What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.
Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this?
Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc.
I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
Reading your comment also evoked in me imaginations of political repression. Anger and fear are really important emotions signifying "this situation is not meeting my needs". Social Media can abuse these for profit probably precicely because they play this important role. In this light, a ban on recommending negative content seems really dangerous. Any content that expresses dissatisfaction with the political status quo is likely to contain some 'negative' (I suggest the term 'challenging') emotions.
So while 'addictiveness' is, like you say, really difficuly to measure - I prefer we try.
Regardless, dangerous content and services (just like dangerous substances) should be hard to make and very visibly marked, leaving no doubt about what it is and how it works. I love the EU’s notion of “algorithmic transparency” [0]. I would go a step further for systems attempting to increase engagement by exploiting behavioural sensitivities to be marked and even opt-in (think cigarette packaging).
To sell drugs, cigarettes, alcohol etc, you need somebody to do the selling, and that person needs to be located wherever your customers are. If you break that place's laws, well, they probably have police who can put you in jail.
Social media is different, you can run a social media website targeted at Americans without ever stepping foot in the US, having a server in the US, having a business entity in the US etc. It's just some random Russian website, following Russian but not American laws, that some Americans like to visit. Sure, the US can try playing the cat-and-mouse game with you and force ISPs to block your site and all VPNs, proxies and TOR nodes that might presumably give customers access to it, but that's still a game one needs to play, and playing it isn't without consequences for the privacy and freedom of others, consequences most democratic governments aren't willing to bear.
Even if the government wins and somehow manages to block you completely, or put enough obstacles in your path that doing further business doesn't make sense, you still don't lose. You don't go to jail or face legal action, you just quit and focus on other countries instead.
For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.
What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.
There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.
The majority of people don't feel victim to addiction, it's a minority of people who are prone to it. Everyone shouldn't have their freedoms restricted just to cater to the more weak-minded.
Personally, I hope we come to protect the vulnerable regardless of their age.
Laws are there to protect powerful people (in many cases), to protect the majority (hopefully most cases) and to protect the vulnerable, sometimes from themselves (in a decent number of cases).
You cannot make people anything without limiting their freedom. How do you make people stronger? If you have an idea, there is a centralised point of control/failure. Bad actors will be more strong and free as well.
There's plenty of examples of successful measures to reduce harm by controlling the "environment" see: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, being old enough to drive on public roads, being old enough to take on debt, child labour, etc.
It's weird to use the words "environment" and "hazard" on one hand and "people" on the other. The discussion is about hazards designed, created and maintained by people. The environment to manipulate is people, organisations, and law.
Do I expect that some social media companies are really going to struggle to continue to operate at their current scale because of these changes? Yes I 100% expect it and I think it's great. It may lead to a smaller and more personal web. Your business model has no inherent right to exist if it harms people. Maybe, for example, you will need to hire more humans to handle moderation so that you stop killing people, and if humans don't scale, well, too bad, you're going to get smaller. We regulate gambling, tobacco etc. to limit the harm they do, I don't see any difference with social media.
To have the biggest impact without stifling innovation we can start by applying this rule to platforms which are above a certain revenue level. There is likely a combination of legislative and judicial action here in that there may already be crimes on the books which these platforms are committing, but the judiciary has not traditionally thought of a corporation being the person who committed that crime, certainly not at scale against thousands of victims. In other cases we may need to amend laws to make it clear that just because you used an algorithm to harm people at scale, doesn't make you immune to consequences from the harm you caused.
A common thread through all human history is people being misled on-mass. Before social media we were slaves to the tabloid headlines. Before widespread papers we were slaves to the pulpit. Etc.
For the last 10 years social media has been the tabloid but personalised. Outrage = engagement so the algorithms have pushed outrage, and personalized in the sense that they have searched for the thing that outrages each of us individually.
I fear that the next 10 years of social media is very basic generative stuff (LLMs don't need to get better; social media companies just have to apply what the current art), turning them into tabloid with intimacy. By turning into your friend in how they communicate with you, they get engagement x10.
The way to change someones mind is through intimacy.
And humans are suckers for it. We can't strengthen the masses against outrage, and we can't strengthen the individual against intimacy.
Sorry for being so pessimistic.
How is that inherently preferable to the addressing the harm itself? By what principle do you conclude that we should prefer one over the other whenever possible?
Is that what you prefer?
On the other hand, if everyone around you was a black belt in jiu jitsu and you knew that there was a good chance that they’d break your arm if you tried to sneak up and punch them, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, would you?
A much worse solution than e.g. jailing me. It's not everyone who is the problem, neither in my scenario nor in the case of a handful of gigantic social networks exploiting insecurities and addictive tendencies in children.
> On the other hand, if everyone around you was a black belt in jiu jitsu and you knew that there was a good chance that they’d break your arm if you tried to sneak up and punch them, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, would you?
Is that a better solution than jailing me?
Seems we've ended up with three different potential solutions and your principle already isn't holding any water IMO. To bring us back to the problem at hand I can think of an analogous set of three solutions:
1. Make everyone announce their age when they use a social media website so that they know not to exploit children, which is kind of like making everyone wear a loudspeaker. 2. "Harden" the children, which is like teaching everyone jiu jitsu 3. Remove the profit incentive to exploitation of children or otherwise by banning ad funded social networks. This is like jailing the culprit.
