I truly hope something is done about this. I just came back from a nice short bath at the beach, where a family had their towels set a few meters away from mine. While I was laying there, relaxing, I saw two kids begging their dad to accompany them into the water, while their dad watched Reels and ignored them completely. Not even a response.
The kids just wanted to have a fun afternoon and play in the water, but the dad was just scrolling, didn't care at all about his surroundings, probably in the zombie state that these platforms let you in. The kids ended up running to the water on their own, the dad didn't react at all to the situation, zero response (to be fair, I'm not saying he should be alarmed or anything, just a "yeah, go ahead" would've been fine).
I may be exaggerating but I really think that these platforms are the tobacco of these decades, I used to be really addicted as a teen as well, now I'm 23 and left most of the platforms for good. Seeing people act like this, even in my group of friends, makes me feel quite weird about the whole situation.
To give a little historical perspective (as you are young at 23) dads have been ignoring their kids for some times in our society: before it was magazines or maybe books. Or TV at home. The cliché "don’t disturb your dad while he is reading his newspaper" is sadly anchored in a real asymmetry in terms of child care (fathers tend to care for kids on their own terms, mothers for all the rest)
Said otherwise: me time for dads is usually sanctuarized
Man, that age means you're "conscious" life had smartphone/social media in it, according to this (1), if you're born 1999 or later (it's a report from 2012 and mentions teens 13-17), your teenage years probably involved smartphones/social media.
As someone older, I wonder what it must be like to grow up since childhood in a world where socializing is done a lot on Facebook/IG comment sections, as well as chasing likes for self-worth.
I get the sentiment you're going for and it seems very popular to shit on parents but as a dad myself with quite demanding kids I'd be more .. hesitant to make judgments like that. There literally are a million reasons I could behave like that. I could have just spend an entire week with them, ceaselessly catering to their every whim. You know this won't ever be enough. They'll yell at you all day any day to look at whatever they're doing if you're not putting in some boundaries.
I imagine this guy just told them a minute ago he needed some time off and what do you know, the next second they come and claim attention, and he is now stewing in his righteous anger-silence. You also don't know what's going on relationship-wise. In general I'd say mind your own business.
Same thing with the childless people complaining about kids having tablets in restaurants. Well, let me know, so next time I'll place two tired and severely hyperactive kids right next to you so you can enjoy their endless whining while I'll sit a few seats away shoving down some wine thank you very much.
That's a fair response, I get that kids can be overwhelming (hell, I'm pretty sure I'm not made to handle all that activity all the time), but at the same time, _you're at the beach_, the day is beautiful, the little waves look great, and even if you just wanna relax, the least you could do is tell your kids to go play in the water while you sunbathe or whatever.
My point, rather than a parent ignoring their kids and me being upset about it, is more of a "out of all things, you're gonna _watch reels_ at the beach?! Save that for home!". The very instant people get bored, there's an unlimited content machine to tickle our brains, when in reality we should learn that being bored is OK.
Still, while the point of raising kids being difficult is something I agree with you on, I also gotta say that I absolutely disagree about kids having tablets at restaurants, they probably shouldn't have them at all. But that's a whole different discussion, so I won't dive deeper here. All I can say is, you're right that I can't assume what the context was in that situation, and I shouldn't judge so harshly.
Its great to have these opinions and I agree with some of them. But to force these beliefs on others through laws is crossing a line you will regret at some point in your life. That's because it sets the precedent for others to force their beliefs on you in the future through governmental force. Including things you may morally disagree with.
Others are already forcing their beliefs on everyone else. The current state of laws isn't natural or god-given, it was constructed by humans. Leaving things as they are is not a neutral stance.
Their original post said, "I truly hope something is done about this." My interpretation is that they mean some policy gets created as its in direct response to the article.
Yes, I truly hope they do something about addicting design patterns, since they can be dangerous and people don't understand what they're getting into when they download, say, Instagram, for the first time.
People should at the very least be warned about the dark patterns that lead to addiction, just like we warn people who smoke with those big labels in cigarette boxes, or how alcohol is regulated to prevent minors from drinking. Education is also given in these matters at schools and kids get to learn about their effects early on, which doesn't mean that they aren't going to smoke or drink, but at least they are aware of what those things do.
These patterns of unlimited scrollable mindless short videos that give us large hits of dopamine constantly should be researched, talked about and regulated as we can already see the effects they're having on people who are addicted to them. Hell, you can't even open TikTok without watching a video, for example. If a friend sent you a message with their username and you're planning on following them, the second you open the app there's a hook waiting for you.
So, while I do partially agree on the fact that governments usually don't do a good job at regulating online stuff, I still think that this sort of thing should be regulated somehow. By giving kids proper education about the topic, warning parents about the dangers of early life exposure, and forcing these companies to change the way these patterns work to make the user aware of what they're doing at all times (schedules, forced time/video limits, another format that doesn't involve unlimited content a swipe away...). There are so many different approaches, some are simply informative, others are more extreme. We'll see how this is handled
For me right now it's not going to any article, but a kind of general landing page for the Eureopean Commission's "Press Corner" which lists a bunch of articles:
I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control
this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias.
things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option (but never be forced) to use it. if this is about kids then use california style on device age signals set by parents.
i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting. yes i believe in legalizing all drugs how could you tell.
This sentence has no meaning in a modern context. The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI". Everything is political.
"Choice" doesn't work. Everyone is under information and attention span overload. There isn't time to research what goes into the food you eat much less everything else going on in your life.
Addiction is exactly what laws should be fighting, be it social media, drugs, or something else. In a free market, people should be free to choose where they spend their time and money, but people aren't free if they're addicted. Addiction causes them to spend their time and money on things which they wouldn't consent to, if it weren't for addiction. For Instagram, the harm is the lost time, and whatever else they could have done with that time. Addictive stuff disrupts the whole market / society, not just the individual.
One thing that's potentially different, at least for Facebook, is the network effect. It only takes a few friends to start using Facebook for event planning for people to start missing events or worrying about missing out. That extra pressure cuts against individual choice.
Instagram is different, but you can see something similar happen on platforms with a chat feature. If people start to gravitate towards a singular app for talking, coordinating, etc. then there's the potential for resisters to be socially excluded. For most people, feeling socially excluded is a strong motivator. So far, this has mostly resulted in everyone having a fairly broad set of apps with chat features, so I'm not sure the centralizing power is as strong.
The overwhelming majority of local businesses around me don't have websites, just a FB page. If you want to look at upcoming events, specials, restaurant menus, etc. you either have to hope FB doesn't throw up the "you need an acct to see this page" blocker, or sign up.
Hey nice to hear somebody taking about social feature of a social network when so much of this is about profiling people through infinite scrolling content from strangers.
It'd be hilarious to see the EU demand interop on features like Events, Groups, Marketplace.
> i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting.
People who say this do not understand how powerful biology is. Nor do they understand that they are putting people with certain genetics more at risk.
"Choice" to people genetically prone to addiction is a trap. So unless you want to figure out the polygenetics of addiction and then have everyone tested for their genetics so they know there risk I will say I strongly disagree with your viewpoint, because there is no informed risk and you are promoting suffering with our beliefs.
The choice already exists: migrate to bluesky, pinksky, mastodon, pixelfed. Create repost bots to start the network effect with content from Instagram. Clearly label the repost bots and choose accounts that aren't reposted yet.
Alcoholic drinking mocktails can experience significant withdrawal symptoms like fever or seizures with potentially fatal results. What do you think will happen to all those "addicted" people after they uninstall TikTok from their phones?
I did. I went crazy and even injured my hand with a deep cut because I have ADHD too. Recommend wearing thick gloves for a week or maybe three weeks to pŕevent injury, do not take them off if you wash dishes by hand wear another glove or several so that you don't cut yourself and to keep your hands dry. Then i realized i was very depressed and didn't want to face my problems like child abandonment
What point? That people experience fatal withdrawal symptoms when they stop "consuming" social media? I find that very hard to believe. Do you have any research proving such claims?
First, to be addicted to something does not mean there has to be the same profile of withdrawal that we see in other drugs. Most of the diagnbosis only means you have an obsession that effects your day to day life in a way that causes harm.
But I do not understand your cognitive bias and why you will not do a simple search.
