Facebook et al are not doing anything traditional media hasn’t been doing since its inception. Spreading fake news? The original name for it was “Yellow Journalism”[1]. Making teenage girls insecure about themselves? Just look at magazines like Cosmopolitan from just a few years ago. Highlighting divisive, polarizing stories to drive engagement? Cable news doesn’t do anything else. Let’s not forget all the crazy racist, and seriously impactful shit local news has done over the years.
Social media and the internet stole a lot of eyeballs from traditional media outlets. They’ve successfully responded by convincing everyone that Facebook and the rest of big tech is some crazy super villain.
Put it another way, if peopled replaced time spent on social media with time spent reading NYT/FOX/CNBC/CNN, would they become more or less upset and polarized? My money would be on more...
At least comment sections challenging a news piece gives some avenue for the audience to consider other angles to the story. I may not agree with every comment here on how they interpret this bill, but it gives me a wider look on the issue than if I listened only to LATime's take on it.
TV can absolutely be evil, but you can choose to not watch TV and still be able to socialize with peers using the telephone or paper mail back in the day.
Nowadays, the "TV" (which now fits in your pocket) is also the primary way humans communicate, so you can't switch off the "TV" without also severely hampering your ability to communicate with other people.
Hell, a lot of small businesses don't even have websites anymore, it's all in some bullshit social-media platform.
"Quantity has a quality all its own" (presumably by Stalin)
Traditional media was time and place bound. Its reach was maybe 10% (at most!) of that of social media. Social media is always on, always available.
That changes a lot of things.
Social media is a cancer that spread to a lot of day-to-day necessities and keeps spreading - some businesses don't even have websites anymore.
I think that opens a differnet discussion altogether. Yelp can be considered a "social media". It's a website where users provide content (in this case, reviews) with some various algorithms made to encourage businesses to play ball to get high visibility. but I doubt any of the proposals discussed here would affect Yelp. Kids sure as heck aren't concerned with ratings over businesses they often can't pay for.
So would it be bad if a company lacked a website and relied on Yelp, whose goal isn't the same as Instagram's?
So disingenuous.
And modern social media really is different in that it's deliberately designed to be addictive and basically prey on insecurities. (or just outright create new ones) They don't do much if anything in terms of not straight up enhancing bullying etc either.
Another difference is, unlike our parents, who simply didn't know much about the internet, and as a result had lots of unfounded fears, our generation are digital natives and very familiar with all the problems. We're just used to and desensitized to them.
With adults, that's one thing, but with minors, it's pretty inexcusable imo. It's not unreasonable to want to protect your children and adolescents from harm, whether from smoking or from social media.
I worry that social media is a red herring, distracting things that may really be contributing to stress and anxiety. Remember, social media isn't the only change society has and continues to experience. Things like, declining labor force participation, rising inequality, and more are likely more significant changes. Narrow example: 45% of teens reported that fear of climate change "negatively affected their daily life and functioning" [3].
1. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
2. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955
+ if you're worried about climate change, isn't social media the medium through which a huge part of all the nonsense denial gets spread and popularized? (same for COVID and any number of other things)
Climate change denial is spread on social media, but so is climate change activism. Propaganda is spread on social media by Russia, but it’s also used by Ukrainians to share their story easily with the world.
Good and bad.
But I do very much think the current implementations are net-losses, probably primarily due to advertising having horrifically perverse incentives for human behavior. And they are all advertising platforms first and foremost at the moment.
Easier communication brings out a lot of higher highs and lower lows, I think that's unavoidable. But I do think it can be substantially better than it is now.
no different from the rest of society as we know it today. Games now include ads, paid streaming platforms are STILL having ads for customers (needing to pay extra to opt-out), TV has commercials, real life has anything you can paint on, etc.
But most of us learn to filter out the ads. I don't see them as the biggest problem here so much as a lack of moderation.
I do. This same stance has been made for every media at some point in history. I feel in every case it's simply a smokescreen to hide deeper symptoms that no one wants to consider acknowledging, let alone treating.