It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there.
So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition.
The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.
It would be like creating a bank account.
You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered?
I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.
Technically true, but social interaction is the great draw of the internet. Even Zawinski's Law noticed that every program expands to include social features or is replaced by those that do.
Where did it do that?
I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.
You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.
I can have privacy in a conversation in my house without anonymity. I can have privacy in the woods. I don't have anonymity while walking down the street, but have pseudo-privacy. If I begin preaching on a street corner should I expect anonymity? If I join a members only fraternal hall that meets monthly, do I have anonymity? Do I have privacy? To what degree? Those are the scenarios we should be focusing on achieving.
As OP said [we should not]... > >elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society
This is probably the most important comment on this topic. You can't build a society on top of anonymity. The problem people should be out here solving is how to provide privacy without requiring anonymity. And when you have the itch to respond with a quick thought of "it's impossible," pause and think about how we accomplish it in the "real world" and then revisit.
I have yet to see a system or proposition that can maintain privacy AND kill anonymity.
Every corporation could implement zero knowledge proof schemes for everything I guess. That's what some schemes like crypto identification programs aim for.
>The problem people should be out here solving is how to provide privacy without requiring anonymity
>How we accomplish this in the real world and revisit
Maybe I'm simply ignorant. How do we achieve digitally the idea of privacy without the ability to mask your identity?
Yes I agree that this is your assertion, and what I'm saying that that I fundamentally believe that this is wrong. Who knows, I may be wrong - but I listed a number of instances IRL where people have privacy without anonymity.
The fact that people only think of privacy as downstream consequence of anonymity is the false conclusion. And to fix the internet we need to all realize that it's false. It's what we're used to, and is the only way privacy has been provided in the digital world (which is why so many including me have thought that way), but it is wrong. We first need to realize and acknowledge that it is wrong and then pursue a path the matches - just like we do in the real world.
But more importantly, there are huge differences between internet anonymity and the older comceptualization of a right to privacy, which has mostly to do with shielding conversations between people who know each other's identities (real names and addresses) from prying government eyes. Shielding such conversations from prying government eyes is not incompatible with preventing teenagers from using social media.
Privacy didn't need protecting in history before bugging. If a founding father wanted to talk to someone privately they just went stood apart from everybody else.
50 years ago, standing apart no longer provided privacy because of long range microphones etc, but those were targeted attacks on diplomats etc.
Nowadays, you can probably do a nice undergrad project to recreate conversations from lip reading streetview video clips.
Privacy was defacto available hundreds of years ago, but is technically impossible now. (Imagine the kinds of body checks that will be introduced before you enter a US SCIF post the chess cheating scandal!)
The Constitution is not an enumeration of rights that the people have. It even says so itself, in the ninth amendment. So there doesn't need to be text which says you have a right to privacy: you have that right even without it being listed.
Anyway good thing I'm not on Facebook. If I can hang out in a community of about 100 without anyone calling it "media", and we just keep out kids by not bringing any in, I'll live I guess
But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.
They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.
Because social media is a tool for global social influence and global intelligence that the powers that be do not want to give up. Because those same powers are often invested in social media companies or don’t want to get on their list of enemies. Because it might look bad politically if it proved unpopular. Because they are all social media addicts. Take your pick.
Once they control a significant part of society's communications they own society something in return. Let society access our communications how we choose.
I commuted one hour from and to middle school and high school, I definitely needed a phone to communicate with my mother when stuff happened (and occasionally happened), such as missing the bus or being late for lunch.
You're neglecting emergencies that are happening in the school itself. School shooters, for instance.
I frankly don't see the problem with kids having the phone with them as long as they're not actually using it outside of an actual emergency.
And how is it enforced exactly? Are parents held responsible, or are state education funds impacted somehow based on smartphone use?
Would we need a federal mandate to require flip phone / feature phone support? The last time I tried to find a feature phone it wasn't easy, many depend on 2G/3G networks which are losing support and carriers have absolutely no incentive to carry feature phones when smartphones are all that sell.
A quick look at Indiana's law and the news articles are interesting. The law requires schools to implements rules that ban phone use during class, but the actual rules and implementations are left for schools to decide. The articles I found make that sound like the law is toothless and passes the hard work off to school systems, but in my opinion that's a great law as it let's every school do what works best for them without prescribing a single solution for everyone.
This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.
Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)
I'm strongly opposed to ID collection of any kind. But I think age bans are a good idea.
Why not sell age verification codes at physical stores? One code per account per website. It's good for 2 years and costs no more than $5. You can pay cash at the store and the sales clerk may only check your ID, as though they were selling you tobacco or alcohol. They cannot record anything.
There will still be straw purchases, just like booze and cigs. But it makes it easier to police the ban on minors joining social media without seriously compromising anonymity for adults. Few kids in my high school smoked or drank. Most couldn't access those things. And social media has network effects. If most kids can't join it, the rest probably won't bother.
doesn't have to in the general case
maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media
that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more
This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents.