A behavioral addiction such as SNS addiction may thus be seen from a biopsychosocial perspective [16]. Just like substance-related addictions, SNS addiction incorporates the experience of the ‘classic’ addiction symptoms, namely mood modification (i.e., engagement in SNSs leads to a favourable change in emotional states), salience (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and emotional preoccupation with the SNS usage), tolerance (i.e., ever increasing use of SNSs over time), withdrawal symptoms (i.e., experiencing unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms when SNS use is restricted or stopped), conflict (i.e., interpersonal and intrapsychic problems ensue because of SNS usage), and relapse (i.e., addicts quickly revert back in their excessive SNS usage after an abstinence period).
According to mean withdrawal effects on cognitive skills, 97.6% participants in group A were able to complete task within assigned time before cessation and after cessation only 57% participants were able to do so, while in group B 94% were able to complete task before cessation and only 72% of participants were able to do so after cessation. Lastly, the mean BP reading checked in group A before cessation was 114.54/82.34mmHg and after cessation, it increased to 122.47/90.34mmHg whereas in group B, before cessation the mean BP reading was 118.32/84.88mmHg and after cessation it was 121.42/88.63mmHg. Conclusion: It is concluded that the addiction status of social media users and smokers is almost similar. This leads to the outcome that social network abuse is as harmful as smoking on focus, concentration, cognitive skills and increment of anxiety and BP.
> First, to be addicted to something does not mean there has to be the same profile of withdrawal that we see in other drugs. Most of the diagnbosis only means you have an obsession that effects your day to day life in a way that causes harm.
I never disputed that. I disputed OP's comparison with alcohol which like other GABA agonists (benzos, etc.) can cause lethal physical withdrawal symptoms. Looking at the downvotes a lot of "man, I scroll TikTok 10 hours a day because I addicted man, literally like heroin, but worse, man!!1" types got offended. Guess people took it as challenge to their victim identity or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> But I do not understand your cognitive bias and why you will not do a simple search.
But I did.
> According to mean withdrawal effects on cognitive skills, 97.6% participants in group A were able to complete task within assigned time before cessation and after cessation only 57% participants were able to do so, while in group B 94% were able to complete task before cessation and only 72% of participants were able to do so after cessation. Lastly, the mean BP reading checked in group A before cessation was 114.54/82.34mmHg and after cessation, it increased to 122.47/90.34mmHg whereas in group B, before cessation the mean BP reading was 118.32/84.88mmHg and after cessation it was 121.42/88.63mmHg.
So after uninstalling TikTok they will experience a few weeks of decreased mood and concentration but be fine overall? Seems like we are in agreement then!
> a few weeks of decreased mood and concentration but be fine overall?
Do you not understand that this make the addiction worse? Because people like you say "no big deal" while these poor people are stuck in thgis addiction being numbed and brainwashed?
You are a fucking jackass and I am tired of your techno-apologists trying to minimize everything bad about what the world has created.
> choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms
A few years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment however after watching many adults (and children) fall into addictive AI slop alternate reality hell holes, I just want it to stop. Likewise, I prefer not to live in a society that enables drug addicts to walk the streets and used needles to litter the pavements every 10cm like empty Coke bottles.
We regulate things we know will be abused, and we are often the better for it. Social media is no different.
I agree with you, for a an adult, the choice should be given and not enforced, it's same with smoking or alcohol consumptions. Both are terrible for your health on the long term, but the side effects are clear and open and people can make an educated decision.
Any attempt to ban political bias will reveal huge political bias.
Now I don’t mean all political biases are equal, or that all biases are absolutely wrong. Of course my biases are better™. But this days it looks like even stating that genocides are bad™ is not as consensual as it used to be in Europe over the last few decades, so what do I know.
Yeah it doesn't work long term because you go back to being addicted in no time. At least that's how it was when I tried to do it by creating new accounts
My solution is to use curbox and repost content on bluesky
Using instagram in a browser (e.g. firefox as it allows for extension on phone) and then installing an extension like control for instagram or hide reels works great, even better to set the https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following as your main page to enter (or is that only available in europe?). Allows to use instagram as old school social media instead of a scrolling app
Where, exactly? I browsed through the account settings and didn't see anything obviously relevant. (Could be that whatever option you're talking about is available only to mobile users, whereas I only ever visit Instagram on a desktop.)
Yeah, there don't seem to be any settings by those names in the web version. Or maybe their presence depends not on whether you're using the web vs. mobile client, but rather where you're connecting from geographically. That is, maybe Meta exposes these settings only when necessary to comply with laws or court orders in certain jurisdictions.
Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
What about calling these stuffs something like "junk media"? Using the words of the offenders to depict the landscape is giving a major concession in this battle for critical thinking.
I am with you and wish you were right, but good luck forcing Meta to change the key dark design patterns of their products (correctly identified by the regulators as "highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll")
This is a step in the right direction, though. It will be a long journey.
When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.
Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)
It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.
With FBPurity: https://www.fbpurity.com/ I have Facebook on my desktop computer exactly as it used to be in the 2000s when I signed up: content only from my "friends" and a few chosen sources (a band I like etc).
The newsfeed is very slow to load, as to fill the screen the extension must make twenty plus requests while hiding 99% of what Facebook's addiction machine returns.
Forcing alcoholic drinks to have a less addictive product is a much better way to protect young people’s brains than an alcohol age limit is (and frankly adults need help there too).
Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.
...Or, y'know...It could, just possibly...have something to do with the fact that no one has the money to engage in all of those things, especially young people.
Yes, that would help. Putting regulatory caps on the strength of alcoholic drinks would probably go a long way towards reducing harm across all of society.
Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.
And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.
Good idea. There’s an objective measure of alcohol content. All you need to do to make this analogy work is to create one for social media. Best of luck with that.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.
And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.
Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.
Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".
If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.
I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.
I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,
You're probably speaking more from the perspective of a college student, if not adult when this stuff was kicking off.
For kids today it's an entirely different world. Take all the petty little things that naturally happen in school settings, multiply it by orders of magnitude, make it not only permanent but permanently shareable - and you have social media + kids. It's a rather horrific thing. By college a lot of things like bullying have cooled down a good deal, and college kids tend to be at least somewhat more secure, so the image crafting and other issues are at least somewhat less harmful, but this is all very different for children.
And the worst part of this is that as horrible as this all is, it remains highly addictive. It's not about perpetual browsing but about FOMO. Anytime anybody posts something, there's this concern that maybe it's about you, or maybe it's something you don't want to miss out on, or maybe it's just something generally interesting. And this again just among your 'friends.'
Even if you completely eliminated algorithmic promotion (and advertising - which is probably even worse than crap organic 'content') you'd still see significant negative effects of social media on children.
it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development
Socializing isn't harmful. Socializing in a way that naturally trends towards mob mentality, where everything is potentially permanently recorded, and where artificial representations of people are the norm - that's all harmful, and it's inescapable in social media.
Agreed. HN feed is also addictive. EU should ban HN feed and only allow searching for new posts.
Quite honestly, I've been addicted to using my air fryer for cooking nowadays. The design is too good and convenient and the food comes out too tasty. I think EU should focus on making them less addictive.
Last time EU fined Facebook for merging WhatsApp userbase merging with Facebook, that they explicitly forbade. Facebook just paid the fee and moved along.
What would be different here?
Online advertisements should be forbidden as a whole. The attention-stealing and engagement-maximising internet with all it horribly effects only exist, due to advertising. And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
This is a wild take. Most serious media companies would collapse without online ad revenue. Google would be dead, along with all the products that sorta run the world like maps. But even local publications, like your independent city news site, which you presumably think is good, also die instantly.
The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.
They wouldnt be dead, everbody would use subscription and they could easily afford them because stuff would be cheaper.
The biggest misconception that average people can’t get their head around is that all ads are being paid for by themselves - the consumer. Meta and Google offer nothing for free to you, you are paying for their services everytime you buy a Coke, a car, or a Levis pant, or … anything.
what assures you they would be cheaper? they have already proven people can pay a higher price so why not charge more? this won't be enforced worldwide people would just switch platforms to one that isn't in a jurisdiction where ads are banned
because contrary to many peoples believe system, prices actually work to modulate demand. The whole idea that you can increase prices without losing customers is nonsense.
> And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
We're in an information crisis. Most people don't know what is true or false anymore. Google and Meta didn't make it better and in fact might have contributed to it. I'd say let's go back to 1996.
Real household median income in the US has risen by more than 25% since 1996, largely driven by technology built for and by the ecosystem you want to pull out by the roots.
assuming 2% inflation over 30 years, that means that a dollar in 1996 is now worth $1.81. 80% depreciation versus 25% increase in income is not comparable.
