I do wonder what’s going to happen in the future to addictive social media algorithms.
Feels like one of those things that’s so powerful, but skirts by because it doesn’t feel like it should be (like targeted advertising).
Of course, but the users can’t be trusted to stay away from something designed to addict them.
Only real solution is regulation, although the how is still a big question mark.
Instagram definitely doesn't have the option but youtube for instance does, there's a subscription tab that's collecting dust in most people's accounts.
I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.
We have that in the EU, they mandated it. It finally made instagram use-able for me again. Did instagram geo-gate that feature? Wouldn't surprise me, but still.
With the amount of money behind them, I regret to say I don’t think they’ll get legislated away. My best guess is that social shaming slowly dwindles their usage. It’s actively shameful to scroll at dinner among Gen Z, for example. The problem becomes using the apps alone at home.
I really hope it gets legislated away or kneecapped to the point where it isn't so effective. With all the legislation coming out regarding kids and social media, I hope that people will start to draw a line to the fact that maybe adults shouldn't be hooked up to it too. I don't think all content recommendation algorithms should go away, but we need to dial down the intensity by an order of magnitude or two.
Biological addiction is different from psychological addiction, sure. But both are addictive. And personally I believe both cigarettes and Meta products are damaging to a subset of the people consuming them.
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
"By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris scientists had discovered that ammonia could also be used to increase the free nicotine in cigarette smoke, providing a more powerful nicotine kick than the milder low-pH tobaccos traditionally used in American-blend cigarettes."
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
They're also not doing that to pay for tobacco. Come on. Heroin is justifiably illegal for good reason already; you're stretching the analogy past breaking point.
If heroin was free, nobody would be breaking into cars but there'd still be a problem.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
the underlying cause of addiction is very different. But if there is enough evidence that they're similarly damaging (in magnitude), I think that fundamental difference is irrelevant.
IIRC, the lovely book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas claims that gambling addiction was a concept pushed by the casinos, to put the blame onto individuals, rather than the machine.
Not when they condition children and allow access to them by predators. Reports of bad content, fake, and scam behavior go deliberately rejected and Meta profits from scammers doing their scamming among children. (Read up on Officer Gomez reports of grooming all over Instagram and Facebook and TikTok)
The big tobacco lawsuits hinges on the same things these will:
(1) Did they know they were hurting users?
(2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
Is the argument here that social media wasn't designed to be addictive? And no, cigarettes were not designed to cause cancer. It makes no sense to design a product that kills the customer.
Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws.
I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.
Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.
I’d bet that an exceptional legal team could make a pretty solid case based purely on the volume and testimony of behavioral psychologists on their payroll
This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive?
At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case
It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.
100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.
NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof.
So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."
It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.
The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices.
And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.
But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.
My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be
It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling.
In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
Having "underlying risk" to something just means you invested in it before. So for you it's not a gambling as long as you... have gambled before in the other direction?
Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
It's all gambling. You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up. The stock market is exactly the same - middle class gambling.
> You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up.
Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.
Why should having money ever give you a return on that? I ask that question in the context of moral philosophy, not a capitalist society. Surely there are better ways to determine how an individual should live that doesn't typically amount to emerging from a lucky orifice?
@hgomersall: emerging from a lucky orifice is in fact the main thing in life if you think about it. After all, we are collectively a computer made of monkeys, and the function it is computing is natural selection. Kin selection is one aspect of it. Everything else - including money and innovation - is window dressing.
Buying small pieces of businesses isn't gambling. The fact the price moves around a lot isn't the point of it, it's just a result of people buying/selling. In gambling, the risk itself is the point.
Everyone is exposed to those so by that definition nobody would ever be gambling. I was trying to be charitable so assumed the bar was higher in the what-if.
You aren't exposed to football game outcomes, nor dice rolls or cards flipping. I, in california, am not exposed to electricity prices in the northeast. My exposure to wheat prices is extremely small - if I go and bet a lot on wheat going down, I'm gambling.
If you are creating risk that didn't exist, you are gambling.
If you are an oil company entering the futures market to reduce your risk on oil prices, you aren't gambling. If I enter the market and short oil for fun, I'm gambling.