It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.
You’re describing a ban.
People did things just fine, just took a bit longer. Thankfully kids have a lot of extra time.
No one is asking teens to set up a production kube cluster. There’s so much to learn—they’ll be fine.
Recommendation based on previous views. Recommendation based on what is currently being viewed is permitted. Recommendation based on current view that is customized to user is not permitted.
Ratings up/down.
Sorting based on rating or based on users' interest. Chronological sorting is permitted.
Suggesting content is forbidden. Specifically subscribed content is permitted to be suggested - but only chronologically, or in response to a search.
No public comments. Private comments permitted. Comments in room/forum/group permitted. User must specifically subscribe/join to see the comments.
Comments sorting/notification rules same as above.
"Reactions" to messages show up as additional/new replies, and are not attached to the original message.
Discussion:
The idea is to reduce addictive methods, and to modify discussion/views to reflect ordinary human behavior: No one rates your sentence spoken in a group, no one goes back and promotes certain things you said, words are said in a group chronologically.
I guess the definition of "social media" is not as simple as outlined above.
GitHub does not show me (on my home page) "recommended" repositories, rather only the ones I specifically searched for, and the information on it is organized in a chronological fashion, which is permitted by my suggestion.
Is your issue that I can see public comments regarding the repository? That's permitted - comments on random repositories do not show up on my home page, only if I specifically go to a particular repository, which is effectively joining it for the purposes of what I wrote. (Although I guess that could be clarified.)
Forums have existed before reddit that didn't have those things, and those forums worked just fine - and continue to work just fine. The way reddit does things is not necessary, they do it to try to make it more addictive, and that's exactly what we are trying to stop.
Discord I'm not sure - does it have votes/rating that kind of thing? From what I saw in my limited usage it's pure chronological chat, but I haven't used it much.
> Recommendation based on previous views. Recommendation based on what is currently being viewed is permitted. Recommendation based on current view that is customized to user is not permitted.
This would ban all kinds of news aggregators, or even just simple help-desk / support ticket systems.
> Ratings up/down.
This is one of the most important features of an internet forum! Just imagine HN without votes. It would be flooded with nonsense!
> Sorting based on rating or based on users' interest. Chronological sorting is permitted.
I don't want a chronological information thread most of the time. I want to see the things that are relevant to me. A news ticker full of stuff you don't care about is just a big waste of life or work time.
If I'm working on project X with technology Y I want to get relevant information. Without the need to search for it explicitly. The computer knows anyway what I'm working on, so it should show me the relevant information. That's the whole point of a computer: It processes information for you so you don't have to go through it manually.
> Suggesting content is forbidden. Specifically subscribed content is permitted to be suggested - but only chronologically, or in response to a search.
How do you discover interesting things you don't know about already? Should we ban the "see also" section on Wikipedia, too?
What again about work organization tools? Should they be kept dump instead of helpful?
> No public comments. Private comments permitted. Comments in room/forum/group permitted.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.
Is a blog post a public comment?
Spam email is a private comment, right?
Reddit or YouTube comments happen in a room/forum/group I guess?
> User must specifically subscribe/join to see the comments.
Yeah, sure, you need to be logged in to read Stackoverflow comments. But you can only see them when you joined the discussion of some question, otherwise no comments for you. Do I get this right?
> Comments sorting/notification rules same as above.
Sure. Your inbox full of trash notifications about "chronological events"—that don't matter to you.
> "Reactions" to messages show up as additional/new replies, and are not attached to the original message.
OMG. Back to "+1" comment threads on GitHub & Co…
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The whole point is: Something that works like "social media" is just a communication tool. A tool by itself is not good or bad. The difference is in who's interest the tool is applied. When I install something that works like Reddit on my own servers and use it to discus internal topic related to my workplace this tool is likely great. The same Reddit-like software operated by an company that seeks out to sell ads to people is likely dangerous to the public.
The problem now is, the whole internet is run on ads. So more or less any communication platform on the internet is potentially malicious.
Of course there are exceptions, like for example HN. But these are rare cases. Also note that something like HN ticks a lot of the "not permitted" boxes outlined above. This just makes no sense as I don't think HN is harmful. More the contrary. So the stated "rules" just don't work.
And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.
Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes".
Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.
Most people here should be engineers or at least analytical. No solution is 100%.
Prevents kids from stumbling onto it by accident at very least.
Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.
You can't force people to not hurt themselves.
Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire
Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China.
Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for all users to do age verification, you create a privacy nightmare for the adults. Meanwhile, children will circumvent the restrictions with VPNs, so you need to ban VPNs too. Foreign companies, who have no incentive to play by the rules, will surely capitalize on this, so you also need a comprehensive website blocking system. As they say, there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such.
The only middle ground I see here is enforcing this through the App Stores, perhaps with an extra ban on sideloading without a developer certificate, guarded byID checks. Losing the ability to sideload would be a shame, but this is the "worst solution, except for all the others" kind of situation. Sure, this is trivial to circumvent by using the web, but the extra friction required due to web apps being worse than native might be a good enough deterrent.