The wealth inequality in the past 30 years has dramatically shifted in favor of the ultra rich.
Technology has been used to create illegal monopolies -> too big to fail -> surely we can't / don't need to regulate this -> tech companies get away with murder and laugh all the way to the bank.
A company like Meta could finesse their algorythms to bias people against antitrust action and you would never know.
To repeat the talking point of tech companies that "technology has helped us, therefore we should not regulate it in any way" is to accept the premise of people that spend every waking hour of their day figuring out what they can get away with to screw you over.
I would asume the FRED statistic already is inflation adjusted as they said real income (usally inflation adjusted). That is 25% come ontop of the inflation, while you subtract it.
That being said, inflation or CPI is a very poor metric over time. I mean, sure, lets look what a smartphone with an all-knowing AI and internet access cost 100 years ago and see how much more we are paying now for it. Or the price of antibiotics, polio vacines and so on - sure they were cheap 100 years ago.
Because it is obvisouly not possible, we measure CPI in the price of eggs, milk, veggies, transportation and so on. Sure, we are all happy that we can buy today 25% more butter than we could 20 years ago.
True but the whole “influencer” and “creative” industry would collapse overnight. A few large ones would survive on their patreon income, most would collapse and have to get a real job, if those are still around.
Mostly true but there are a few good channels with very practical information for picking up new skills (gardening, woodwork, playing an instrument, etc) as well as looking up troubleshooting information.
Those too would be lost.
Sure some drag out three minutes into fifteen, but whatever…
In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.
Magazines primarily make money through advertising.
Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.
In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.
If it's really that good, you'll pay for it with the money you saved in advertising. You're paying for the ads, don't forget. Plenty of people used to pay for things like woodworking classes, back when there was money. Doing a woodworking class in person at a woodworking shop will teach you much better than youtube.
They buy ads too. It’d adversely affect their campaign budgets. (Sure, it would adversely affect their competitors’ too, but second-order effects are usually too complex for politicians to understand.)
MEPs want to write rules that mean they get to fine rich US companies. Local advertising might be worse for you overall but you'd have to do more work to get less free money.
The addictive design is in service of ads. Instead of regulating software, tax ad revenue to disincentivize building a business model around user profiling and tracking.
Vendors now cannot get X pounds with Y pounds advertising outlay to make Z pounds per unit of wares. To continue making Z money per unit of wares, with previous S pounds price charged to consumers per unit, add significantly more than reduction in Y advertising per unit to S to offset reduced "brand" "awareness".
No one buying shit anymore. People still buying shit elsewhere. GDP and tax revenues fall relative to others. Deflationary aspects. Market leaders complain through lobbying groups. Repeal. Back to square one.
I don't agree. They are two separate depictions of what might happen as a result of applying a tax on advertising. They may well coincide with each other, however. Saying that the second is a restatement of the first is like saying two interpretations of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" are restating the same fact.
Governments see reduction in tax income and GDP and repeal taxes. In UK: Signal "mansion" tax on properties valued above X price to collect recurring Y pounds total tax. Market adjusts valuations based on probability of tax. Number of houses still worth at least X now diminishes. Now cannot collect recurring Y pounds. "Mansion" tax delayed.
You have this complex system that has reached some sort of relative equilibrium based on say a set S of ten sorts of tax rates, along with a set F of factors (size millions), with the government's tax revenue R being one of those outputs. Then some guy in the government called G signals to the government and public that he can increase R by X by fiddling with a member of S, or maybe adding a member to S (of size say ten).
Is G stupid, or does he just lean towards retaining the public's affection, his relatively low salary, potential under the table payments and whatever networking opportunities his job provides? I lean towards the latter.
The downside to this is that services become class based again then.
Instagram is the same service for everyone, regardless if you are homeless or a billionaire, it is exactly because it is an ad based model. Same for google and facebook.
These models are "classless business" incarnate, and people absolutely hate them. It's part bewildering and part bemusing.
This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.
> are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.
I’m sorry but this is just not real.
There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.
If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.
Which is exactly the problem with this whole discussion. On the far side, you hear that it's heroin! It's fentanyl! It's alcohol! Facebook groups are the modern opium den! But when actually challenged, it's oh no no, that's a metaphor, it's metaphorical fentanyl, not real fentanyl. People on Instagram are metaphorically injecting metaphorical drugs into their metaphorical veins.
It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.
The academic literature funded by what grants from what stakeholders? Like the social media research from Harvard Kennedy now? The research that came after its social media research lead was fired and a $500mm Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant occurred somehow in parallel [0] [1]?
That recent research?
Or the research that was occurring on social media before that? Surely you're not arguing in that bad of faith, despite where I could speculate your RSUs might have came from. But this seems an extremely naive take if not made in bad faith.
Would love to see the overlap between the average anti-Big Tech HN commenter cheering on this regulatory advance, and the average HN commenter who thinks hard drugs should be legalized and that the War on Drugs is bad. Because these are contradictory positions! Either you think people should be free to do things that are addictive or you don't
These apps should be banned or be forced to only show feeds from accounts you follow in chronological order, nothing more. Perhaps with some basic search if you want to discover something new, but cumbersome enough so that you don't spend hours on it.
I know someone he keeps scrolling the minute they wake up. They are behind on chores, life stuff, but keep scrolling.
That wouldn't be too bad in itself if not for sheer amount of misinformation that is being served. Especially health related. Thanks to AI enhanced videos showing parasites everywhere, person now has developed eating disorder and thinks their poor health is due to parasites and not the fact they spend whole day on Instagram. Now they started ordering "supplements" and "courses" those people peddle. I tried to report these accounts, but Meta insist they are no breaching any T&C.
Hm, I use Facebook twice a year, to thank folks for my b-day greetings and for checking my account. Some with Insta.
I am not the least addicted to it. I suspended TikTok, because it is of low value.
YouTube is useful - only with the subscription to get rid of all the ads.
Sorry, addictive design is once again another strawman. No one forces you to use these crappy apps. Same with the iPhone.
Need free time? iPhone will serve you. All Icons colorless? iPhone!
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
There is a problem, if you see people being sucked into their smartphones - however, you cannot have one without the other. Many public services require a smartphone. Where is the alternative?
It is human nature, that's all. Fighting Facebook is so low, absolutely low.
This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.
Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”
I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.
We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.
But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.
But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.
People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.
Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.
However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).
Markets don’t come into existence ex nihilo. They come into existence by regulation setting the rules to ensure that the system works for humans.
You have nothing without regulation and government power, setting up the rules and enforcing them.
Further, when we look at the merits of the case which is driving this entire conversation, Meta acted in a manner that most people would consider evil.
More or less the definition of a state is that it upholds the monopoly of violence within its borders. In modern liberal states that monopoly comes with extensive regulations on how, when and by whom violence should be used. This is called the rule of law. The regulations are usually broadly enumerated in the constitution or similar basic law, and in more detail in ordinary legislation. In democratic states these are ideally determined by the population, usually via some representatives.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is the rationale why many people think that some powers may be granted to the institution with the sole legitimate power to force you to comply at gunpoint.
Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)
The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…
None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.
There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.
So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.
As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.
A functioning democratic leadership listens when told they've done good, and listens when told they messed up.
Arguing that they should receive no support or positive reactions because they also deserve blame is how the center and left break down their own power: Believing that disengagement from one another is a stronger moral obligation than working together and fixing shit with people who are willing to listen and work.
The EU is an institution that is democratically legitimized at every level (Either through direct elections in the parliament or through elections to the appropriate national government in the case of the Council / Commission). Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes the Conservatives do some messed up lawfare to introduce fucked up things like Chat Control, but at least they were voted in and can be voted out again.
Big Tech is some foreign rich dudes being dictators of their little fiefdom doing whatever they can to make themselves even richer. We have zero control over them and what they do to our society in this pursuit. No elections. No recalls. No public votes.
The only correct reaction is for the sovereign to assert its sovereignty and lay out some ground rules.
Maybe you missed it but the commission and parliament consists of a lot of people and groups that are all pushing for different things. While we have chat control being actively pushed by some groups actively funded by Facebook we have other groups like this working against Facebook.
If social media was just your family, friends and acquaintances sharing stuff like it used to be you may have a point. But with the algorithm feed its turned into a der sturmer like propaganda pipeline.
This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.
EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.
The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.
The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.
This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.
They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.
They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.
While it is genuinely a huge concern, the legal measure are not going to address it. One has to consider the overall picture, not just a corner of it.