The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doesn't make your house purchase a gamble.
The "for fun" part is really important here. Addictive behavior comes from a hijacked dopamine system, into which you slowly get lured in. This makes it applicable to social media, drugs and if you squint, even to broad obsessions.
This doesnt help the gambling distinction though. What activities can take over your neurological reward mechanism? Pretty much everything. So you have to factor in scale and amount of (potential) harm and this is where the vague debate begins.
A striking observation i made was, that gambling machines have deliberate delays between action (eg pull the lever) and reaction/reward for the brain to create tension and to break it with a dopamine spike. This deliberate design is how the machine exploits your brain and makes you an addict. A similar system is the social media feed (or even worse brainrot short videos). You scroll, you see new stuff, you identify content maybe emotionally. Its the same fast stimulus-reward cycle. Meassured in 1-2 seconds, same as gambling machines.
That definition sounds plausible but breaks down in practice. Every Chicagoan has snowfall-related risk. And conversely, a lot of those guys legally traded where they were not exposed to risk. They were just gambling.
I do think it breaks down in practice for the goal of deciding which given trade/bet is gambling.
I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even.
That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well.
I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers.
So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.
One side of a trade can be a gamble and the other a hedge. A single transaction doesn't need to be classified as a gamble or hedge - it can be both.
As for the market maker themselves - they are definitely not gambling. They are trying to make money while reducing risk to the extent possible. You don't walk into the risk management committee and get an excited response because you increased risk all else equal, right?
You started out saying it was simple, but now you have a definition where you need to somehow slice trades down the middle, so I think you're starting to see my point.
Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/
> toeing the line
I'm not sure that phrase means what you intended to say here. From Wikipedia, [1]: "Toe the line" is an idiomatic expression meaning either to conform to a rule or standard, or to stand in formation along a line.
Guess I learned something new today. I've always thought "toe the line" means something closer to "staying as close as you can to the line without crossing it", if that makes sense.
It's probably common enough to be an accepted meaning nowadays, like what's happened with "beg the question". I think the original meaning also lends itself very well to people believing the phrase is "tow the line" since that makes some sense with conforming to a rule. Who knows, idioms are a moving target.
In certain cases you can use information asymmetry to your advantage. You know something they don't. A good example is any market dependent on public opinion surveys (eg political polling). That data can be hard to find. If you can find it faster than everybody else then you win more often. There is still some chance involved but it's more like poker than blackjack (not a great analogy but you get my drift).
> What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling?
Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.
But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:
Roulette - generally gambling
Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible
That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...
It's a common refrain, but I don't agree that it's correct. You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk:
If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false;
With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged portfolio of derivatives your risk might be substantially lower.
And in any case, so what? If you place a small bet on every number of a roulette table your risk is essentially zero: you'll simply make a guaranteed fixed loss of 5.26% on every spin. On the other hand, if you invest in the Vanguard Total Stock Market index tracker, you might hope to make around 8 to 10% per year, but in some years (e.g. 2008) you might make a big loss (37%), so the risk is significant. Yet I think most people would agree that the former is gambling while the latter is not.
The important factor isn't how much risk you take on, it's whether a sufficiently skilled person can achieve a positive mathematical expectation over a series of similar bets.
> You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk
Indeed, but I'm not alone in making this decision, it's a common thing in the finance world, known there as "accredited investor" [1].
Generally, the distinction between gambling and investing (a fine line that especially Kalshi and Polymarket are attempting to walk, by the way) often is "can the investor / gambler influence the outcome of the investment by knowledge". Say, a stock like GME... the initial analysis by DFV clearly was investment, based on very thorough research. The Army of the Apes however that m00ned the stonk? That was pure degenerate gambling, with the point not being profits but hedgefunds closing down.
I think a more effective definition involves socially productive activity. If support the creation of value to others in hopes of getting paid back over time through getting a fraction of the value created, that's investing. If I put money into something volatile in hope that I get more money out, that's gambling.
Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.
The examples don't hold in most jurisdictions (except for the stock market and if short sells are allowed).
