people with physical handicaps or anxiety. The critique makes sense —I’m not denying it— but it doesn’t come. from “the algorithm.” It comes from having a lot of money poured into the Instagram creation ecosystem. Instagram has very little control over that as most of it is through brand deals or magazine raising their own profile. That behemoth of money and attention comes from an industry that has decades of well-documented problematic practices behind it, including the unrepentant glorification of using self-starvation and drugs, notably cocaine, to reach unhealthy thinness.
If you condemn Instagram but don’t include that industry among the culprits, you’ll have Snap with unhealthy models, TikTok with unhealthy models, or whatever comes next with unhealthy models.
The people making money from it; either the company itself or the employees working for it that are designing it. They clearly do not have issues with it.
Connected software, with very few exceptions, doesn’t attract a very large audience. For rarer situations, you aren’t going to find that person easily. Having worldwide interest groups (like subreddits, like thematic Discord channels) helps, but is conditioned to people using either Reddit or Discord. Facebook and Instagram still win compared to those two contenders.
That’s of course assuming that Reddit and Discord wouldn’t get much bigger if Meta were to close, but I’m not sure the negative effects would vanish because the owner is different.
is it safe to assume that you've worked at meta at some point? because this comes across as a little defensive
The post is about instagram so I'm talking about instagram, feel free to post an article about magazines if you want to talk about magazines... legislation aimed towards instagram will create precedence to pursue other platforms like tiktok and can also become ingrained as policy. Just because we're focusing on one subject here doesn't mean we're ignoring the others or playing favorites.
The post isn’t about Instagram at the exclusion of the fashion ecosystem: it’s an argument that truncates research that does find that posts that the drop in self-esteem is directly related to seeing posts either from fashion professionals or peers trying to emulate those. You can’t read those studies and think that detail is not part of the key findings.
Those are not two similar but separate problems.
This is like saying that mail bombs are the problem of the post office and not people having access to explosives: the problem isn’t envelopes. It’s people with access to explosives, and FedEx would likely have the same issue—unless federal rules allow them to scan and to refuse to deliver explosives.
I’m not being crass with a bad metaphor: focusing on the support has been a key issue in the argument for a while. Fashion magazines used to be decried as “glossy paper,” but no one thought the difference between magazines sending problematic self-image and serious news was that newspapers came on broad sheets of mate paper. Still, it’s now how the problem is presented: without clear separation.
I did work at Meta on the team looking at Teenagers, and I did raise that point internally: should we look at gambling and alcohol and extend the same rules to fashion? Should we boost peers over brands to avoid problematic ideation?
Those conversations, without the shadow of fashion partners, were generally productive. It wasn’t perfect: the goal remained “engagement” but there were no sacred cows to avoid.
As soon as the findings about teenage body dysmorphia were put in the context of fashion (and presented to one particular executive who cared about advertising more than algorithmic boost), that question was buried. Several friends of mine got blackballed hard not for suggesting Instagram-specific treatment, but for instance, for asking Anna Wintour about the quip where she fat-shamed her best friend in _The September Issue_ (it’s a niche fashion reference, but it’s widely considered a smoking gun in the industry).
There are inherent biases to how Instagram and Facebook work: you post when you achieve something, and there’s a bias towards success, but the internal findings rarely found that those were crippling. Thinness, on the other hand, leads to clear, widespread medical issues. I remember asking if the issue became more prevalent because teenagers didn’t have access to that many magazines before but that the dose effect was comparable. I don’t think anyone has looked into that.
I’m not saying that to disengage Meta’s responsibility: I had argued for explicit filters, like giving teenage boys who know they can’t resist and will behave in a way they think is unhealthy, the ability to exclude scantly clad women in their feed. I used another example, naturally (more typical of internal debate). That idea could have had legs ten years ago; now, with the debate being a lot less constructive, I'm not sure.
the post office did actually implement stricter screening, including x-rays, chemical detection, and GPS tracking, due to mail bombs... in a way mail bombs sped up the process of implementing package tracking systems for everyone — they took a very serious approach to safety despite not being the direct cause of the problem
from my perspective, this is the kind of regulation the FTC should seek out — so for different reasons I agree with your analogy
magazines are an entirely different beast and it's strange to not address that — I have to physically go out of my way to purchase a magazine or have one delivered... that's something I opt in to
people opt-in to instagram, but for teenagers there are much larger stakes involved... instagram has become an integral part of many teens' social life (by design) and they're constantly getting targeted and personalized ads fed to them directly
the fact that the goal remains engagement makes it pretty clear where meta's priorities lie, and it's not on the side of safety
I'm convinced that a decade or two from now we are going to look back on social media exactly like we see the tobacco industry today. The companies knew what they were selling, knew the harm, but put profit over public good.
A fact that gets glossed over too often on HN. It's not just company leadership making these harmful applications: Everyone in the org chart down to the individual engineer is actively doing this--maybe even you, reader of this comment. Did your last "git push" contribute to the problem or help solve it? Will you be proud to tell your teenage grandchildren about what you're creating? You can't just hide behind "boss told me to do it" and wash your hands of the ethics.
In the sense that the downsides are documented in the relevant scientific literature, sure. But popular perception of those downsides is very different. A whole lot of people think those downsides are a pack of lies: that cannabis isn't habit forming, that it doesn't make the average user lazy and complacent, that it doesn't increase the risk of schizophrenia, that driving under the influence of it isn't unsafe and is probably even safer, etc. The downsides are all "DARE lies" according to many of the people who think legalizing cannabis is worth it, who weighed the harms of criminalization against 'cannabis is literally harmless.'
(FWIW I voted to legalize it in Washington in 2012.)
You started down a path that was sane then took a sharp turn.
People recognize that cannabis is habit forming, it's just not as physically addictive as the things we label "dangerous addictive drugs." Most people are addicted to caffeine and we generally accept that it's fine. In the same way that moderate drinking for almost everyone doesn't turn into alcoholism it's the same for cannabis. In contrast everyone who smokes nicotine with any regularity at all will become addicted to it.
"average user lazy and complacent" -- That's like why we're here man.
I don't know a single person who thinks it's fine to drive while high, I do know some stoners whose tolerance for "sober enough to drive" is suspect but that happens when we hit the bars too.
I think you're applying the word harmless to a degree that no one else does and then are arguing against that. Like that cheeseburger increases your risk of heart disease but no one's out here being like "cheeseburgers considered harmful."
You say that, but there's a lot of people who flat out deny it. You're saying that everybody knows this, but that isn't true. Same thing with the driving under the influence thing. A lot of people have told me that they drive safer when high because it heightens their senses and slows their roll and makes them paranoid and therefore careful, and a whole lot of cope like that invented to excuse themselves for doing it.
The downsides of cannabis that you claim everybody understands and recognizes are in fact flat out denied by many people.
IMO no, because legal cannabis is sold with warnings plastered everywhere just like cigarettes. (Unless you think the existing disclosure doesn't properly warn users of the danger)
I bet this case would never have been brought if Facebook had a "This product is addictive" warning every time you open the app.
Personally I think the effects of social media will be overshadowed by the impact of internet pornography. More and more young men every day are lamenting the issues it causes them and more and more relationships are falling apart as a result.
Historically, though, most doomsayers are proven wrong. Let's hope we are too.
exactly so, and we should be doing something about all harmful advertising to children in proportion to the harm that it's causing. If facebook is a larger problem than teen magazines then that's where our attention should be.
They (and by they I mean everyone - not just the PMs, strategists and designers) either flat out don't care or have deluded themselves into thinking they can still make a positive difference. I'm not sure which is worse.
But: I know some PMs and designers at various social media companies. There are also probably many among us here on HN. The thing is, I don't think most of them think to themselves "I am going to build a harmful, exploitative application". I think most of them, like many of us, wake up in the morning and aim to do a good job. To do good work. To design and build to the best of their abilities. AND - importantly - to excel in their careers, become more senior, and make more money.
The problem is their incentives. They are paid, promoted, and bonused to maximize things like "engagement". The more people use their (likely well-intentioned) feature or design, the more they're praised by their colleagues, the more they're promoted, the more they're paid. So they keep doing things to get more people to click and scroll more and get more praise and money for it. They make a button easier to understand - a post easier to share - a picture easier to like. They fill the feeds with more things that more people click and share and like. And they make more money and get more senior and the cycle continues ad infinitum.
I think SOME likely step back and consider the ramifications and maybe look at what they've built and see depression and rage and anger and misery, but those are the ones who aren't promoted and maybe leave the companies because that kind of observation doesn't make number go up. And number must go up to pay for that $5000/month apartment in SF or the $30k/year private school.