The ship has sailed. There will be addictive designs, products, services etc. The very theme of a business is centered around keeping the customers addicted. It's just a matter of time, every business on this planet would, with the help of AI, make their products and services extremely addictive.
Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.
I personally think the answer should be mandating user controls of said algorithms. If you have a large social media site that suggests results or provides a feed then you must allow users to configure said feed.
The default should be simple, something like time-ordered of followed only with opt in for recommendations. Ideally I'd love to be able to swap algorithms for something open source but setting a standard there rather than just mandating a level of control seems a bigger hurdle.
It seems entirely anti-consumer that I am just the behest of whatever Google or Meta decide is most profitable to show me instead of finding important news or entertainment in a way that I want.
The entire advertising industry is predicated on the principle of preempting personal preferences with paid placements. (Sorry, didn’t start out that sentence expecting to alliterate it all but it just came out like that).
Literally every ad you see is a business deciding ‘instead of showing you what you came here to see, here’s something else, which I am showing you only to benefit my business.’
I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
> I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
That's a baby I'm happy to lose along with its bathwater.
Fun sidenote: On a recent Hotmail post on here, I saw a screenshot of hotmail V1 (way before M$ took over). They had a prominent button on their homepage about privacy.
Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
So, how do we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts of the free flow of information on social media, where all citizens are invited to broadcast?
Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart. A nice natural protection against extremes.
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
I don't follow, the argument is against the addictive design of the feed algorithms, not the information being shared per se.
Nothing in this is geared towards curtailing platforms like social media to exist, it's trying to curtail the design of psychological manipulation for "engagement". Ragebait is the most common case, it makes people interact with content if it enrages them; another common case is to feed kids with slop content that makes them fixated on the platform, scrolling endlessly trying to get the elusive dopamine hit quite similar to the feeling of playing a slot machine.
I think framing this as the EU trying to censor platforms because people post content against the current order is a big cynical leap. I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that? Maybe you have ulterior motives as well?
Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.
> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?
Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
> Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Other kinds of ragebait: creating a whole profile dedicated only to take the most extreme view on issues (on both sides), only to make people angry so they comment or like/interact with the content.
> Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue. You verge into the false equivalency territory, something before was addictive so now that we have something even more addictive it's ok just from precedence? Different levels and degrees demand different solutions.
> So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
That's absolutely cynical and a thought-terminating cliché since it's impossible to contradict you. I understand it's your opinion but it verges into conspiratorial thinking which I don't think anyone can de-escalate you from except for yourself.
> As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
Not really but you constantly rehash similar arguments in topics surrounding the EU so I'm trying to figure out what exactly is behind that. Ulterior motives don't need to be that drastic, it can simply be "I don't support the EU as a project" since you never state that but consistently take that side of the argument.
> Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Thank you! That's the first time I heard a sensible explanation of the word that's being used so much. That's indeed something different and malevolent.
> When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue.
But if social media was non-existent, then people would carry these devices with them for traditional broadcasts.
Let me make a comparison that I think is very on-topic: Alcohol is a traditional drug, less addictive and less harmful than many of the worst drugs. But more addictive and more harmful than many other drugs. Wouldn't it be strange if governments, regulators and rulers only focused on the other drugs and said nothing about alcohol? Would I be a Russian, Chinese or Iranian spy or a jew (as another poster just insinuated) if I said "Hey, what about alcohol?".
Traditional mass media regulation vs Internet regulation is not only an EU issue. What I said about the EU regulators could just as much be said about any other government doing the same. I don't think it's unjustified conspiratorial thinking to look at how rulers want to control speech and the flow of information for their own benefit. It's expected. If screen addiction was what they truly wanted to fight, then the EU Commission would also act against traditional broadcasts in the same way they act against social media. Just like rulers and regulators have acted in all kinds of ways against alcohol, including prohibition and other extreme measures.
> It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
Also known as Russian, Iranian, Israeli and Chinese bot farms.
> Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
More outlandish conspiracy theories on hackernews...
You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
What messages are not being allowed to be 'streamed into the brains of the population' exactly? Are you suggesting, for example, that claims made by the US president should not be shown on TV? Are you suggesting that these are not then analysed and scrutinised by people on TV?
Speaking from the UK, the state controls the media.
There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.
And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.
UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.
> You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.
I'd say: the fediverse. Everyone can "broadcast" and discuss freely without having a central power that can censor or subtly manipulate the broader discussion.
I truly hope something is done about this. I just came back from a nice short bath at the beach, where a family had their towels set a few meters away from mine. While I was laying there, relaxing, I saw two kids begging their dad to accompany them into the water, while their dad watched Reels and ignored them completely. Not even a response.
The kids just wanted to have a fun afternoon and play in the water, but the dad was just scrolling, didn't care at all about his surroundings, probably in the zombie state that these platforms let you in. The kids ended up running to the water on their own, the dad didn't react at all to the situation, zero response (to be fair, I'm not saying he should be alarmed or anything, just a "yeah, go ahead" would've been fine).
I may be exaggerating but I really think that these platforms are the tobacco of these decades, I used to be really addicted as a teen as well, now I'm 23 and left most of the platforms for good. Seeing people act like this, even in my group of friends, makes me feel quite weird about the whole situation.
To give a little historical perspective (as you are young at 23) dads have been ignoring their kids for some times in our society: before it was magazines or maybe books. Or TV at home. The cliché "don’t disturb your dad while he is reading his newspaper" is sadly anchored in a real asymmetry in terms of child care (fathers tend to care for kids on their own terms, mothers for all the rest) Said otherwise: me time for dads is usually sanctuarized
Man, that age means you're "conscious" life had smartphone/social media in it, according to this (1), if you're born 1999 or later (it's a report from 2012 and mentions teens 13-17), your teenage years probably involved smartphones/social media.
As someone older, I wonder what it must be like to grow up since childhood in a world where socializing is done a lot on Facebook/IG comment sections, as well as chasing likes for self-worth.
1) https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2012/young-adults-and-teens...
To me it felt no different from socialising nowadays as an adult.
Some weren’t on social networks at all, and thus missed out on some of the socialising. But also saved themselves from many cringey trends, FOMO, etc.
While some others were on social media 24/7 and basically acted like early influencers.
I'm 48 and lived both analog and digital.
I am so glad cameras on phones didn't exist when I was at school. I probably would have been expelled a dozen times over.
I get the sentiment you're going for and it seems very popular to shit on parents but as a dad myself with quite demanding kids I'd be more .. hesitant to make judgments like that. There literally are a million reasons I could behave like that. I could have just spend an entire week with them, ceaselessly catering to their every whim. You know this won't ever be enough. They'll yell at you all day any day to look at whatever they're doing if you're not putting in some boundaries.
I imagine this guy just told them a minute ago he needed some time off and what do you know, the next second they come and claim attention, and he is now stewing in his righteous anger-silence. You also don't know what's going on relationship-wise. In general I'd say mind your own business.
Same thing with the childless people complaining about kids having tablets in restaurants. Well, let me know, so next time I'll place two tired and severely hyperactive kids right next to you so you can enjoy their endless whining while I'll sit a few seats away shoving down some wine thank you very much.
That's a fair response, I get that kids can be overwhelming (hell, I'm pretty sure I'm not made to handle all that activity all the time), but at the same time, _you're at the beach_, the day is beautiful, the little waves look great, and even if you just wanna relax, the least you could do is tell your kids to go play in the water while you sunbathe or whatever.
My point, rather than a parent ignoring their kids and me being upset about it, is more of a "out of all things, you're gonna _watch reels_ at the beach?! Save that for home!". The very instant people get bored, there's an unlimited content machine to tickle our brains, when in reality we should learn that being bored is OK.
Still, while the point of raising kids being difficult is something I agree with you on, I also gotta say that I absolutely disagree about kids having tablets at restaurants, they probably shouldn't have them at all. But that's a whole different discussion, so I won't dive deeper here. All I can say is, you're right that I can't assume what the context was in that situation, and I shouldn't judge so harshly.
Its great to have these opinions and I agree with some of them. But to force these beliefs on others through laws is crossing a line you will regret at some point in your life. That's because it sets the precedent for others to force their beliefs on you in the future through governmental force. Including things you may morally disagree with.
Others are already forcing their beliefs on everyone else. The current state of laws isn't natural or god-given, it was constructed by humans. Leaving things as they are is not a neutral stance.