All of the three categories are defined as gambling in pretty much all jurisdictions across the globe. However, they are classified as different types, e.g. roulette is closer to slots than poker is. Then poker can be "cash tables" vs "tournament". The main classifier difference is "game of chance" vs "game of skill", yet there are lots of nuances.
As I stated in my comment, they weren't examples of the legal definition of gambling. What the law says something is can often differ greatly from the every day understanding. The legal definition can also change according to the whims of the legislature while the every day meaning tends to stay more static.
In the distant past of 2011, offering online poker to Americans, even from overseas, brought serious Federal prison time. That was before the lobbyists got to work.
> My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it.
In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?
Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think of a clear answer in two minutes, there's no point in anybody looking at anything that harms people I don't care about."
But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.
There are literally emails back and forth with Zuck where it's brought up that they're essentially making things as addictive as possible and it's bad for people, and he goes (to paraphrase) 'yeah, whatever. keep doing what you're doing'.
He said 'if you need info on people at Harvard just ask'. Called people who gave him information 'dumb fucks' (so, who's the next person on HN that's going to dare to reply to me that he was 'making a good point'? Do you see the Google founders saying that? Even as a joke?). Killed the competition of Instagram and Whatsapp. Copied every single Snapchat feature. Wants AI friend profiles for people. Hijacked emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 . Free Basics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198
In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive.
Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.
> Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted
So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.
"How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive?"
You get sued and you win or lose
But seriously, this is the wrong question
The right question is "How do we avoid litigation?"
That seems obvious
Companies were providing information for electronic retrieval before "social media". The laws were written for these types of information services
It's only so-called "tech" companies intermediating access, collecting data, conducting surveillance and providing ad services (while producing no content) that have made a mockery of informational retrieval
The majority of the US population will be over 65 by 2030 or thereabouts
It seems that courts and juries have no trouble telling what's what
The best idea ive seen is if you decide what a user sees in an algorithm way (beyond “natural” ones like chronological) you are liable for the content - you are no longer a common carrier and can be sued for damages. That should be step 1.
That kind of algorithm doesn't show you anything besides the messages in your inbox. It's never making a decision to show you X instead of Y, it's just deciding the ordering in which you see them.
Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
There are already a couple of answers for standard male programs, but if the male programs such as Gmail pushes up content to your inbox, save from Google then yes, that would be an algorithm that would qualify. I would really argue what you are describing is a filter rather than a content algorithm.
A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections.
If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.
Tobacco regulations don't regulate the general case, they regulate tobacco products. I think the same will apply to social media. There's no need to define an addictive platform anymore than there's a need to define an addictive substance. Instead all that you need to define is a social media platform. And that can be expanded/adjusted as necessary.
As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.
For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed.
If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.
Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.
"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."
For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.
The same way we already distinguish between card games and gambling. I can think of quite a few to distinguish normal platforms from addictive ones;
- non-chronological timeline
- promoted content from people you don't follow
- Rewards for using the app (reddit is a great example of this)
- Dark patterns to take control away from the user about what they see
And I'm sure I can think of a bunch more if I spent time on it.
> how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform?
Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts.
For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as:
- Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior;
- Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists;
- Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product;
- Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use;
This seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be decided by a trial. It’s some mix of intent and the actual outcomes, more or less as you stated.
I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter.
In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.
I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite content. Was the intent to _addict_ people? It doesn't have to be, to create a system people have become addicted to. Even if the harm is not intended, does that mean it cannot be regulated? Surely not! Let's ban infinite scroll for a start. The question of whether to punish Meta is quite separate from the question of how to reduce the harms of its products.
I think this captures the essence. Many posts on here, however valid or invalid, are arguing intent. While I think punitive measures are definitely warranted, now that we know for certain about the harm caused (and how it was caused), the discussion can shift to prevention via precise policy.