And others likely consider this but justify it by all the not-horrible things they see too -- the people who are happy, the influences who make a career out of using their tools - the "creators" who power the "creator economy". And their numbers go up too so they're happy and they tell the PMs and designers and engineers what a good job they're doing and so on and so forth.
So the problem is this cycle will continue as long as it's rewarded as richly as it is. And frankly, the free market WILL continue to reward it as long as number keeps going up (and that number is the stock price). Which is why a lawsuit by someone NOT part of that free-market cycle (or part of a different part of it) might actually make a small dent in this horrible infinite cycle.
I was at a talk awhile back where a designer for a large gambling corporation was asked in the Q&A if they had any ethical concerns working for a company that preys on the vulnerable.
The designers answer was…… interesting. They basically said (and I’m paraphrasing) that their aim every morning was to go to work to ensure that users were not being mistreated by dark patterns and unclear design. Their aim was to was to design the best experience for their users to ensure that their users could find an easy way to stop gambling if they wanted to.
I was on the fence about their stance. However they truly believed that they would never intentionally do harm to users, they always wanted the best for their users.
No, they exist as instances of rationalized disobedience. If the founders had meant something other than "Congress shall make no law," nothing stopped them from saying so.
Yes: censorship is prohibited, at least outside of specific narrow circumstances. Advertising regulations specifically regulate advertising products. Neither of these translate into regulating what can and cannot be said on social media, outside of narrow cases like promotional or sponsored content.
Who said this had to do with censorship of content? The issue with social media is algorithms have been fine tuned to incite FOMO, narcissism, self-esteem issues, etc., and keep people addicted/endlessly scrolling.
The above commenter mentioned censorship. Regardless, the usage of algorithms doesn't mean there's a different set of rules the government can use to regulate it. The incentives you mentioned aren't limited to social media. Traditional media also has these same incentives, and tunes their headlines to be more sensational and attention grabbing. For example: https://blog.tjcx.me/p/new-york-times-ab-testing HN discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419070
No idea what you're saying. The NYT A/B testing headlines is not something that impacts teen mental health in the same way that social media impacts mental health.
We're talking about two different things. You're focused on the legality of this lawsuit. The only thing I'm pointing out is that it isn't very difficult to believe social media has a negative impact on mental health in its current form and is likely the source of teen self-esteem issues, body image issues, and inability to concentrate.
"it isn't very difficult to believe..." is an incredibly weak statement. People believe all sorts of demonstrably false things. I expect much more robust argument than assumptions and speculation. The actual study [1] that kicked off this moral panic, in fact, found that Instagram was more likely to make people feel better than feel worse - despite most media outlets claims the opposite.
Why are you unironically using data from FB themselves?
I wasn't presenting myself as a subject matter expert. I'm speaking as an individual who has lived through the evolution of social media and can see how and why Instagram and TikTok are as addictive as they are.
There absolutely needs to be more research done in this area. Hoping this lawsuit will shine more light on the connection between mental health, concentration issues, and social media.
> Why are you unironically using data from FB themselves?
This was the study that triggered all the "Facebook knew Instagram was harming teens' mental health" stories. It was also the study that formed the basis of the whistleblower's argument.
Practically all social media revenue is derived from advertising, and the lawsuit specifically references advertising regulations. The regulation of advertising would seem to necessarily imply the regulation of any ad-funded social media.
> The regulation of advertising would seem to necessarily imply the regulation of any ad-funded social media.
No, it would imply the regulation of advertisements that are displayed on social media not the actual content or algorithms of social media. Advertisements are regulated, the rest of the content people put on social media is not (outside of very narrow things like credible, true, threats).
Content doesn't suddenly become saddled with the same regulations as advertisements themselves just because it's hosted on an ad-supported platform.
That may be so, but then historians will write about reckless corporate behavior as the harbinger of that repeal. If you keep pushing the boundaries of what's technically allowed and it has bad ends, you'll eventually see the rules changed to stop you.
You and I probably both agree that that a substantial revision to the First Amendment would be terrible, and so what we probably want is for these corporations to act in voluntary consideration of what's socially responsible so that it's not necessary.
These are US-based companies (and there's a reason for that.) If they voluntarily choose to subject themselves to the laws of other countries without constitutional free-speech protections, that's on them.
It says basically these internet companies are not publishers so they aren't libel for things that get printed on their platforms. Libel laws was traditionally how publishers have been "regulated" by the gov't / civil courts.
It's worth noting that these lawsuits are based on junk and non existent science, so just because they're being sued it doesn't mean there's any merit to it. It only means that law firms, ambulance chasers, and grandstanding politicians are using some misplaced anger against Facebook et al to make a buck or raise their political profiles.
Whether courts can pin that sentiment down against prior laws may determine if these "lawsuits have merit" as you say, but the concern and calls for action exist and are growing regardless of how the lawsuits happen to settle.
All these companies know they're a target for accountability now, and even many people inside of them acknowledge a need for reform and possibly restitution. Your comment seems focused on the practical matters of these lawsuits (many of which probably are frivolous or will otherwise be lost), but what really matters are the unsettled societal costs that transcend them.
You may feel that accountability is being "misplaced", but it's much bigger than ambulance chasers and grandstanders. People are genuinely concerned about real problems and are hungry for some kind of action on them.
Social media is harmless, so it's the parents' fault for not restricting their child's use of social media? You can't have this one both ways. If there is a parental responsibility, it is incurred because social media can be harmful, which creates a cause for action.
There’s only so much a parent can do when schools hand out Chromebooks then don’t enforce any proper-use policy. My kid watched anime all day, every day, and there was nothing I could do about it. The school just took a Wonka-esque “No. Stop. Don’t.” approach.
In other conversational contexts on this forum, people laugh and gloat about how ineffectual parental control over internet consumption is. Kids find a way, any attempt to lock things down will be quickly circumvented as kids turn computer hacker to access the unfiltered internet. But as soon as the conversation turns to regulating tech businesses, we get people like you pretending that parents have all the responsibility and can easily ban their kids from social media if they simply bothered to try and that failure to do so is nothing more than the product of parental neglect.
The same plays out with "just talk to your kids". In conversations about regulating businesses, the narrative is that parents can simply talk to their kids and persuade them to not use social media. But in other conversations, the narrative is that kids are naturally rebellious and have a strong "always do the opposite of what my parents suggest" instinct.
Do you honestly believe social media has no impact on teen mental health, whether it be related to self esteem or inability to concentrate? It doesn't seem like a stretch to me at all.
I'm not saying it doesn't, but people argued the same thing w.r.t. violence and video games 20 years ago and that turned out to be a nothingburger. But yet on first glance how can shooting 1000s of people virtually not encourage you to do the same in real life? So we should be skeptical of claims made from "gut feelings".
> these lawsuits are based on junk and non existent science
Unfortunately the studies are reasonably solid. They aren't double-blind control group studies but they are correlative, so not the highest most pure studies. Social media use seems to be heavily correlated with depression and other markers of mental illness and struggle.
That isn't very surprising - social media networks are designed for "engagement" and that comes from strong negative emotions. If you constantly bombard someone with a drip feed of negative emotions.. that probably does them harm.
This doesn't mean the litigants will prevail because correlation and causation aren't 1:1 but it's probably a good idea to push your kid away from social media by explaining this to them.
AGs are elected politicians they campaign on this kind of stuff, so them being behind this particular suit doesn't legitimize it but probably the opposite.
Settling is losing for the company. Company has to pay millions or even tens of millions on fines and be subjected to strong injunctive actions. Since I suck at google, find me a company that won a court case against a state in federal court.
Let's assume that the lawsuits are poorly constructed. That does not necessarily mean that Facebook is harmless. It just means these lawsuits aren't sufficient to prove harm.
Consider this analogy: Just because the DA doesn't have enough evidence to convict in a murder trial, that doesn't mean that the defendant is innocent. I just means they haven't been proven guilty.
Presuming innocence doesn't make him actually, literally innocent. The reality of what happened is what it is, regardless of whether anybody can prove it to a legal standard.
Also, when you say "We tend to presume innocence", that's not really true. It's true (or is supposed to be true) for the government and people who want to be civically responsible, but a whole lot of the general population does not actually think this way. People think OJ did it, have various theories about who killed JFK, etc. People read the news about somebody accused of murder and think "yeah, that guy probably did it."
Not in the court of public opinion. People are allowed to judge guilt/innocence for themselves well in advance of being legally proven. Cynicism about modern day capitalism is thoroughly justified. The track record of ad-tech companies to "do the right thing" is really bad.
It's up to Meta to handle PR on such things. Unfortunately when your company is accused of, for instance, contributing to a genocide, your PR department probably doesn't have a lot of options.
In your original comment, you suggest "misplaced anger against Facebook". Many people hold the belief that Facebook's products are harmful to children.