> But to force these beliefs on others through laws is crossing a line you will regret at some point in your life.
Where did they argue for a policy solution?
Their original post said, "I truly hope something is done about this." My interpretation is that they mean some policy gets created as its in direct response to the article.
Yes, I truly hope they do something about addicting design patterns, since they can be dangerous and people don't understand what they're getting into when they download, say, Instagram, for the first time.
People should at the very least be warned about the dark patterns that lead to addiction, just like we warn people who smoke with those big labels in cigarette boxes, or how alcohol is regulated to prevent minors from drinking. Education is also given in these matters at schools and kids get to learn about their effects early on, which doesn't mean that they aren't going to smoke or drink, but at least they are aware of what those things do.
These patterns of unlimited scrollable mindless short videos that give us large hits of dopamine constantly should be researched, talked about and regulated as we can already see the effects they're having on people who are addicted to them. Hell, you can't even open TikTok without watching a video, for example. If a friend sent you a message with their username and you're planning on following them, the second you open the app there's a hook waiting for you.
So, while I do partially agree on the fact that governments usually don't do a good job at regulating online stuff, I still think that this sort of thing should be regulated somehow. By giving kids proper education about the topic, warning parents about the dangers of early life exposure, and forcing these companies to change the way these patterns work to make the user aware of what they're doing at all times (schedules, forced time/video limits, another format that doesn't involve unlimited content a swipe away...). There are so many different approaches, some are simply informative, others are more extreme. We'll see how this is handled
100% agree, with the slight nuance that the EU would not care 1-bit if the dad was scrolling EU propaganda.
Full title: "Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act"
Edit: for some reason, the URL has been changed. The page I tried to post is here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
It's because the page you posted contains this incorrect tag:
For me right now it's not going to any article, but a kind of general landing page for the Eureopean Commission's "Press Corner" which lists a bunch of articles:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/home/en
I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control
this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias.
things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option (but never be forced) to use it. if this is about kids then use california style on device age signals set by parents.
i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting. yes i believe in legalizing all drugs how could you tell.
> ban any kind of political bias.
This sentence has no meaning in a modern context. The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI". Everything is political.
"Choice" doesn't work. Everyone is under information and attention span overload. There isn't time to research what goes into the food you eat much less everything else going on in your life.
> The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI"
That's something I didn't need to learn today!
Addiction is exactly what laws should be fighting, be it social media, drugs, or something else. In a free market, people should be free to choose where they spend their time and money, but people aren't free if they're addicted. Addiction causes them to spend their time and money on things which they wouldn't consent to, if it weren't for addiction. For Instagram, the harm is the lost time, and whatever else they could have done with that time. Addictive stuff disrupts the whole market / society, not just the individual.
One thing that's potentially different, at least for Facebook, is the network effect. It only takes a few friends to start using Facebook for event planning for people to start missing events or worrying about missing out. That extra pressure cuts against individual choice.
Instagram is different, but you can see something similar happen on platforms with a chat feature. If people start to gravitate towards a singular app for talking, coordinating, etc. then there's the potential for resisters to be socially excluded. For most people, feeling socially excluded is a strong motivator. So far, this has mostly resulted in everyone having a fairly broad set of apps with chat features, so I'm not sure the centralizing power is as strong.
The overwhelming majority of local businesses around me don't have websites, just a FB page. If you want to look at upcoming events, specials, restaurant menus, etc. you either have to hope FB doesn't throw up the "you need an acct to see this page" blocker, or sign up.
Hey nice to hear somebody taking about social feature of a social network when so much of this is about profiling people through infinite scrolling content from strangers.
It'd be hilarious to see the EU demand interop on features like Events, Groups, Marketplace.
> i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting.
People who say this do not understand how powerful biology is. Nor do they understand that they are putting people with certain genetics more at risk.
"Choice" to people genetically prone to addiction is a trap. So unless you want to figure out the polygenetics of addiction and then have everyone tested for their genetics so they know there risk I will say I strongly disagree with your viewpoint, because there is no informed risk and you are promoting suffering with our beliefs.
The choice already exist: don't use social media like Instagram and TikTok. Yet everyone keep choosing it despite being addictive.
So you can't really trust people, even less teenagers, to make a disciplined choice of not using an addictive algorithm.
> Yet everyone keep choosing it despite being addictive.
Let me fix that for you. Everyone keeps choosing it because it is addictive.
Because the network effect prevents them from using alternatives. Bluesky is a desert in the global south
The choice already exists: migrate to bluesky, pinksky, mastodon, pixelfed. Create repost bots to start the network effect with content from Instagram. Clearly label the repost bots and choose accounts that aren't reposted yet.
Don't you get it? No one is on those sites because they are not addictive. It is like trying top tell an alcoholic to just drink mocktails.
Alcoholic drinking mocktails can experience significant withdrawal symptoms like fever or seizures with potentially fatal results. What do you think will happen to all those "addicted" people after they uninstall TikTok from their phones?
I did. I went crazy and even injured my hand with a deep cut because I have ADHD too. Recommend wearing thick gloves for a week or maybe three weeks to pŕevent injury, do not take them off if you wash dishes by hand wear another glove or several so that you don't cut yourself and to keep your hands dry. Then i realized i was very depressed and didn't want to face my problems like child abandonment
> I did.
Text following this first sentence of your message doesn't indicate any kind of physical withdrawal symptoms though.
That is the point they are making.
What point? That people experience fatal withdrawal symptoms when they stop "consuming" social media? I find that very hard to believe. Do you have any research proving such claims?
"fatal" You are just clutching at dramatic things nobody said
Also,these studies are a search away. Fill your boots.
OP compared "TikTok addiction" to alcoholism. It is up to them to provide proofs.
Here are just some of the studies that find physcial changes in brains who show symptoms of internet addiction.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/04/i...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240604184208.h...
Can you cite any specific claims regarding withdrawal symptoms from the studies you referenced? I couldn't find any.
First, to be addicted to something does not mean there has to be the same profile of withdrawal that we see in other drugs. Most of the diagnbosis only means you have an obsession that effects your day to day life in a way that causes harm.
But I do not understand your cognitive bias and why you will not do a simple search.
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/8/9/3528pdf?bcsi-ac-e192c8b16...
A behavioral addiction such as SNS addiction may thus be seen from a biopsychosocial perspective [16]. Just like substance-related addictions, SNS addiction incorporates the experience of the ‘classic’ addiction symptoms, namely mood modification (i.e., engagement in SNSs leads to a favourable change in emotional states), salience (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and emotional preoccupation with the SNS usage), tolerance (i.e., ever increasing use of SNSs over time), withdrawal symptoms (i.e., experiencing unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms when SNS use is restricted or stopped), conflict (i.e., interpersonal and intrapsychic problems ensue because of SNS usage), and relapse (i.e., addicts quickly revert back in their excessive SNS usage after an abstinence period).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muhammad-Qureshi-30/pub...
According to mean withdrawal effects on cognitive skills, 97.6% participants in group A were able to complete task within assigned time before cessation and after cessation only 57% participants were able to do so, while in group B 94% were able to complete task before cessation and only 72% of participants were able to do so after cessation. Lastly, the mean BP reading checked in group A before cessation was 114.54/82.34mmHg and after cessation, it increased to 122.47/90.34mmHg whereas in group B, before cessation the mean BP reading was 118.32/84.88mmHg and after cessation it was 121.42/88.63mmHg. Conclusion: It is concluded that the addiction status of social media users and smokers is almost similar. This leads to the outcome that social network abuse is as harmful as smoking on focus, concentration, cognitive skills and increment of anxiety and BP.
> First, to be addicted to something does not mean there has to be the same profile of withdrawal that we see in other drugs. Most of the diagnbosis only means you have an obsession that effects your day to day life in a way that causes harm.
I never disputed that. I disputed OP's comparison with alcohol which like other GABA agonists (benzos, etc.) can cause lethal physical withdrawal symptoms. Looking at the downvotes a lot of "man, I scroll TikTok 10 hours a day because I addicted man, literally like heroin, but worse, man!!1" types got offended. Guess people took it as challenge to their victim identity or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> But I do not understand your cognitive bias and why you will not do a simple search.
But I did.
> According to mean withdrawal effects on cognitive skills, 97.6% participants in group A were able to complete task within assigned time before cessation and after cessation only 57% participants were able to do so, while in group B 94% were able to complete task before cessation and only 72% of participants were able to do so after cessation. Lastly, the mean BP reading checked in group A before cessation was 114.54/82.34mmHg and after cessation, it increased to 122.47/90.34mmHg whereas in group B, before cessation the mean BP reading was 118.32/84.88mmHg and after cessation it was 121.42/88.63mmHg.