The distinction between punishment and prevention seems important here. Meta's intent might matter when deciding liability or penalties, but if a design pattern is demonstrably harmful, "we only wanted more engagement" isn't much of an argument against regulating it
have worked in analytics for a while. Engagement is a very broad category. Not all engagement metrics are toxic. For example, daily active users is healthy for a business to measure and is engagement. Commenting on Hackernews is engagement. Meta also has a wide range of engagement metrics - not all of which are problematic
Interesting to choose Hacker News as an example. I'm sure they measure every metric that can be measured, but it'd be interesting to see what measures they actually care about doing well on. The stated goal of the site is pretty explicitly not to be as engaging as possible. It's to satisfy intellectual curiosity. They make plenty of design choices for the express purpose of not being addictive. No infinite scroll. No personalized feed. No ability to subcribe to or follow particular users or topics. No visual or audio content. No previews. Automatic editing of clickbait titles to be less clickbaity. Built-in ability to temporarily ban yourself if you're spending too much time here.
It's not the measurement that is toxic. It's what measures you optimize for that can become toxic.
There was a moment in time when Instagram use to show this disclaimer "You're all caught up with the posts". You could still scroll below that and it would show you algorithmic content as it always have if you choose to view it. However I don't see this feature anymore and it's gotten worse with pure infinite slop. I really appreciated that cause every time I opened the app, saw that disclaimer I would instantly close it and go about doing other things. I wish they just kept simple stuff like that around but I guess that doesn't help their metrics.
the engagement argument could be applied to every commercial service or product. anything that is sold is getting optimized for appeal/attraction/engagement/adictiveness.
No, it isn't. Nobody evaluates a drill on how long a worker spends using it. If you can get the same job done faster, you'll go with that. Even in entertainment, not all products optimize for time of use. Nobody intentionally makes the longest possible movies.
Products optimize for engagement specifically when they exist within the attention economy and their monetization model is serving ads and/or harvesting user data. If Porsche and Rolex can sell you cars and watches you almost never use, I'm sure they're fine with that.
"spending time on FB" corresponds to "selling a Porsche/Rolex/drill". that is covered by marketing (for example by addressing male self-esteem in dishonest ways) which is a variation of appeal/attraction ... also the advertisement is engaging.
Even if it's hard to conclusively prove intent, I think it's easy to see how there must have been at least recklessness in play and perhaps even wilful blindness.
In other words, even if they didn't know that what they were doing was harmful, they should have.
Facebook causes Face Cancer: their interface and algorithm are so toxic that it causes users to React by scratching their eyes out because it hurts so much to look at and use.
Meta employees reading this: whether you work in Reality Labs, ads, operations, ML compiler, LLMs, marketing, whatever. You're all complicit in the harm. Remember that.
I'm delighted to see this headline because I've been comparing Facebook to cigarettes for more than a decade. The parallels are striking. Both industries knew their products were poisonous and intentionally hid that knowledge while intentionally engineering them to be as addictive as possible, and ended up marketing them directly to children.
> It could, for instance, do so on the grounds that it is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which safeguards platforms from legal liability for content posted by third parties.
But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.
Section 230 has nothing to do with whether a platform is impartial or not. All it does is make it so they are not treated as the publisher or speaker of third party content.
So if I post something on Facebook full of libelous statements about you section 230 means you sue me, not Facebook, over that libel because that libel is my speech, not Facebooks.
If Facebook figures out that libels posts about you are engaging and starts pushing them in everyone's feeds section 230 would protect Facebook if you wanted to sue them forlibel. I don't think section 230 would care though if you wanted to sue Facebook over their engagement seeking algorithm.
I am old and used to use FB back when it was cool. Think 2010-14 period, and it was addictive even then even when it was just content from friends. Humans have deep need for connection with other humans and they will be addicted to anything that provides it given that modern society is increasingly isolated.
People are addicted to reddit, heck I know people who are addicted to Stocks app because they just need something to scroll.
Modern day addictions are complex and products are not the cause imo. You remove Instagram and that time will be replaced by Reddit, tiktok or whatever product gives you some dopamine
People are lazy. If you give people an easy way to "fill that void" they will do so, even if it's detrimental to their long term health.
No social media? People will still find ways to socialize. It might not be as easy, but they will do it. Maybe you'll even see a resurgence in social clubs.
I wouldn't say social media is just "filling a void". I feel like it's more accurate to say that social media is exploiting weaknesses in the human brain for profit and causing harm to individuals and society as a whole. I'd even say that it's preventing people from filling that void because it's sucking away people's time.