Following from that, I can imagine a few viewpoints:
0) Parents are wrong, Facebook is awesome!
1) Facebook has violated existing laws (these lawsuits are exploring that space).
2) Parents should be frustrated with legislators for failing to regulate social media.
3) Parents should be angry with themselves for allowing their children to use Facebook's products.
I'm curious which (if any) of these viewpoints you hold.
"In our A|B testing, we're able to show that making a small portion of teens suicidal increases app engagement by 0.05%. We were unable to calculate the dollars of profit per teen life lost, because our research teams keep quitting."
Growing up, I knew maybe two or three kids that had emotional problems. Now (as an adult with grown kids) I hardly know any families that don’t have such a person. I’m sure part of it is we’re more open, which is great, but I can’t attribute all of it to that. The rising generation is really struggling. My guess is social media, but maybe it’s environmental pollution or something similar. I live in the US for what it’s worth.
The system does not care for their well being because they are redundant. Drug use was frowned upon during the Cold War because we needed people to win a industrial war against a much bigger enemy. We don't need them anymore, so the system does not care if they end overdosing in an alleyway. It is all connected, culture, social and economical.
I'm conflicted about it. On the one hand, I'm angry that society would simply give up and leave people behind. On the other hand, societies have always done that in one rationalized way or another, and at least this way is slightly more honest and compassionate.
>My guess is social media, but maybe it’s environmental pollution or something similar
There are plenty of other countries that have just as much social media usage as the US but don't have the same widespread emotional dysfunction, so wouldn't that suggest that social media isn't to blame?
Cultural stigma against mental health issues is extremely ubiquitous outside the US
This causes mental health issues to go unaddressed, but, ironically, it also helps in a way, because peer pressure certainly helps reinforce individual discipline to develop techniques to keep it together. Peer pressure is a very powerful motivator.
For example fat shaming is certainly bullying but it's also certainly effective at discouraging overeating
> fat shaming is certainly bullying but it's also certainly effective at discouraging overeating
As far as I know, it just traumatizes people and discourages them from eating in front of the people shaming them. Then, as we all do, they relieve the trauma by using their usual coping mechanism - in their case, eating.
It's just like hitting kids. It teaches them to avoid getting hit; they learn nothing about their behavior.
> As far as I know, it just traumatizes people and discourages them from eating in front of the people shaming them. Then, as we all do, they relieve the trauma by using their usual coping mechanism - in their case, eating.
But if you materially get fat you will get fat shamed regardless. So while it doesn't make you stop eating garbage, you will somehow, someway figure out how to keep a decent figure. This can either be exercise or more awful methods like surgery.
A lot of Asian countries are shame based on the Shame - Guilt - Fear spectrum of cultures, and have some of the lowest obesity rates.
I wouldn't be surprised if these countries have less obese people and more suicides of people who feel they cannot fit in
Teens literally put their (usually self diagnosed) conditions in their Instagram bios.
That sort of thing used to be only something you’d share with close friends, if that. It was a big deal if someone let you know they had bipolar, depression, etc.
A good book on this is The Coddling of the American Mind. It argues several factors (including social media, safteyism, and the decline in unstructured play time) are responsible for the significant rise in young adult mental health issues that started around 2012. Good read.
In my opinion, it's largely the result of poor economic conditions and rising inequality endemic to a broken system. Young people today are keenly aware that they will have significantly lesser quality of life than the generation that preceded them, while simultaneously having to work much harder to gain a fraction of it. Communism may have fallen over in the Soviet Union, but it looks as if Capitalism is destined to fall much the same way. It is just taking a little longer, and so, the fall will be a little harder too.
I don't know which 'young people' generation you are talking about but I don't think most of them are actively comparing themselves to previous generations. It is very difficult to accurately compare my quality of life vs say my mothers. Most people are just trying to live life and get by as best as they can. If anything, older generations belittle the younger ones with the 'you've got it easy' comments.
Communism never really took off, so it didn't have far to fall. But nothing lasts forever, so surely capitalism and democracy will give way eventually(in some ways it already has).
Communism was/still is (depends on how you feel about China) a system that billions of people lived through. I think there’s been a great amnesia about this in younger people who’ve never met someone who interacted with Really Existing Socialism
It's no accident that American colleges don't have courses dedicated to teaching students what life was like in the Soviet Union. They had money, and they had people living in nice places with cars and people who lived in ghettos and were a decade+ away from automobile ownership if ever. A reality check isn't what you need if you're raising a generation of utopian idealists.
I was born in the USSR and grew up through the restructuring following its fall. We weren't well off, and my whole family(including extended) basically lived in a 2br apartment. I don't remember feeling poor or anything, that was just the life we knew, and I don't really remember seeing people who were 'better off', but I wasn't looking for it at that age. I have recently started asking my mom about what she experienced during her work years, but that process is just starting for me.
Anywho, my reference to communism not taking off is mostly to the utopian idealogy, I understand many people live/d under communism, but it was really just socialism with some caveats.
Yeah, but there are obvious differences. A lot of people watched TV with their families or friends, although this is likely less frequent now with streaming. The amount of interactivity, portability, and solitude that the iPad affords its users with is undoubtedly bad for developing minds, at least in large doses.
It is the food that destroys our brains and even worse, our women eat shit even during pregnancy, so the brains of newborns already start out with defects.
If we were eating a proper human diet (ie beef and eggs), we would not have these issues on this scale.
Can confirm this is a bullshit theory. Eating beef and eggs did not help my depression years ago. In fact, going vegan has had a positive impact on my mental health.
Let's not scapegoat the real problems at play: climate disaster, the rise of authoritative leaders in democracies that use fear as their biggest selling point, crippling debt to merely exist in a healthy manner (in the US), disinformation turning friends and family into anti-vaxx Q-following idiots, capitalism squeezing blood out of every penny... The list goes on.
> My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly visible number next to every expressed human thought, you influence behavior and thinking.
As usual, American society superficially protects children while the most harmful perpetrators are given near-absolute access.
I really think the addictive qualities of video games should garner the amount of attention these social media companies generate. Actually, anything that takes your time and gives you nothing is suspect. As always, nothing will save you from a grift except knowledge.
I remember when Facebook was restricted to folks with college domain emails. I used it for a year and decided I wasn't interested in algorithmic online stalking of people I barely knew and cared about. I'm still surprised social media turned out to be such a big hit. I guess people wanted some way to keep track of social news and the usual outlets like blogs and RSS feeds were too "nerdy" for the average internet consumer. Now we are stuck with digital panopticons and all the attendant problems associated with them. If you have kids I recommend teaching them how to properly use computational devices instead of just being passive consumers who get herded by statistical algorithms to optimize clickthrough rates.
Tons of people used things like alumni addresses (or were somehow loosely connected to a college) well before Facebook was opened to all emails. Except at the very beginning, membership wasn’t that exclusive.
Social media is for socializing... If you don't enjoy socializing (stalking, drama everything), if you have no interest in those, of course you wouldnt join
Stats show people are inherently resistant to join any social media, until all their friends are already on there.
If none of your peers use social media actively or you don't keep in touch with large group of people, it wouldnt offer much value for you
AKA: Dozens of states' attorney generals could petition legislatures to pass laws saying under-18's are not allowed to use Facebook in their state, knowing it'd probably fail because of freedom of speech trespasses, but instead would rather sue the deep-pocket corporation for profit and reelection-time bennies.
False. It asks for both injunctive and monetary relief.
On monetary relief:
On the joint COPPA claim, it asks the court to “Award the Filing States damages, restitution, and other compensation”
On the state law claims, each and every state asks for monetary relief under its own law in the form of civil penalties, damages, disgorgement, and/or restitution.
I wonder if ads shown to kids "make more revenue" over the lifecycle of the kid than ads aimed at adults. Like the Youtube videos for kids that are nonsense but rake millions of views
> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know
Though scanning the account's comment history, they appear to use this site almost exclusively to brag about their unethical and occasionally criminal behavior. Not "challenged," but "bankrupt." Downvotes encourage them to continue this trail of evidence, apparently.
I get asked weekly for an ad-bait app that my kids find though an ad-bait app that they previously had approved. Fun fact: once you’ve approved an App on Apple’s App Store, you can’t unapproved it. Hit the wrong button, too bad. Game switched from purchase to free-to-play and full of ads. Too bad.
The only option is to uninstall the app and then block App Store altogether, at which point they can’t update anything.
The role of parental responsibility is a valid but separate matter.
Kids can sign up to social media from a friend's phone/ computer/ tablet, from a library computer etc., and self-certify their claimed age. They can get phones (without cellphone contract) from other people without their parents' knowledge.
Tobacco ads are banned and tobacco companies are required to pay the government to make and run anti tobacco ads. Social media facing the same regulations is a reasonable end goal here I think.