So after uninstalling TikTok they will experience a few weeks of decreased mood and concentration but be fine overall? Seems like we are in agreement then!
> a few weeks of decreased mood and concentration but be fine overall?
Do you not understand that this make the addiction worse? Because people like you say "no big deal" while these poor people are stuck in thgis addiction being numbed and brainwashed?
You are a fucking jackass and I am tired of your techno-apologists trying to minimize everything bad about what the world has created.
By dang et all...
Chicken or egg problem: if you migrate, you become a hermit.
> choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms
A few years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment however after watching many adults (and children) fall into addictive AI slop alternate reality hell holes, I just want it to stop. Likewise, I prefer not to live in a society that enables drug addicts to walk the streets and used needles to litter the pavements every 10cm like empty Coke bottles.
We regulate things we know will be abused, and we are often the better for it. Social media is no different.
Open sourcing the algorithm and showing the weights used to generate the feed each time would be great.
I agree with you, for a an adult, the choice should be given and not enforced, it's same with smoking or alcohol consumptions. Both are terrible for your health on the long term, but the side effects are clear and open and people can make an educated decision.
> strictly ban any kind of political bias.
Any attempt to ban political bias will reveal huge political bias.
Now I don’t mean all political biases are equal, or that all biases are absolutely wrong. Of course my biases are better™. But this days it looks like even stating that genocides are bad™ is not as consensual as it used to be in Europe over the last few decades, so what do I know.
> more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option
This seems like a hot take given the (justifiably) illegality of stuff like fentanyl.
Only tangentailly related, but, there is an option in Instagram to reset your algorithm. I highly recommend this if you find yourself doom-scrolling.
Not sure if it's also in FB on account of me not having an account there.
Yeah it doesn't work long term because you go back to being addicted in no time. At least that's how it was when I tried to do it by creating new accounts
My solution is to use curbox and repost content on bluesky
After resetting my algorithm the content I’m served now is even more clickbaity and trying to forcibly hold my attention
Using instagram in a browser (e.g. firefox as it allows for extension on phone) and then installing an extension like control for instagram or hide reels works great, even better to set the https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following as your main page to enter (or is that only available in europe?). Allows to use instagram as old school social media instead of a scrolling app
Thank you so much for sharing that URL! Works in US of A.
I highly recommend not using Instagram. Also ketamine I hear is bad for people brain. Stay safe.
What happen when wanna-be-free-market interests have some lucrative addictive crap to sell, hmm? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Where, exactly? I browsed through the account settings and didn't see anything obviously relevant. (Could be that whatever option you're talking about is available only to mobile users, whereas I only ever visit Instagram on a desktop.)
Not sure about desktop, but on mobile it is under Settings and activity -> (What you see) Content preferences -> Reset suggested content.
Yeah, there don't seem to be any settings by those names in the web version. Or maybe their presence depends not on whether you're using the web vs. mobile client, but rather where you're connecting from geographically. That is, maybe Meta exposes these settings only when necessary to comply with laws or court orders in certain jurisdictions.
Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
What about calling these stuffs something like "junk media"? Using the words of the offenders to depict the landscape is giving a major concession in this battle for critical thinking.
Junk media is the shoe that fits.
I'm definitely going to start calling it that when discussing it from now on.
I prefer Anti-social Media
I am with you and wish you were right, but good luck forcing Meta to change the key dark design patterns of their products (correctly identified by the regulators as "highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll")
This is a step in the right direction, though. It will be a long journey.
> good luck forcing Meta
When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.
Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)
It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.
Exactly. If social media apps had a configurable old style non-algorithmic feed the problem would be dramatically smaller.
With FBPurity: https://www.fbpurity.com/ I have Facebook on my desktop computer exactly as it used to be in the 2000s when I signed up: content only from my "friends" and a few chosen sources (a band I like etc).
The newsfeed is very slow to load, as to fill the screen the extension must make twenty plus requests while hiding 99% of what Facebook's addiction machine returns.
People prefer the more engaging option, based on testing when preferences are offered.
You aren’t really putting a fair choice here. A product that is tested and refined to be viscerally attractive to our brains, vs will power.
This means you have the illusion of individual choice, with practical addiction at scale.
> highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll
Didn't tiktok get hit with this earlier in the year? Has tiktok removed these features for European users?
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Forcing alcoholic drinks to have a less addictive product is a much better way to protect young people’s brains than an alcohol age limit is (and frankly adults need help there too).
Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.
We do not care where we get our dopamine hits. The most likely place is the easiest, and right now, for teens, it is social media.
I am afraid this is setting kids up for abusing drugs and alchohol in the future.
...Or, y'know...It could, just possibly...have something to do with the fact that no one has the money to engage in all of those things, especially young people.
Yes, that would help. Putting regulatory caps on the strength of alcoholic drinks would probably go a long way towards reducing harm across all of society.
Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.
And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.
In quite a few countries, you can drink less-acoholic drinks, eg. beer and wine, much younger than high-alcohol drinks, eg. whiskey, vodka, etc.
Germany is one such example.
Good idea. There’s an objective measure of alcohol content. All you need to do to make this analogy work is to create one for social media. Best of luck with that.
What’s your point? We do this.
NA beer now exists. Beer and wine places can’t sell liquor. Alcohol sales aren’t 24/7 in many places.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.
And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.
Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.
Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".
If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.
I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.
I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,
You're probably speaking more from the perspective of a college student, if not adult when this stuff was kicking off.
For kids today it's an entirely different world. Take all the petty little things that naturally happen in school settings, multiply it by orders of magnitude, make it not only permanent but permanently shareable - and you have social media + kids. It's a rather horrific thing. By college a lot of things like bullying have cooled down a good deal, and college kids tend to be at least somewhat more secure, so the image crafting and other issues are at least somewhat less harmful, but this is all very different for children.
And the worst part of this is that as horrible as this all is, it remains highly addictive. It's not about perpetual browsing but about FOMO. Anytime anybody posts something, there's this concern that maybe it's about you, or maybe it's something you don't want to miss out on, or maybe it's just something generally interesting. And this again just among your 'friends.'
Even if you completely eliminated algorithmic promotion (and advertising - which is probably even worse than crap organic 'content') you'd still see significant negative effects of social media on children.
it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development
Socializing isn't harmful. Socializing in a way that naturally trends towards mob mentality, where everything is potentially permanently recorded, and where artificial representations of people are the norm - that's all harmful, and it's inescapable in social media.
I kind of wish they had developers that know how to get a video upload working from the website.
Alas, it all must have gotten scrapped for a llama workflow.
Website is worse than 15 years ago (code AND contents).
Just ban the discovery feed. Search only.
Agreed. HN feed is also addictive. EU should ban HN feed and only allow searching for new posts.
Quite honestly, I've been addicted to using my air fryer for cooking nowadays. The design is too good and convenient and the food comes out too tasty. I think EU should focus on making them less addictive.
HN openly violates GDPR and is proud of it. Why would they follow this?
Your posts are archived really fast once submitted, removing comments would not be an effective approach to improve people's privacy on this site.
That's hilarious. Are you accusing dang et al of unscrupulously designing HN to maximize time spent on the site?
That could be their punishment. Also subscribed feed.
Last time EU fined Facebook for merging WhatsApp userbase merging with Facebook, that they explicitly forbade. Facebook just paid the fee and moved along. What would be different here?
And what about the addictive design of advertisements that keeps us hooked on consuming more and more stuff?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382310867_Methods_o...
Online advertisements should be forbidden as a whole. The attention-stealing and engagement-maximising internet with all it horribly effects only exist, due to advertising. And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
This is a wild take. Most serious media companies would collapse without online ad revenue. Google would be dead, along with all the products that sorta run the world like maps. But even local publications, like your independent city news site, which you presumably think is good, also die instantly.
The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.
They wouldnt be dead, everbody would use subscription and they could easily afford them because stuff would be cheaper.
The biggest misconception that average people can’t get their head around is that all ads are being paid for by themselves - the consumer. Meta and Google offer nothing for free to you, you are paying for their services everytime you buy a Coke, a car, or a Levis pant, or … anything.
what assures you they would be cheaper? they have already proven people can pay a higher price so why not charge more? this won't be enforced worldwide people would just switch platforms to one that isn't in a jurisdiction where ads are banned
because contrary to many peoples believe system, prices actually work to modulate demand. The whole idea that you can increase prices without losing customers is nonsense.