Imagine if a tobacco executive said "you remove cigarettes and people will just replace it with alcohol or other drugs or another vice altogether". It may be true for some people but overall we've reduced harm by fighting back against cigarettes
At worst Suckerberg just pays money. So the issue is not being solved.
These US corporations operate outside the law - and they are protected by the orange king who is just too incompetent for anything other than pocketing away more money from the people, which is the only real skill he has.
and since all that tobacco money changed human behavior and gave people healthcarea and access to ways to quit smoking so they did, they lived happily ever after
oh wait no, what the states did is use all that money for other projects and let the smoking addicts pump up sales tax gains on the insane cigarette prices instead
so they are going to do the same with all that facebook money, nothing will change, they won't "protect the children" and they will funnel the millions into other projects for themselves
Social media is the worst thing we've ever created. The current political state of the world is entirely to blame on it. The misinformation. The deceit. The false impression that everyone's opinion is equal. It's not.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadOr maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.
Those both have problems too, I'm sure.
New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.
One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.
It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.
Heroin is addictive. Light and sound is fundamentally different.
fundamentally different how? Because they use your visual cortex to trigger neurons?
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis
(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.
Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.
At some point choices were made, with full awareness of the tradeoffs, to move products in a specific direction.
Absolutely none of this, the harms, the patterns, the tech, is unknown to people who work in trust and safety, content moderation, and policy.
At various times, meta and other tech firms did try to hold the line, but they eventually succumbed to the financial pressures they were under.
If there is any lesson to be taken, it is that ideals don’t survive beyond a few years in contact with market incentives.
At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case
100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."
It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.
The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.
But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.
My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.
Isn't that a bet that your government won't devalue your currency fast enough?
You are conflating risk with gambling. You can go through life without gambling, you can't go through life without risk.
Our entire society is based on being forced to gamble. If you don't invest your money in some capacity then inflation will eat you alive.
If you are creating risk that didn't exist, you are gambling.
The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doesn't make your house purchase a gamble.
This doesnt help the gambling distinction though. What activities can take over your neurological reward mechanism? Pretty much everything. So you have to factor in scale and amount of (potential) harm and this is where the vague debate begins.
A striking observation i made was, that gambling machines have deliberate delays between action (eg pull the lever) and reaction/reward for the brain to create tension and to break it with a dopamine spike. This deliberate design is how the machine exploits your brain and makes you an addict. A similar system is the social media feed (or even worse brainrot short videos). You scroll, you see new stuff, you identify content maybe emotionally. Its the same fast stimulus-reward cycle. Meassured in 1-2 seconds, same as gambling machines.
If your position is unrelated to a risk or wildly above the magnitude, you are creating risk for it's own sake. Gambling.
The legality of it has zero to do with anything. You can gamble legally and illegally.
I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even.
That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well.
I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers.
So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.
As for the market maker themselves - they are definitely not gambling. They are trying to make money while reducing risk to the extent possible. You don't walk into the risk management committee and get an excited response because you increased risk all else equal, right?
Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
It's possible I misinterpreted your statement though, and if so: apologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOptJl8Xkx0
In certain cases you can use information asymmetry to your advantage. You know something they don't. A good example is any market dependent on public opinion surveys (eg political polling). That data can be hard to find. If you can find it faster than everybody else then you win more often. There is still some chance involved but it's more like poker than blackjack (not a great analogy but you get my drift).
Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.
But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:
Roulette - generally gambling
Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible
Poker - not gambling
Stock market investing - not gambling
That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...
If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false;
With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged portfolio of derivatives your risk might be substantially lower.
And in any case, so what? If you place a small bet on every number of a roulette table your risk is essentially zero: you'll simply make a guaranteed fixed loss of 5.26% on every spin. On the other hand, if you invest in the Vanguard Total Stock Market index tracker, you might hope to make around 8 to 10% per year, but in some years (e.g. 2008) you might make a big loss (37%), so the risk is significant. Yet I think most people would agree that the former is gambling while the latter is not.
The important factor isn't how much risk you take on, it's whether a sufficiently skilled person can achieve a positive mathematical expectation over a series of similar bets.