I'm all in for suing the shit out of faceplant, goggle and twerk tick...
But I have to say, they're basiacally just exploiting an existing weakness.
The modern youth mental health "crisis" is fundamentally caused by a willingness to believe that an instagram avitar is "real life".
Being lost in an electronicly hosted make believe land is really the root cause of the giant increase in "mental health" issues.
Why do people do it? Simple: monkey brain...
That is, especially for adolescents, people want to do what's "popular".
This is why people who give up on popularity are less affected.
But of course, every manic mellennial on ritalin is going to flame me now. Becaseu OBVIOUSLY thinking that your player in fortnight is the "real" you couldn't possibly lead to psychosis...
I think GP is referencing the substitution effect in media [1], albeit incompletely; it's hard to discuss the ways in which social media may be "purchased" with attention in substitution to real life interaction without having a broader conversation about conventional media. I also think it's not so easy to discuss what a true control is -- how often are people aware of the fact they are consuming a fantasy, and at what point does the line between reality and fantasy blur? Are we really so sure that the youth cannot distinguish between someone's online persona and real life persona and which parts are scripted?
Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children.
Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE.
We routinely prevent certain business from existing, like a factory that wants to dump harmful chemical on water people use for drinking. If the factory investors say that there is no alternative, we will still prevent, to the best of our ability, the construction of the factory because it's a business that simply shouldn't exist in the proposed manner.
> Social media companies argue that they can't monitor ever post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE.
1000%. I think there are more complex problems in the world that are solved that this. If you look at youth and teenagers activities in Instagram, their photos and videos, and social graph I don't think it is so difficult to detect them, within a high percentile.
I think monitoring every post is a pretty solved problem, and it only gets better (worse?). Censoring has varying degrees of success, whether that is outright deleting a post/user or just hiding it from "not interested" users.
I mean FB engineers are specifically optimizing for toxicity at an algorithmic level. It’s the product. You can’t perform controlled experiments to measure the profitability of depression and also fiend ignorance.
You’re all very welcome to whatabout but working at FB is a stain on your character.
Oh they understood how it works, and they definitely accepted that their efforts to boost engagement caused mental health issues, especially among teenage girls. But toxicity was not a goal in itself.
In all seriousness, no, and for obvious reasons. The toxicity is created by the participants, freely and of their own volition. Is it Facebooks responsibility to police that, shut it down, censor it? Honestly... And where who and when? According to what laws in what regions. Also how do we know Facebook created it, or if it is simply making visible the toxicity that everyone knows is middle school and highschool.
I honestly don't know, but I don't like so disingenuously simple shoot the messenger answers. That being said, if Facebook amplified it willfully knowing the damage already -- then it's a different issue. And I think there is some evidence of that.
Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.
> Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.
One could argue that Meta willingly boosted toxic engagement themselves.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. When a controversial post or comment suddenly pops up in your feed, out of nowhere, participants may be responsible for the responses to it, but Meta is very clearly seeking, targeting, and amplifying that toxic behaviour for profit.
Again, you don't know that. That can be the result of, show what is engaged with more, and you end up with a rage-loop, that was in no way designed purposefully into the original system.
You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...
> That can be the result of, show what is engaged with more, and you end up with a rage-loop, that was in no way designed purposefully into the original system.
That may have been true fifteen years ago. There is now a decade worth of scientific literature on social network effects on human behaviour, and I think we can agree that this is hardly something not a single Meta executive know anything about.
> You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...
What I'm suggesting is that this is not an issue for them, but a feature.
The mistake we are making here is to draw the problem along the boundary of age.
The problem is not exclusive to children!
Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.
Very much true. Marketing content should be carefully vetted, filtered. Whom you wish to project that content for may want to take back control from addictions they suffer from (i.e. food).
There are many things in life more harmful than Facebook that we don't ban. Just because you don't like something or it has some negatives doesn't mean it should be illegal. Indeed given that it's impossible to specifically define "social media" such a ban wouldn't even really be legally feasible given 1st amendment issues.
Now personally I don't use alcohol, don't do drugs (including caffeine), don't gamble, and barely ever use social media (except HN, my one guilty pleasure). But I still think those things should all be legal.
That's not following their reasoning at all, it's a strawman. His point was that a business shouldn't be able to claim that doing something we want/require them to do is too hard and just not do it, which is what they currently do with content moderation.
How do you know they're not doing it and that it's unreasonable to ask more considering the difficulty of the task? His point is that there's no excuse for not doing it, even if the task is impossible. We don't ask the impossible to car manufacturers, why should it be different with Meta? who's to decide?
It is for the society in which these companies operate and profit to decide, not the companies themselves. And if it is indeed “too difficult”, which we all know just means it will hurt profits to a degree that is unacceptable to shareholders, too bad, they can either make less money or shut it down.
If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.
Because it's well documented that they're not doing it. They have had several whistleblowers around content moderation already. The whole of Africa's content moderation was basically being handled by a mid level employee.
> Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too?
Yeah if they sold cars with 0-star zero safety rating claiming that it's just too hard to do anything about making cars safer when you sell cars at scale.
If Meta was a low-margin business, we might buy their argument that "it's just too hard".
I think the lawsuit in the article draws a reasonable, if not conservative, line at knowingly exploiting vulnerable people to boost profits, which a whistleblower is saying Meta is doing. It's not just that the product is harming people, but that it is going out of its way to harm people. Is open decentralized social media doing this?
There are restrictions around advertising for cigarettes, I think for the same reason. To take it a step further in discussing around cars, I think companies who sell certain sized trucks are aware of the blind spots that make it hard to see people in certain spots. Reasonably, these trucks should be banned, or at least more conservatively, no new trucks with this flaw should be built or sold or require a commercial license.
None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc
The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and someone else nay have a completely different answer that seems equally obvious to them.
It's not about any of our opinions. As the article says, there is a whistleblower from Meta saying that this is documented. The lawsuit is what's going to sort it out.
I'm having a very hard time buying this. I may be wrong but I'd assume that Meta is audited and well-regulated. Besides, the company is very transparent. I know a bunch of people working there and they don't strike me as people who would purposely harm people. Besides, every employee has access to the whole code base and freely talk about what they work on. I don't believe in some conspiracy.
That being said, it's perfectly reasonable that we keep these companies under the microscope given the power they have, and they may be making mistakes.
> Is open decentralized social media doing this?
Arguably, decentralized social media without moderation would be more harmful than Facebook/Instagram.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE explain how that's in any remote way equivalent??
"hurr durr lets ban cars now". PLEASE.
Unlike social media, to drive a car you need a license, you need insurance, and if you run over a kid you most likely will go to prison. Or maybe you weren't driving your car, but it was unsecured, or had a mechanical malfunction. You are still responsible and you will in one way or another have to pay.
But, you can create ads on social media targeting minors with toxic messaging, and nobody bats a damn eye.
It's about time that online commercial endeavors, like ad networks, get reigned in and have rules applied to them, same as for other activities.
We do ban cars. We have safety ratings and regulations that they have to meet, otherwise they are banned from sales. We also have driving tests and age requirements for using them.
Since we still have cars post regulation, maybe we would still have social media as well.
The poster didn't say ban, this is a huge strawman.
The poster said laying down requirements and them being unable to scale whilst adhering to those requirements is not an argument for removing said requirements.
Our priority is the safety and health of society, if the only way they can scale is to put people at risk then maybe as a society we don't WANT them to scale.
As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children.
I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet.
Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.
> As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children.
COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)
There is historical precedent for limiting access for children. Children can't legally buy cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets, firearms (of which owning is a constitutional right), or enter certain prohibited places. Unfortunately, I many service providers have abused their access to children and acted as if children can legally enter into some type of one sided quasi-contract. The bar for working with children at any physical location is huge and boundaries are well understood.
I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.
But what about all the small, independent forums in the internet? For them it would really be impossible to comply with monitoring every post. Often they are hobby projects.
My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does.
If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way.
Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart from scale.
Hence, small forums hosted by hobbyists and volunteers should be shut down.
> My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers.
Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.
How does that mesh with the original post's point?
If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?
Ideally, no matter what the size of the platform is, if it's genuinely impossible for the people running that platform to not harm children, that should be their problem. If they can't figure out how to not be harmful to children, they don't get to exist. That's how it's supposed to work.
In practice though, it's not unreasonable to say that we should expect more from companies that can cause harms at a much larger scale. Perhaps there's some kind of threshold where we can accept some harm being done at a small scale while still not allowing harm at a much larger scale. Seems fair enough.
What? How do you figure? I run a small hobby forum for a niche interest and it's very easy to monitor every post. We have five moderators, a couple hundred registered users and we get maybe 3 or 4 posts a day.