Did you not read:
> And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
We're in an information crisis. Most people don't know what is true or false anymore. Google and Meta didn't make it better and in fact might have contributed to it. I'd say let's go back to 1996.
Real household median income in the US has risen by more than 25% since 1996, largely driven by technology built for and by the ecosystem you want to pull out by the roots.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
That would be a staggering cut to everyone’s standard of living.
assuming 2% inflation over 30 years, that means that a dollar in 1996 is now worth $1.81. 80% depreciation versus 25% increase in income is not comparable.
The wealth inequality in the past 30 years has dramatically shifted in favor of the ultra rich.
Technology has been used to create illegal monopolies -> too big to fail -> surely we can't / don't need to regulate this -> tech companies get away with murder and laugh all the way to the bank.
A company like Meta could finesse their algorythms to bias people against antitrust action and you would never know.
To repeat the talking point of tech companies that "technology has helped us, therefore we should not regulate it in any way" is to accept the premise of people that spend every waking hour of their day figuring out what they can get away with to screw you over.
I would asume the FRED statistic already is inflation adjusted as they said real income (usally inflation adjusted). That is 25% come ontop of the inflation, while you subtract it.
That being said, inflation or CPI is a very poor metric over time. I mean, sure, lets look what a smartphone with an all-knowing AI and internet access cost 100 years ago and see how much more we are paying now for it. Or the price of antibiotics, polio vacines and so on - sure they were cheap 100 years ago.
Because it is obvisouly not possible, we measure CPI in the price of eggs, milk, veggies, transportation and so on. Sure, we are all happy that we can buy today 25% more butter than we could 20 years ago.
As you suggest, if anything, inflation statistics overstate the decline in currency value over time.
Over the long term, attempting to quantitatively adjust for the value of goods that simply did not exist prior to time X becomes a subjective game.
What’s the value of $10 worth of penicillin or $10 worth of LLM tokens relative to their “substitutes” in an era before they were invented?
“We should regulate tech companies” != “Online advertising should be illegal.”
Also, real median household income.
Oh no, would Google and Meta be dead? How will we manage?!
Why do you think podcasters give you recommendations for mattresses?
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True but the whole “influencer” and “creative” industry would collapse overnight. A few large ones would survive on their patreon income, most would collapse and have to get a real job, if those are still around.
…and nothing of value would be lost.
Mostly true but there are a few good channels with very practical information for picking up new skills (gardening, woodwork, playing an instrument, etc) as well as looking up troubleshooting information.
Those too would be lost.
Sure some drag out three minutes into fifteen, but whatever…
In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.
Magazines primarily make money through advertising.
Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.
It’s a bit harder to find stuff in a magazine that helps troubleshoot a water pump at night…
I’m going to shock you, but you can pay for magazine-like content through the Internet right now.
That information used to come with the water pump
How many people keep those docs around? It’s also easier to search on YT than rifle though the pump manual which may include all failure modes…
You do realize that sponsored stories aren’t modern invention? Magazines were full of it too, sometimes disclosed, most often not.
And? They’d be banned too.
In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.
Nothing would be lost, it would just be somewhere else. Meta and Google monopolized content and ads.
We had the usenet, irc, ftp and small hobbiest websites long before those companies existed. It actually helps if you can remember 1996 or maybe 1998.
If it's really that good, you'll pay for it with the money you saved in advertising. You're paying for the ads, don't forget. Plenty of people used to pay for things like woodworking classes, back when there was money. Doing a woodworking class in person at a woodworking shop will teach you much better than youtube.
Yeah, but why don't we ever hear any MEPs talk about it like that?
They buy ads too. It’d adversely affect their campaign budgets. (Sure, it would adversely affect their competitors’ too, but second-order effects are usually too complex for politicians to understand.)
MEPs want to write rules that mean they get to fine rich US companies. Local advertising might be worse for you overall but you'd have to do more work to get less free money.
We should do something about that too, yes.
Good. We have the benefit of enough hindsight to know that these platforms have had a net negative impact on everything and everyone they touch.
The addictive design is in service of ads. Instead of regulating software, tax ad revenue to disincentivize building a business model around user profiling and tracking.
Tax ad revenue. Increase advertising prices. Advertisers pay more to sell their wares. Consumers pay more to consume their wares.
Vendors won’t see RoI on their ad spend and will stop buying. Simples.
Vendors now cannot get X pounds with Y pounds advertising outlay to make Z pounds per unit of wares. To continue making Z money per unit of wares, with previous S pounds price charged to consumers per unit, add significantly more than reduction in Y advertising per unit to S to offset reduced "brand" "awareness".
Brand awareness is a Red Queen’s race. Attention is a finite resource, and ad spend mainly exists to counteract the spend of your competitors.
No one buying shit anymore. People still buying shit elsewhere. GDP and tax revenues fall relative to others. Deflationary aspects. Market leaders complain through lobbying groups. Repeal. Back to square one.
That’s just a restatement of your previous point. Pretend I restated my response.
I don't agree. They are two separate depictions of what might happen as a result of applying a tax on advertising. They may well coincide with each other, however. Saying that the second is a restatement of the first is like saying two interpretations of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" are restating the same fact.
Governments see reduction in tax income and GDP and repeal taxes. In UK: Signal "mansion" tax on properties valued above X price to collect recurring Y pounds total tax. Market adjusts valuations based on probability of tax. Number of houses still worth at least X now diminishes. Now cannot collect recurring Y pounds. "Mansion" tax delayed.
You have this complex system that has reached some sort of relative equilibrium based on say a set S of ten sorts of tax rates, along with a set F of factors (size millions), with the government's tax revenue R being one of those outputs. Then some guy in the government called G signals to the government and public that he can increase R by X by fiddling with a member of S, or maybe adding a member to S (of size say ten).
Is G stupid, or does he just lean towards retaining the public's affection, his relatively low salary, potential under the table payments and whatever networking opportunities his job provides? I lean towards the latter.
Why instead of?
Do both.
The downside to this is that services become class based again then.
Instagram is the same service for everyone, regardless if you are homeless or a billionaire, it is exactly because it is an ad based model. Same for google and facebook.
These models are "classless business" incarnate, and people absolutely hate them. It's part bewildering and part bemusing.
This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.
> are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.
I’m sorry but this is just not real.
There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.
If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.
Which is exactly the problem with this whole discussion. On the far side, you hear that it's heroin! It's fentanyl! It's alcohol! Facebook groups are the modern opium den! But when actually challenged, it's oh no no, that's a metaphor, it's metaphorical fentanyl, not real fentanyl. People on Instagram are metaphorically injecting metaphorical drugs into their metaphorical veins.
It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.
> all of the recent academic literature
The academic literature funded by what grants from what stakeholders? Like the social media research from Harvard Kennedy now? The research that came after its social media research lead was fired and a $500mm Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant occurred somehow in parallel [0] [1]?
That recent research?
Or the research that was occurring on social media before that? Surely you're not arguing in that bad of faith, despite where I could speculate your RSUs might have came from. But this seems an extremely naive take if not made in bad faith.
[0] https://www.thecrimson[.]com/article/2023/2/2/donovan-forced... [1] https://www.npr[.]org/2023/12/04/1217086770/disinformation-r...
Really? Would you mind pointing us to all that academic literature?
And compulsive behaviour is definitely something that medication can help with.
And yet the Mata price jumped yesterday. For some investors this is apparently a feature.
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Would love to see the overlap between the average anti-Big Tech HN commenter cheering on this regulatory advance, and the average HN commenter who thinks hard drugs should be legalized and that the War on Drugs is bad. Because these are contradictory positions! Either you think people should be free to do things that are addictive or you don't
No, those positions aren't inherently contradictory. There are plenty of viewpoints that make them consistent.
These apps should be banned or be forced to only show feeds from accounts you follow in chronological order, nothing more. Perhaps with some basic search if you want to discover something new, but cumbersome enough so that you don't spend hours on it.
I know someone he keeps scrolling the minute they wake up. They are behind on chores, life stuff, but keep scrolling.
That wouldn't be too bad in itself if not for sheer amount of misinformation that is being served. Especially health related. Thanks to AI enhanced videos showing parasites everywhere, person now has developed eating disorder and thinks their poor health is due to parasites and not the fact they spend whole day on Instagram. Now they started ordering "supplements" and "courses" those people peddle. I tried to report these accounts, but Meta insist they are no breaching any T&C.