> if you're worried about climate change, isn't social media the medium through which a huge part of all the nonsense denial gets spread and popularized?
it's a double edged sword. It's also why many youth may find out about climate change to begin with. cutting off all access simply creates ignorance instead of at the bare minimum awareness of the arguments being made. Maybe instead of blaming Facebook for the loonies not being listened to (if you're worried about climate change, the loonies clearly failed) we actually take actino to start preserving the envionment? But no, that takes actual congress bills to agree on.
The difference is the impact and ubiquity.
Those negative you mention are now on steroids, because they're <<everywhere>> <<all the time>>.
I wouldn't be here if not for those!
I grew up in a conservative town with little exposure to outside ideas and my parents were overly protective. The early internet sans filters and "filter bubble" algorithms gave me much needed perspective on the world.
IRC and forums were fundamentally a part of shaping who I am today.
I mean, kinda. That's pretty much the whole purpose of their current algorithmically-ranked feed - maximize engagement (which is most-maximized by addiction).
I would argue it is similar to alcohol or tabacco this way. Shouting think of the children because some kids/teenagers get drunk at some point is way overkill. However once the tabacco/alcohol industry started directly marketing to them it was quite a different matter.
The Wild West era of Internet freedom was much more tame than that.
Sure, you had trolls and other nasties, but not only were those trolls for the most part doing their mischief for personal entertainment, their impact was relatively localized - their trolling didn't scale.
Now compare this to an industrial-scale trolling & spamming operation where billions are poured into research, development and infrastructure.
You're comparing a small-scale spammer using their email client to spam manually against an industrial-scale automated spamming operation. The first one can be dealt with locally, the second one might require some out-of-band intervention.
Also, back in the day, you didn't need to go into IRC or the dark corners on the Internet to participate in society day to day. Nowadays, you have to be in the social media cesspool to even be able to lookup some business' opening hours or contact them.
> Does anyone here really think there is an “addictiveness” feature in the Facebook algorithm that can be toggled on and off like this article suggests?
Yes - just give the user a chronological feed with no extra bullshit inserted into it and let the user choose what they want to see based on their follows, instead of the engagement-maximizing algorithm choosing for them.
Unless the users of HN collectively wrote the bill I'm failing to see where the hypocrisy is lol
IIRC the average age of a congressman is the mid 50's, and the senate the early 60's. That would be right before their time.
I think that user was more talking about the audience here at HN agreeing with it. "we" won't be in congress for another 20 years on average (given current congress age).
I think its extremely hyperbolic to compare FB to morphine. Social media addiction isn't something that is commonly worried about on a clinical level (in a day and age where "video game addiction" is officially recognized).
Maybe some breaking study brings something up, but it's still a long debate after that to determine how and if society should control those activities. Even with alcohol, it's not illegal for a minor to drink, it's illegal for vendors to sell to them.
That's the difference. It was Wild West, now it's a capitalist monster with questionable intentions.
Back when I was younger, the internet evilness was chat rooms and video games, both of which were supposedly addicting us and corrupting our young, helpless minds. We all knew it was ridiculous and mocked the “think of the children” attacks. We also turned out fine.
Then a couple decades pass and many of the same people are in full on “think of the children” mode over the latest generation of internet social interactions. I know commenters will claim it’s different this time, but I think the real difference is that people are getting older and out of touch. I’m guessing most of the anti-social media crusaders on HN don’t even use social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, but instead get their opinions from exaggerated news stories, just as our parents did back when the internet was new.
Does anyone here really think there is an “addictiveness” feature in the Facebook algorithm that can be toggled on and off like this article suggests? Does anyone think kids will just shrug and accept whatever limitations are imposed on them, or will they find creative ways to get a second account and set the age to 18 like we found creative ways around primitive internet content blockers? It’s the same stuff all over again and I think it’s getting quite hypocritical to pretend that heavy-handed internet controls were bad for us but good for them.
Amazing how it comes full circle.