So we can only have discussion forums where the owner is a big company that can afford to have a team of moderators around the clock. Yes, that's going to end well. (For the elites, that is.)
There needs to be a line drawn from those who service a large number of people, and those who don't.
Either way, only those who are big enough can be actively monitored and accounted for.
Before the obvious argument "where do you draw the line?", I may add that only a select and obvious number of social platforms reach the level of Meta's.
The original post claimed every post should be monitored for "harm to children". And that if giant social media companies can't do that, they shouldn't exist.
Now you want to exempt everyone apart from giant social media companies from that same rule?
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't notice that extremely important part.
That is... more than kafkaesque. I thought the conversation was around marketing, not user posts.
> a factory that wants to dump harmful chemical on water people use for drinking
Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable.
> no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children.
I disagree. Businesses and websites ought to have a right to exist as long as they do not inflict harm on third parties and their users participate willingly. Individuals ought to be free to make decisions regarding their own health and that of their children. If we were to consider otherwise, can you fathom the sheer volume of things we'd need to prohibit?
> Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable.
Yeah just like alcohol and drugs, you can easily restrict your children from using them so companies should be free to sell to whomever. Good parents ensure their children aren’t doing this.
Talking from personal experience growing up, I would generally agree. The prohibition from selling alcohol/cigarettes to minors was pretty ineffective. The only effective prevention was having stricter parents and facing consequences. That said, I wouldn't say Facebook is at all comparable to alcohol or drugs...
> Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE.
Nope. It's also your problem, because it has to be enforced somehow. Few websites are age appropriate for young children (this one certainly isn't), so perfect enforcement would mean essentially no viewing websites without login, and all logins requiring display of face and government issued ID to live webcam.
The ID check is already in place for several countries with YouTube if you try to view an age restricted video.
> I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law.
Simply put this sentiment on the landing page of your website, labeling on your product or, if you have a mailing list, in the subject field of your next newsletter. “I do not understand if my business is inside or outside the law” is bound to generate useful feedback
So often I've seen the opinion that effectively expresses that some company or business plan has a God-given right to be viable. Not directly of course but through about-face when someone points out that the company's business proposition conflicts with something—but how will the business make a profit if it has to [submit to government regulation] because of [concerns about marketing to children]?
Some people could probably steadfastly support a new business that was selling something dangerous but that was new and “innovative”. “Oh well people just have take responsibility for their own well-being—regulating crystal dust fumes™ would be way too onerous and impractical.”
"Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE."
Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access. Instead the "Silicon Six" intend only to scale their own gargantuan websites that they now refer to as "platforms". All web publishing and even internet communications are expected to be intermediated by a handful of surveillance advertising companies. What a disaster.
Not saying I think it's a good outcome but I don't see why it's relevant what the "original architects" thought. This is just a variant of 'argument from authority'.
>Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access.
This, I think, is roughly true but the issue is nuanced. The history of the web can be characterized by ever-decreasing barriers to entry. At first you needed a physical host and apache. Then, you could have a shared host and put html files in your user directory. Then, you could run wordpress. Then, you could sign up for myspace and never have to run anything. The 'like' is the smallest unit of content that can be captured by such systems. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, wikipedia, etc are what you get from this evolution.
The unexpected downside is that with reduced friction to content-creation, the content has become quite awful. In part because people are awful, but also because of money and how effective it is to hire people to say things using these systems. If the friction to create content remained high, it may have been a "better" internet in some measures. It would certainly be a much smaller one.
Who knows how it will turn out? I suspect that AI will have a significant impact on all these systems, to wit, injecting massive amounts of noise that will reduce their utility significantly, if not to zero. No empire lasts forever.
Regardless of what the original architects of the web may have thought, it was clearly not designed for (a) only a small number of mega-sized websites with hundreds of millions of page that only serve resources produced by others as a substitute for (b) many websites each hosting resources their operators have produced or at least public information.
I find the history interesting. But I started using the www in 1993. There were no so-called "tech" companies like Facebook or Google. Younger web users born into a web intermediated and surveilled by so-called "tech" companies for the purpose of advertising may have no such interest.
> it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www
Not to jump to the defense of social media companies, because I honestly think they're not worth the cost of keeping around, but who gives a shit what the original architects of the www intended?
They weren't forming a country and making a constitution. Hell, even for constitutions I don't really care what original founders wanted, and for the most part, and most of them also thought you shouldn't care either, as they meant for them to be amended.
It's unclear if even the porn site verification laws will be allowed[1] so I'm not sure the chances are that good in terms of requiring age verification for all social media.
"harmful youth marketing" ? Adults are just as dumb as kids, and can actually impact the rest of the world with their dumbness. We should be suing them for harmful marketing, period. I have had adult friends have literal emotional breakdowns because of social media's harmful effects.
Adults have a lot more responsibility for their actions. One of those actions is choosing to participate in a system that is widely considered harmful in multiple ways.
It's harmful for emotionally damaged people; the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer because a few people never learned that envy is a flaw to be overcome not a virtue to be cultivated.
Not that I like social media or tech companies (I detest them). But it's not a special case. Media companies, cable companies, newspapers, etc. They've all enjoyed the ability to manipulate and 'guide' what people see and what opinions they form, for a long time. It's nothing new.
Really, it's extremely new. The feedback loop for old media was very coarse. They knew how many newspapers they sold and had an idea of who the repeat customers were. Editorial could be said to be linked to bumps in opinion polls, but only very loosely. Nobody knew how or if anything worked. It was all theories and snake oil and "conventional wisdom". The old adage was that 50% of marketing was effective but nobody knew which 50%.
For old media to have the same qualities as new media, newspaper publishers would have to know in real time if you were a new or returning reader, how long you spent reading page 32, which article you talked about with your friends, who your friends were, what their and your demographic profile was and then be able to serve up customised content within an instant based on all of those factors. And then say that they aren't responsible for any of it because they're just a platform.
Really, the only thing that old and new media have in common is that they are broadcasting words and images to the general public. The comparison ends there.
Yeah, what's the worst that old media could do? Print uncritical, false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
479 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI hope the money is worth it.
The fines are just a cost of doing business for them.
Also, how is nobody in the government responsible?
It really feels like the Sackler family has been bundled up as a nice solution to the whole thing.
The fines only slightly raise the cost of this raw material from $0, so it's unlikely to deter Meta's behavior until someone faces a more severe penalty there.
Doesn't make it right, but we shouldn't assume the people responsible don't feel responsible simply because we aren't hearing about it.
If we don't like how something works, we should understand the factors that shape it. If someone's internal preferences are contrary to their actions, that's worth knowing, as it says something about the strength of the incentive structures. This is true for any person of any status, not least the rich, who, ideally, should not be destructive forces in society.
Private preferences and feelings are relevant to the analysis.
It'd be great if the USA had some kind of effective consumer protection agency, but I guess then we might have fewer billionaires here.
Suicides seem to have gone up and social media use might have something to do with it.
https://news.byu.edu/intellect/10-year-byu-study-shows-eleva...
> Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study—when they were about 13 years old—and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults.
https://socialmediavictims.org/mental-health/suicide/
> Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in the risk of teenage suicide. Although several factors play a role in an individual’s choice to take their life, recent studies have established connections between mental health issues such as depression and suicidal ideation, and social media usage.
Yes, bullying has always been a problem. Yes, society has always been force-feeding kids dangerously unattainable body images. The problem is not that these things have just been repackaged into a different kind of book or TV show. The problem is that it takes much less effort than any time in history to fake a "community" all parroting the same dangerous lie.
The old adage went "If I run into one asshole today, then I ran into an asshole. If I run into 100 assholes today, then I am the asshole, and I should reflect", and it was pretty good advice. But if one asshole can create the illusion that you ran into 100 of them, what's the appropriate response. The whole problem with facebook and instagram is that it has made coordinating bullying campaigns much MUCH cheaper from a labor standpoint. Couple that with the constant drive to keep kids on the platform and you have a system that seems purpose built to drive already anxious kids to suicide.
I can 100% keep my kids off social media. But I can't keep their classmates from assembling pages impersonating them and driving bullying via that avenue. Facebook and Instagram's engagement algorithm plays a serious role in that operation.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...
Oh I'm sure this particular lawsuit will be the one that solve these problems once and for all. Hint: it won't. This is performative politicking. Meta and co will continue to pay minuscule fines (not too much though, META is in alot of ETF and mutual funds), they'll continue to spread lobbying money around to both political parties, parents will point fingers (without taking any responsibility), young adults/teens will drone on about "mental health" because its fashionable (if social media is giving you an eating disorder or making you anxious, how about putting down the phone?), and nothing will change.
Ah, yes, technical solutions to social problems. Those always work.
Here's a better idea: raise your kids to value things that are real, and then teach them that nothing they see on a screen is real.
This is just as irrational as believing anything on a screen is real.