The US should start fining all EU created software.
On what grounds? Retaliation?
Hm, I use Facebook twice a year, to thank folks for my b-day greetings and for checking my account. Some with Insta.
I am not the least addicted to it. I suspended TikTok, because it is of low value.
YouTube is useful - only with the subscription to get rid of all the ads.
Sorry, addictive design is once again another strawman. No one forces you to use these crappy apps. Same with the iPhone.
Need free time? iPhone will serve you. All Icons colorless? iPhone!
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
There is a problem, if you see people being sucked into their smartphones - however, you cannot have one without the other. Many public services require a smartphone. Where is the alternative?
It is human nature, that's all. Fighting Facebook is so low, absolutely low.
Replace "Facebook" with "heroin" in your argument and see how ridiculous you sound.
Doing heroin twice a year doesn't sound that bad
This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.
Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”
I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.
We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
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I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.
But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.
But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.
People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.
Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.
However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).
Your model has a major gap in it.
Markets don’t come into existence ex nihilo. They come into existence by regulation setting the rules to ensure that the system works for humans.
You have nothing without regulation and government power, setting up the rules and enforcing them.
Further, when we look at the merits of the case which is driving this entire conversation, Meta acted in a manner that most people would consider evil.
And the market is rewarding them for it.
More or less the definition of a state is that it upholds the monopoly of violence within its borders. In modern liberal states that monopoly comes with extensive regulations on how, when and by whom violence should be used. This is called the rule of law. The regulations are usually broadly enumerated in the constitution or similar basic law, and in more detail in ordinary legislation. In democratic states these are ideally determined by the population, usually via some representatives.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is the rationale why many people think that some powers may be granted to the institution with the sole legitimate power to force you to comply at gunpoint.
Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)
The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…
None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.
There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.
So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.
As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.
Unless they regulate how algorithms can work rather than filtering what they can show?
A functioning democratic leadership listens when told they've done good, and listens when told they messed up.
Arguing that they should receive no support or positive reactions because they also deserve blame is how the center and left break down their own power: Believing that disengagement from one another is a stronger moral obligation than working together and fixing shit with people who are willing to listen and work.
The EU is an institution that is democratically legitimized at every level (Either through direct elections in the parliament or through elections to the appropriate national government in the case of the Council / Commission). Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes the Conservatives do some messed up lawfare to introduce fucked up things like Chat Control, but at least they were voted in and can be voted out again.
Big Tech is some foreign rich dudes being dictators of their little fiefdom doing whatever they can to make themselves even richer. We have zero control over them and what they do to our society in this pursuit. No elections. No recalls. No public votes.
The only correct reaction is for the sovereign to assert its sovereignty and lay out some ground rules.
Maybe you missed it but the commission and parliament consists of a lot of people and groups that are all pushing for different things. While we have chat control being actively pushed by some groups actively funded by Facebook we have other groups like this working against Facebook.
If social media was just your family, friends and acquaintances sharing stuff like it used to be you may have a point. But with the algorithm feed its turned into a der sturmer like propaganda pipeline.
This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.
EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.
The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.
The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.
This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.
They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.
They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.
While it is genuinely a huge concern, the legal measure are not going to address it. One has to consider the overall picture, not just a corner of it.
The ship has sailed. There will be addictive designs, products, services etc. The very theme of a business is centered around keeping the customers addicted. It's just a matter of time, every business on this planet would, with the help of AI, make their products and services extremely addictive.
"The ship has sailed."
Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.
I personally think the answer should be mandating user controls of said algorithms. If you have a large social media site that suggests results or provides a feed then you must allow users to configure said feed.
The default should be simple, something like time-ordered of followed only with opt in for recommendations. Ideally I'd love to be able to swap algorithms for something open source but setting a standard there rather than just mandating a level of control seems a bigger hurdle.
It seems entirely anti-consumer that I am just the behest of whatever Google or Meta decide is most profitable to show me instead of finding important news or entertainment in a way that I want.
The entire advertising industry is predicated on the principle of preempting personal preferences with paid placements. (Sorry, didn’t start out that sentence expecting to alliterate it all but it just came out like that).
Literally every ad you see is a business deciding ‘instead of showing you what you came here to see, here’s something else, which I am showing you only to benefit my business.’
I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
> I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
That's a baby I'm happy to lose along with its bathwater.
Do you think people made similar arguments about privacy before the GDPR?
Fun sidenote: On a recent Hotmail post on here, I saw a screenshot of hotmail V1 (way before M$ took over). They had a prominent button on their homepage about privacy.
GDPR ship has largely sailed too. E.g. the illegal Pay or Okay is widespread, including in Instagram.
Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
So, how do we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts of the free flow of information on social media, where all citizens are invited to broadcast?
> all citizens are invited to broadcast
Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart. A nice natural protection against extremes.
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
I don't follow, the argument is against the addictive design of the feed algorithms, not the information being shared per se.
Nothing in this is geared towards curtailing platforms like social media to exist, it's trying to curtail the design of psychological manipulation for "engagement". Ragebait is the most common case, it makes people interact with content if it enrages them; another common case is to feed kids with slop content that makes them fixated on the platform, scrolling endlessly trying to get the elusive dopamine hit quite similar to the feeling of playing a slot machine.
I think framing this as the EU trying to censor platforms because people post content against the current order is a big cynical leap. I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that? Maybe you have ulterior motives as well?
> Ragebait
Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.
> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?
Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
> Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Other kinds of ragebait: creating a whole profile dedicated only to take the most extreme view on issues (on both sides), only to make people angry so they comment or like/interact with the content.
> Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue. You verge into the false equivalency territory, something before was addictive so now that we have something even more addictive it's ok just from precedence? Different levels and degrees demand different solutions.
> So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
That's absolutely cynical and a thought-terminating cliché since it's impossible to contradict you. I understand it's your opinion but it verges into conspiratorial thinking which I don't think anyone can de-escalate you from except for yourself.
> As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
Not really but you constantly rehash similar arguments in topics surrounding the EU so I'm trying to figure out what exactly is behind that. Ulterior motives don't need to be that drastic, it can simply be "I don't support the EU as a project" since you never state that but consistently take that side of the argument.
> Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Thank you! That's the first time I heard a sensible explanation of the word that's being used so much. That's indeed something different and malevolent.
> When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue.
But if social media was non-existent, then people would carry these devices with them for traditional broadcasts.
Let me make a comparison that I think is very on-topic: Alcohol is a traditional drug, less addictive and less harmful than many of the worst drugs. But more addictive and more harmful than many other drugs. Wouldn't it be strange if governments, regulators and rulers only focused on the other drugs and said nothing about alcohol? Would I be a Russian, Chinese or Iranian spy or a jew (as another poster just insinuated) if I said "Hey, what about alcohol?".
Traditional mass media regulation vs Internet regulation is not only an EU issue. What I said about the EU regulators could just as much be said about any other government doing the same. I don't think it's unjustified conspiratorial thinking to look at how rulers want to control speech and the flow of information for their own benefit. It's expected. If screen addiction was what they truly wanted to fight, then the EU Commission would also act against traditional broadcasts in the same way they act against social media. Just like rulers and regulators have acted in all kinds of ways against alcohol, including prohibition and other extreme measures.
> It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
Also known as Russian, Iranian, Israeli and Chinese bot farms.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/experts-w...
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/09/g-s1-9010/russia-bot-farm-ai-...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/facebook-bot-fa...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-allies-using-armies-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...
People calling this stuff "popular movements" and "citizen journalists" are either naive or complicit.
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I'm not sure what you mean.
I have not accused you of being any of those things, please make sure to read messages you respond to carefully before deflecting to outrage.
Those "citizen journalists" threatening "those in power" (e.g. our democratic societies) however? Yeah no shit they're malign actors.
> Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
More outlandish conspiracy theories on hackernews...
You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
What messages are not being allowed to be 'streamed into the brains of the population' exactly? Are you suggesting, for example, that claims made by the US president should not be shown on TV? Are you suggesting that these are not then analysed and scrutinised by people on TV?
Speaking from the UK, the state controls the media.
There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.
And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.
UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.
> You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Not even that, it is just an off-topic rant about government censorship.
I'd say: the fediverse. Everyone can "broadcast" and discuss freely without having a central power that can censor or subtly manipulate the broader discussion.
Or websites. Everyone can "broadcast" via their website.