Indeed, but I'm not alone in making this decision, it's a common thing in the finance world, known there as "accredited investor" [1].
Generally, the distinction between gambling and investing (a fine line that especially Kalshi and Polymarket are attempting to walk, by the way) often is "can the investor / gambler influence the outcome of the investment by knowledge". Say, a stock like GME... the initial analysis by DFV clearly was investment, based on very thorough research. The Army of the Apes however that m00ned the stonk? That was pure degenerate gambling, with the point not being profits but hedgefunds closing down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.
All of the three categories are defined as gambling in pretty much all jurisdictions across the globe. However, they are classified as different types, e.g. roulette is closer to slots than poker is. Then poker can be "cash tables" vs "tournament". The main classifier difference is "game of chance" vs "game of skill", yet there are lots of nuances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
In the distant past of 2011, offering online poker to Americans, even from overseas, brought serious Federal prison time. That was before the lobbyists got to work.
And betting on sports is ganbling too, despite the excuse of "skilled game" being deployed there too.
In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?
But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.
If you tell people at a dinner party your wealth came from it, will they be impressed and intrigued, or will they roll their eyes and be dismissive?
"I know how to throw dice" doesn't have quite the same intellectual ring as "I know how to trade derivatives contracts" haha
Although it may be possible to replicate either with AI. But it still should be conversation style rather than infinite feed thing without any input.
We just use those.
List goes on. Socio.
Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.
https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/
So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.
You get sued and you win or lose
But seriously, this is the wrong question
The right question is "How do we avoid litigation?"
That seems obvious
Companies were providing information for electronic retrieval before "social media". The laws were written for these types of information services
It's only so-called "tech" companies intermediating access, collecting data, conducting surveillance and providing ad services (while producing no content) that have made a mockery of informational retrieval
The majority of the US population will be over 65 by 2030 or thereabouts
It seems that courts and juries have no trouble telling what's what
So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?
Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.
If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.
In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.
As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.
If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.
Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.
"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."
For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.
Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts.
For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as:
- Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior;
- Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists;
- Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product;
- Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use;
and so on.
I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter.
In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.
Fidelity zero is compelling, in a retirement account.
Upton Sinclair
It's not the measurement that is toxic. It's what measures you optimize for that can become toxic.
This still exists and I get it every day. It is the floor for my feed. I have to refresh or close the app and reopen to fetch more.
Things will keep getting worse in the US as long as the current nothing is anti-competitive policies endure.
Products optimize for engagement specifically when they exist within the attention economy and their monetization model is serving ads and/or harvesting user data. If Porsche and Rolex can sell you cars and watches you almost never use, I'm sure they're fine with that.
In other words, even if they didn't know that what they were doing was harmful, they should have.
But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.
So if I post something on Facebook full of libelous statements about you section 230 means you sue me, not Facebook, over that libel because that libel is my speech, not Facebooks.
If Facebook figures out that libels posts about you are engaging and starts pushing them in everyone's feeds section 230 would protect Facebook if you wanted to sue them for libel. I don't think section 230 would care though if you wanted to sue Facebook over their engagement seeking algorithm.
People are addicted to reddit, heck I know people who are addicted to Stocks app because they just need something to scroll.
Modern day addictions are complex and products are not the cause imo. You remove Instagram and that time will be replaced by Reddit, tiktok or whatever product gives you some dopamine
No social media? People will still find ways to socialize. It might not be as easy, but they will do it. Maybe you'll even see a resurgence in social clubs.
Imagine if a tobacco executive said "you remove cigarettes and people will just replace it with alcohol or other drugs or another vice altogether". It may be true for some people but overall we've reduced harm by fighting back against cigarettes
These US corporations operate outside the law - and they are protected by the orange king who is just too incompetent for anything other than pocketing away more money from the people, which is the only real skill he has.
That’s where it ends the analogy cuz big Tabacco still exists
oh wait no, what the states did is use all that money for other projects and let the smoking addicts pump up sales tax gains on the insane cigarette prices instead
so they are going to do the same with all that facebook money, nothing will change, they won't "protect the children" and they will funnel the millions into other projects for themselves