Frankly you come off a lot more like Diogenes than Plato.
we know what happens when the government creates uninformed regulations, so I think it's worth supporting them when they appear to take a reasonable approach
kids need to be able to operate within the world that technology has created, and parents need informed guidelines and tools to enforce them
the all or nothing approach probably isn't the way to go... how's abstinence only sex education going, for example?
Id say that access to Instagram isn't a biological function and normalizing it will lead to it ever entrenched in our lives. Make 18 the age requirement. I don't care about privacy concerns because you have no privacy if you participate with these companies.
Do you actually have any real exposure to the kind of things that are targeted to women on social media? It's more like young girls shouln't get sold that it's reasonable for them to achieve with a full schoolday and budget of a teenager the same appearance as a wealthy woman who has access to time, dieticians, personal trainers, and a plastic surgeon, except the wealthy woman tells you her one secret trick is actually a 75$ green powder she takes in the morning (the powder making company is paying her of course).
"Just put down the phone" is this generation's Nancy Reagan "Just say no" moment. It was a joke amongst my young peers back in the day. But the real war on drugs, the War on Tobacco, has been incredibly effective - smoking used to be ubiquitous in the US, now it is just about gone. Social media, with attention-engineered timelines, is tobacco.
To be fair, for many young adults and teens the parents are demanding the kids have their phones so that the parents can track their location and other surveillance shit.
Additionally, we know for a fact that these social media companies are hiring tams of people with full doctorate degrees in keeping you online and responding. How is a 13 year old's underdeveloped brain supposed to compete with that when most adults can't even do it?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/23/ftc-plans-to-hire-child-psyc...
There's a thin line to be walked between privacy and regulation, but Facebook's own research has pointed at the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of children... so I think some scrutiny here is overdue.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22712927/facebook-instagr...
Facebook’s own research has found both positive and negative effects, depending on the child’s status among their peers.
The Verge is quick to point out that:
> Instagram makes teen girls feel worse about their bodies
but more discreet in reminding people that fashion magazines, including The Cut (also published by Vox), have the same negative effects and none of the positive ones, like helping gender minority find a safe space, re-socialising people with physical handicaps or anxiety. The critique makes sense —I’m not denying it— but it doesn’t come. from “the algorithm.” It comes from having a lot of money poured into the Instagram creation ecosystem. Instagram has very little control over that as most of it is through brand deals or magazine raising their own profile. That behemoth of money and attention comes from an industry that has decades of well-documented problematic practices behind it, including the unrepentant glorification of using self-starvation and drugs, notably cocaine, to reach unhealthy thinness.
If you condemn Instagram but don’t include that industry among the culprits, you’ll have Snap with unhealthy models, TikTok with unhealthy models, or whatever comes next with unhealthy models.
Who is actually ok with this?
That’s of course assuming that Reddit and Discord wouldn’t get much bigger if Meta were to close, but I’m not sure the negative effects would vanish because the owner is different.
The post is about instagram so I'm talking about instagram, feel free to post an article about magazines if you want to talk about magazines... legislation aimed towards instagram will create precedence to pursue other platforms like tiktok and can also become ingrained as policy. Just because we're focusing on one subject here doesn't mean we're ignoring the others or playing favorites.
Those are not two similar but separate problems.
This is like saying that mail bombs are the problem of the post office and not people having access to explosives: the problem isn’t envelopes. It’s people with access to explosives, and FedEx would likely have the same issue—unless federal rules allow them to scan and to refuse to deliver explosives.
I’m not being crass with a bad metaphor: focusing on the support has been a key issue in the argument for a while. Fashion magazines used to be decried as “glossy paper,” but no one thought the difference between magazines sending problematic self-image and serious news was that newspapers came on broad sheets of mate paper. Still, it’s now how the problem is presented: without clear separation.
I did work at Meta on the team looking at Teenagers, and I did raise that point internally: should we look at gambling and alcohol and extend the same rules to fashion? Should we boost peers over brands to avoid problematic ideation?
Those conversations, without the shadow of fashion partners, were generally productive. It wasn’t perfect: the goal remained “engagement” but there were no sacred cows to avoid.
As soon as the findings about teenage body dysmorphia were put in the context of fashion (and presented to one particular executive who cared about advertising more than algorithmic boost), that question was buried. Several friends of mine got blackballed hard not for suggesting Instagram-specific treatment, but for instance, for asking Anna Wintour about the quip where she fat-shamed her best friend in _The September Issue_ (it’s a niche fashion reference, but it’s widely considered a smoking gun in the industry).
There are inherent biases to how Instagram and Facebook work: you post when you achieve something, and there’s a bias towards success, but the internal findings rarely found that those were crippling. Thinness, on the other hand, leads to clear, widespread medical issues. I remember asking if the issue became more prevalent because teenagers didn’t have access to that many magazines before but that the dose effect was comparable. I don’t think anyone has looked into that.
I’m not saying that to disengage Meta’s responsibility: I had argued for explicit filters, like giving teenage boys who know they can’t resist and will behave in a way they think is unhealthy, the ability to exclude scantly clad women in their feed. I used another example, naturally (more typical of internal debate). That idea could have had legs ten years ago; now, with the debate being a lot less constructive, I'm not sure.
from my perspective, this is the kind of regulation the FTC should seek out — so for different reasons I agree with your analogy
magazines are an entirely different beast and it's strange to not address that — I have to physically go out of my way to purchase a magazine or have one delivered... that's something I opt in to
people opt-in to instagram, but for teenagers there are much larger stakes involved... instagram has become an integral part of many teens' social life (by design) and they're constantly getting targeted and personalized ads fed to them directly
the fact that the goal remains engagement makes it pretty clear where meta's priorities lie, and it's not on the side of safety
Same with oil companies.
Of course there are many entities doing bad things, but few have such a dramatic impact on all of civilization.
In the sense that the downsides are documented in the relevant scientific literature, sure. But popular perception of those downsides is very different. A whole lot of people think those downsides are a pack of lies: that cannabis isn't habit forming, that it doesn't make the average user lazy and complacent, that it doesn't increase the risk of schizophrenia, that driving under the influence of it isn't unsafe and is probably even safer, etc. The downsides are all "DARE lies" according to many of the people who think legalizing cannabis is worth it, who weighed the harms of criminalization against 'cannabis is literally harmless.'
(FWIW I voted to legalize it in Washington in 2012.)
People recognize that cannabis is habit forming, it's just not as physically addictive as the things we label "dangerous addictive drugs." Most people are addicted to caffeine and we generally accept that it's fine. In the same way that moderate drinking for almost everyone doesn't turn into alcoholism it's the same for cannabis. In contrast everyone who smokes nicotine with any regularity at all will become addicted to it.
"average user lazy and complacent" -- That's like why we're here man.
I don't know a single person who thinks it's fine to drive while high, I do know some stoners whose tolerance for "sober enough to drive" is suspect but that happens when we hit the bars too.
I think you're applying the word harmless to a degree that no one else does and then are arguing against that. Like that cheeseburger increases your risk of heart disease but no one's out here being like "cheeseburgers considered harmful."
You say that, but there's a lot of people who flat out deny it. You're saying that everybody knows this, but that isn't true. Same thing with the driving under the influence thing. A lot of people have told me that they drive safer when high because it heightens their senses and slows their roll and makes them paranoid and therefore careful, and a whole lot of cope like that invented to excuse themselves for doing it.
The downsides of cannabis that you claim everybody understands and recognizes are in fact flat out denied by many people.
I bet this case would never have been brought if Facebook had a "This product is addictive" warning every time you open the app.
Historically, though, most doomsayers are proven wrong. Let's hope we are too.
But: I know some PMs and designers at various social media companies. There are also probably many among us here on HN. The thing is, I don't think most of them think to themselves "I am going to build a harmful, exploitative application". I think most of them, like many of us, wake up in the morning and aim to do a good job. To do good work. To design and build to the best of their abilities. AND - importantly - to excel in their careers, become more senior, and make more money.
The problem is their incentives. They are paid, promoted, and bonused to maximize things like "engagement". The more people use their (likely well-intentioned) feature or design, the more they're praised by their colleagues, the more they're promoted, the more they're paid. So they keep doing things to get more people to click and scroll more and get more praise and money for it. They make a button easier to understand - a post easier to share - a picture easier to like. They fill the feeds with more things that more people click and share and like. And they make more money and get more senior and the cycle continues ad infinitum.
I think SOME likely step back and consider the ramifications and maybe look at what they've built and see depression and rage and anger and misery, but those are the ones who aren't promoted and maybe leave the companies because that kind of observation doesn't make number go up. And number must go up to pay for that $5000/month apartment in SF or the $30k/year private school.
And others likely consider this but justify it by all the not-horrible things they see too -- the people who are happy, the influences who make a career out of using their tools - the "creators" who power the "creator economy". And their numbers go up too so they're happy and they tell the PMs and designers and engineers what a good job they're doing and so on and so forth.
So the problem is this cycle will continue as long as it's rewarded as richly as it is. And frankly, the free market WILL continue to reward it as long as number keeps going up (and that number is the stock price). Which is why a lawsuit by someone NOT part of that free-market cycle (or part of a different part of it) might actually make a small dent in this horrible infinite cycle.
The designers answer was…… interesting. They basically said (and I’m paraphrasing) that their aim every morning was to go to work to ensure that users were not being mistreated by dark patterns and unclear design. Their aim was to was to design the best experience for their users to ensure that their users could find an easy way to stop gambling if they wanted to.
I was on the fence about their stance. However they truly believed that they would never intentionally do harm to users, they always wanted the best for their users.
This is the logic of psychopaths.
Its like hacker news poetry.
Maybe they should stop putting kids at risk in the first place.
Those downvoted are badges of honor on this one. Shameful.
1. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
I wasn't presenting myself as a subject matter expert. I'm speaking as an individual who has lived through the evolution of social media and can see how and why Instagram and TikTok are as addictive as they are.
There absolutely needs to be more research done in this area. Hoping this lawsuit will shine more light on the connection between mental health, concentration issues, and social media.
This was the study that triggered all the "Facebook knew Instagram was harming teens' mental health" stories. It was also the study that formed the basis of the whistleblower's argument.
No, it would imply the regulation of advertisements that are displayed on social media not the actual content or algorithms of social media. Advertisements are regulated, the rest of the content people put on social media is not (outside of very narrow things like credible, true, threats).
Content doesn't suddenly become saddled with the same regulations as advertisements themselves just because it's hosted on an ad-supported platform.
You and I probably both agree that that a substantial revision to the First Amendment would be terrible, and so what we probably want is for these corporations to act in voluntary consideration of what's socially responsible so that it's not necessary.
It's not just a question of addictiveness but also of potential level of harm.
All these companies know they're a target for accountability now, and even many people inside of them acknowledge a need for reform and possibly restitution. Your comment seems focused on the practical matters of these lawsuits (many of which probably are frivolous or will otherwise be lost), but what really matters are the unsettled societal costs that transcend them.
You may feel that accountability is being "misplaced", but it's much bigger than ambulance chasers and grandstanders. People are genuinely concerned about real problems and are hungry for some kind of action on them.
The same plays out with "just talk to your kids". In conversations about regulating businesses, the narrative is that parents can simply talk to their kids and persuade them to not use social media. But in other conversations, the narrative is that kids are naturally rebellious and have a strong "always do the opposite of what my parents suggest" instinct.
Unfortunately the studies are reasonably solid. They aren't double-blind control group studies but they are correlative, so not the highest most pure studies. Social media use seems to be heavily correlated with depression and other markers of mental illness and struggle.
That isn't very surprising - social media networks are designed for "engagement" and that comes from strong negative emotions. If you constantly bombard someone with a drip feed of negative emotions.. that probably does them harm.
This doesn't mean the litigants will prevail because correlation and causation aren't 1:1 but it's probably a good idea to push your kid away from social media by explaining this to them.
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
Consider this analogy: Just because the DA doesn't have enough evidence to convict in a murder trial, that doesn't mean that the defendant is innocent. I just means they haven't been proven guilty.
Also, when you say "We tend to presume innocence", that's not really true. It's true (or is supposed to be true) for the government and people who want to be civically responsible, but a whole lot of the general population does not actually think this way. People think OJ did it, have various theories about who killed JFK, etc. People read the news about somebody accused of murder and think "yeah, that guy probably did it."
It's up to Meta to handle PR on such things. Unfortunately when your company is accused of, for instance, contributing to a genocide, your PR department probably doesn't have a lot of options.
Following from that, I can imagine a few viewpoints: 0) Parents are wrong, Facebook is awesome! 1) Facebook has violated existing laws (these lawsuits are exploring that space). 2) Parents should be frustrated with legislators for failing to regulate social media. 3) Parents should be angry with themselves for allowing their children to use Facebook's products.
I'm curious which (if any) of these viewpoints you hold.
There are plenty of other countries that have just as much social media usage as the US but don't have the same widespread emotional dysfunction, so wouldn't that suggest that social media isn't to blame?
Are you sure? A quick search says otherwise. E.g Effect of social media on youth in [country].
I guess my search term is favouring a conclusion but not sure where / how to find proof of your claim.
This causes mental health issues to go unaddressed, but, ironically, it also helps in a way, because peer pressure certainly helps reinforce individual discipline to develop techniques to keep it together. Peer pressure is a very powerful motivator.
For example fat shaming is certainly bullying but it's also certainly effective at discouraging overeating
I think you should back that statement up with a citation.
As far as I know, it just traumatizes people and discourages them from eating in front of the people shaming them. Then, as we all do, they relieve the trauma by using their usual coping mechanism - in their case, eating.
It's just like hitting kids. It teaches them to avoid getting hit; they learn nothing about their behavior.
But if you materially get fat you will get fat shamed regardless. So while it doesn't make you stop eating garbage, you will somehow, someway figure out how to keep a decent figure. This can either be exercise or more awful methods like surgery.
What makes you say that? Lots of people remain overweight, lots of research shows that shaming doesn't have the impact you say.
Also, lots of people can't physically do anything about it.
That sort of thing used to be only something you’d share with close friends, if that. It was a big deal if someone let you know they had bipolar, depression, etc.
Communism never really took off, so it didn't have far to fall. But nothing lasts forever, so surely capitalism and democracy will give way eventually(in some ways it already has).
Anywho, my reference to communism not taking off is mostly to the utopian idealogy, I understand many people live/d under communism, but it was really just socialism with some caveats.
Mental diseases are metabolic diseases.
It is the food that destroys our brains and even worse, our women eat shit even during pregnancy, so the brains of newborns already start out with defects.
If we were eating a proper human diet (ie beef and eggs), we would not have these issues on this scale.
Take your pick.
Let's not scapegoat the real problems at play: climate disaster, the rise of authoritative leaders in democracies that use fear as their biggest selling point, crippling debt to merely exist in a healthy manner (in the US), disinformation turning friends and family into anti-vaxx Q-following idiots, capitalism squeezing blood out of every penny... The list goes on.
> My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly visible number next to every expressed human thought, you influence behavior and thinking.
-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325515
As usual, American society superficially protects children while the most harmful perpetrators are given near-absolute access.
I really think the addictive qualities of video games should garner the amount of attention these social media companies generate. Actually, anything that takes your time and gives you nothing is suspect. As always, nothing will save you from a grift except knowledge.
Stats show people are inherently resistant to join any social media, until all their friends are already on there.
If none of your peers use social media actively or you don't keep in touch with large group of people, it wouldnt offer much value for you
> but instead would rather
It sounds like you are implying something wrong with the very line of thinking you have presented.
On monetary relief:
On the joint COPPA claim, it asks the court to “Award the Filing States damages, restitution, and other compensation”
On the state law claims, each and every state asks for monetary relief under its own law in the form of civil penalties, damages, disgorgement, and/or restitution.
> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know
Though scanning the account's comment history, they appear to use this site almost exclusively to brag about their unethical and occasionally criminal behavior. Not "challenged," but "bankrupt." Downvotes encourage them to continue this trail of evidence, apparently.
> Help me get to 1000 karma and I’ll stop posting forever.
Maybe we should give them that last 50 karma.
The only option is to uninstall the app and then block App Store altogether, at which point they can’t update anything.
Kids can sign up to social media from a friend's phone/ computer/ tablet, from a library computer etc., and self-certify their claimed age. They can get phones (without cellphone contract) from other people without their parents' knowledge.
[0] https://www.fightcancer.org/news/department-justice-lawsuit-...
But I have to say, they're basiacally just exploiting an existing weakness.
The modern youth mental health "crisis" is fundamentally caused by a willingness to believe that an instagram avitar is "real life".
Being lost in an electronicly hosted make believe land is really the root cause of the giant increase in "mental health" issues.
Why do people do it? Simple: monkey brain...
That is, especially for adolescents, people want to do what's "popular".
This is why people who give up on popularity are less affected.
But of course, every manic mellennial on ritalin is going to flame me now. Becaseu OBVIOUSLY thinking that your player in fortnight is the "real" you couldn't possibly lead to psychosis...
I'm not familiar with this argument, as I've never heard it. Could you provide some examples or a study or similar showing this is widespread?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97804...
Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE.
We routinely prevent certain business from existing, like a factory that wants to dump harmful chemical on water people use for drinking. If the factory investors say that there is no alternative, we will still prevent, to the best of our ability, the construction of the factory because it's a business that simply shouldn't exist in the proposed manner.
1000%. I think there are more complex problems in the world that are solved that this. If you look at youth and teenagers activities in Instagram, their photos and videos, and social graph I don't think it is so difficult to detect them, within a high percentile.
You’re all very welcome to whatabout but working at FB is a stain on your character.
"Knowingly preying on vulnerable young people to boost profits" is different from blindly optimizing for engagement without understanding what works.
I honestly don't know, but I don't like so disingenuously simple shoot the messenger answers. That being said, if Facebook amplified it willfully knowing the damage already -- then it's a different issue. And I think there is some evidence of that.
Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.
One could argue that Meta willingly boosted toxic engagement themselves.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. When a controversial post or comment suddenly pops up in your feed, out of nowhere, participants may be responsible for the responses to it, but Meta is very clearly seeking, targeting, and amplifying that toxic behaviour for profit.
You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...
That may have been true fifteen years ago. There is now a decade worth of scientific literature on social network effects on human behaviour, and I think we can agree that this is hardly something not a single Meta executive know anything about.
> You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...
What I'm suggesting is that this is not an issue for them, but a feature.
The problem is not exclusive to children!
Even if you could successfully bar all children from participating on Facebook, the problem would still exist, and Facebook would continue to harm people.
Now personally I don't use alcohol, don't do drugs (including caffeine), don't gamble, and barely ever use social media (except HN, my one guilty pleasure). But I still think those things should all be legal.
Following your reasoning, anything that could possibly harm children should be banned. Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too?
Now, suppose we do ban Meta. Where should we stop? should we ban open decentralized social media too?
You may not like social media, but a lot of people use them without any particular issues.
If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.
Google.
On public roads, but not otherwise.
Yeah if they sold cars with 0-star zero safety rating claiming that it's just too hard to do anything about making cars safer when you sell cars at scale.
If Meta was a low-margin business, we might buy their argument that "it's just too hard".
There are restrictions around advertising for cigarettes, I think for the same reason. To take it a step further in discussing around cars, I think companies who sell certain sized trucks are aware of the blind spots that make it hard to see people in certain spots. Reasonably, these trucks should be banned, or at least more conservatively, no new trucks with this flaw should be built or sold or require a commercial license.
None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc
The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and someone else nay have a completely different answer that seems equally obvious to them.
I'm having a very hard time buying this. I may be wrong but I'd assume that Meta is audited and well-regulated. Besides, the company is very transparent. I know a bunch of people working there and they don't strike me as people who would purposely harm people. Besides, every employee has access to the whole code base and freely talk about what they work on. I don't believe in some conspiracy.
That being said, it's perfectly reasonable that we keep these companies under the microscope given the power they have, and they may be making mistakes.
> Is open decentralized social media doing this?
Arguably, decentralized social media without moderation would be more harmful than Facebook/Instagram.
"hurr durr lets ban cars now". PLEASE.
Unlike social media, to drive a car you need a license, you need insurance, and if you run over a kid you most likely will go to prison. Or maybe you weren't driving your car, but it was unsecured, or had a mechanical malfunction. You are still responsible and you will in one way or another have to pay.
But, you can create ads on social media targeting minors with toxic messaging, and nobody bats a damn eye.
It's about time that online commercial endeavors, like ad networks, get reigned in and have rules applied to them, same as for other activities.
let's ban meta because they can't prevent that some kid somewhere is gonna be able to create an account (and may see really horrible things there)
let's ban car because some kids are going to get run over because car manufacturers can't prevent it.
You're welcome
Since we still have cars post regulation, maybe we would still have social media as well.
The poster said laying down requirements and them being unable to scale whilst adhering to those requirements is not an argument for removing said requirements.
Our priority is the safety and health of society, if the only way they can scale is to put people at risk then maybe as a society we don't WANT them to scale.
I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet.
Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.
COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)
I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.
If hobbyists can't comply, maybe it's about time we prevented small independent forums from existing.
My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does.
If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way.
Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart from scale.
Hence, small forums hosted by hobbyists and volunteers should be shut down.
Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.
If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?
In practice though, it's not unreasonable to say that we should expect more from companies that can cause harms at a much larger scale. Perhaps there's some kind of threshold where we can accept some harm being done at a small scale while still not allowing harm at a much larger scale. Seems fair enough.
Moderating the News board became too arduous and carried potential legal liability.
So they turned the board off.
It’s really not that hard.
And anyway, just because you can’t fix everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fix something.
All or nothing thinking leads to inaction.
It's invite only Groups on Telegram, FB Messenger, or Apple Messages mostly.
So it has ended well for my social circle ;-)
Before the obvious argument "where do you draw the line?", I may add that only a select and obvious number of social platforms reach the level of Meta's.
Now you want to exempt everyone apart from giant social media companies from that same rule?
This is getting a bit Kafkaesque.
Your example is describing an externality, a cost imposed on a unwilling third party. Facebook is a platform that individuals can choose to avoid or restrict their children from using if they deem it harmful. These situations are not comparable.
> no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children.
I disagree. Businesses and websites ought to have a right to exist as long as they do not inflict harm on third parties and their users participate willingly. Individuals ought to be free to make decisions regarding their own health and that of their children. If we were to consider otherwise, can you fathom the sheer volume of things we'd need to prohibit?
Yeah just like alcohol and drugs, you can easily restrict your children from using them so companies should be free to sell to whomever. Good parents ensure their children aren’t doing this.
Nope. It's also your problem, because it has to be enforced somehow. Few websites are age appropriate for young children (this one certainly isn't), so perfect enforcement would mean essentially no viewing websites without login, and all logins requiring display of face and government issued ID to live webcam.
The ID check is already in place for several countries with YouTube if you try to view an age restricted video.
I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law.
Simply put this sentiment on the landing page of your website, labeling on your product or, if you have a mailing list, in the subject field of your next newsletter. “I do not understand if my business is inside or outside the law” is bound to generate useful feedback
So often I've seen the opinion that effectively expresses that some company or business plan has a God-given right to be viable. Not directly of course but through about-face when someone points out that the company's business proposition conflicts with something—but how will the business make a profit if it has to [submit to government regulation] because of [concerns about marketing to children]?
Some people could probably steadfastly support a new business that was selling something dangerous but that was new and “innovative”. “Oh well people just have take responsibility for their own well-being—regulating crystal dust fumes™ would be way too onerous and impractical.”
Indeed, it is doubtful that these mega-sized websites were intended by the original architects of the www. More likely, they may have imagined the web as a whole would grow (scale) as more people gained internet access. Instead the "Silicon Six" intend only to scale their own gargantuan websites that they now refer to as "platforms". All web publishing and even internet communications are expected to be intermediated by a handful of surveillance advertising companies. What a disaster.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/25/silicon-si...
This, I think, is roughly true but the issue is nuanced. The history of the web can be characterized by ever-decreasing barriers to entry. At first you needed a physical host and apache. Then, you could have a shared host and put html files in your user directory. Then, you could run wordpress. Then, you could sign up for myspace and never have to run anything. The 'like' is the smallest unit of content that can be captured by such systems. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, wikipedia, etc are what you get from this evolution.
The unexpected downside is that with reduced friction to content-creation, the content has become quite awful. In part because people are awful, but also because of money and how effective it is to hire people to say things using these systems. If the friction to create content remained high, it may have been a "better" internet in some measures. It would certainly be a much smaller one.
Who knows how it will turn out? I suspect that AI will have a significant impact on all these systems, to wit, injecting massive amounts of noise that will reduce their utility significantly, if not to zero. No empire lasts forever.
I find the history interesting. But I started using the www in 1993. There were no so-called "tech" companies like Facebook or Google. Younger web users born into a web intermediated and surveilled by so-called "tech" companies for the purpose of advertising may have no such interest.
Not to jump to the defense of social media companies, because I honestly think they're not worth the cost of keeping around, but who gives a shit what the original architects of the www intended?
They weren't forming a country and making a constitution. Hell, even for constitutions I don't really care what original founders wanted, and for the most part, and most of them also thought you shouldn't care either, as they meant for them to be amended.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23854369/texas-porn-age-v...
Being able to manipulate what 100s of millions or billions of people see every day on their screens is an unprecedented amount of power.
Democratic nations are not going to tolerate these companies much longer.
For old media to have the same qualities as new media, newspaper publishers would have to know in real time if you were a new or returning reader, how long you spent reading page 32, which article you talked about with your friends, who your friends were, what their and your demographic profile was and then be able to serve up customised content within an instant based on all of those factors. And then say that they aren't responsible for any of it because they're just a platform.
Really, the only thing that old and new media have in common is that they are broadcasting words and images to the general public. The comparison ends there.