It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."
Histeria (and the virbrator), ice pick lobotomies, electro shock therapy, Quaalude, Benzodiazepines (valium) as mothers little helpers, MAOI's, SRRI's (PSSD), Benzodiazepines again (Xanax, klonipin). <<< (Hint all of these things turned out to be DEEPLY fucked up)
And for good measure a few variations of adrenal Ritalin and other methamphetamines.
Maybe, just maybe, and hear me out on this, we have more people with mental health issues because "self diagnosis" and "self identifications" can get you a prescription. Maybe, just maybe more people have mental health issues because there is a whole fucking industry designed to profit off of problems that have a "diagnostic criteria" and not a "test". Maybe just maybe we should remember that the "reproducibility crisis" has some of its worst offenders in psychiatry and psychology.
Or you know blame social media, like we did for books, radio, tv, Elvis and rock, rap and metal, video games, 4chan and now....
electro shock therapy: were still doing this, there isnt good research to support it at all.
Quaalude addictive, banned in USA since 1984
Benzodiazepines, Valium, Xanax, Kolinapin: Addictive, withdrawal from these are brutal: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=benzodiazepines+suicide
MAOI: so well studied that we let them out in the public and then realized that taking them and eating leftovers could kill you.
SRRI: This is an entire class of drugs that is getting ripped apart by current research. There are studies that show they dont have greater benefit than placebo with therapy. There is new research that says they may be damaging in their own right and have massive withdrawal symptoms.
The term "replication crisis" started with psychology. And, though it has shown its face across much of academia, psychology on the whole looks particularly blighted. Modern research is having no problem turning over much of the last 30 or so years of drugs and research.
It. Is. Damming.
>> Many, if not all, of the medications you listed have been a net benefit for the individual and the world.
The only medication I mentioned with a leg left to stand on anywhere is the SSRI group:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130402/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0... (hey better that we figure this out AFTER it has been on the market for 30 years right?)
To summarize all those links: A study that says serotonin isn't involved in depression. Another that is a meta analysis of SSRI research that says "no better than placebo" and the last one that says SSRI's have some gnarly withdrawal and you should taper off them (a multi month process).
So no I did not have a tirade against a broad spectrum of drugs. I had a tirade against the "treatments" that have, or are, turning out to be worse than the diseases they were treating.
Most (like 90%) businesses don’t have a website or when they have, it’s a static website. All the news are on social medias behind nag screens.
Children don't need social media, just as they don't need tobacco or alcohol. As long as all your friends are off social media, you'll be fine. It's when there's a choice that you get the FOMO situation that makes it more or less impossible for parents to dissuade their children from using social media.
I kind of feel like Elon was actually right that Twitter has become the "public square", but I disagree violently that he should be the one to control and steward it. We need a non-government controlled, non-corporate/profit-driven Twitter. The fediverse is okay but the UX needs to be completely frictionless so everyone can use it (also my mum).
Luckily with Elon doing crazy things to X, NYC has divorced a bunch of public services from it.
But not enough
I for one deleted all of those platforms and my life is definitely better (I'm way less distracted for once, but the list is longer).
What do I care what others do?
When I was in high school, Facebook was just opening up access to everyone. I remember literally everyone getting on it, and swapping between messages in MSN, and some posts on FB. We had whole school wide conversations, planning and etc. on social media, and on days when I didn’t get in front of the computer to check things, I remember feeling left out. It’s just so much worse now, because every kid expects every other kid to be on the loop of things 24/7. I think that’s where we screwed up. Having just casual access without mobile phones was the sweet spot, in my opinion.
Social media can be really bad, and maybe it's actually mostly bad, but it does facilitate real life interactions and good things.
Imagine your child going to school but not being allowed to play with other kids in recess. Lots of bullying and physical violence can happen during recess, after all. Would you use that as an opportunity to teach them the dangers of FOMO, and to just read a book?
Teaching another person, even an eager one, how to change their behaviour and mental patterns concerning validation and FOMO is a really hard task. It's not knowledge like math or something that you can just pass onto them. It can take months or even years even for pros (psychitrists etc.) to do that. Combine that with the fact that teenagers brains are wired differently (their need to fit it is greater than that of an adult) and their "natural resistance" to adults' teaching and it becomes almost impossible task.
Ever tried teaching anything to teenagers where their peers and society in general promote the opposite? Good luck with that...
Like a strict parent whose kids end up doing drugs and partying as soon as they can leave the house, or even the opposite, some "hippie" all-too-liberal parent whose kind grow up and seek strictness and discipline, and e.g. turn religious or join a cult, or find some abusive partner who gives that to them.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids. And you’re supposed to be an adult who already knows what’s right and wrong. If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate? No, what you should do is show them the right way and to what’s good for them in the long term, even if it’s difficult for them to see it now because of their youth.
I have been bullied by losers the whole school time, because of something as simple as my name and being smarter. I managed to develop a strong resistance to certain things and learned to go my own way, questioning the mainstream, including dealing with network effect and peer pressure to do things I do not want to participate in. For children in primary school it can be terrible.
However, I can easily imagine, what can happen, if a parent does not support their child as much as my parents did support me. I think except for exceptionally strong independent children, there needs to be a balance in children's lives. If almost everyone in their social circles is basically telling them, that they suck, because they are out of the loop, then it needs parents to support them and make them feel that they do not suck.
Parent, after an age, has very small influence in what kids do. Kids will be spending most of their time with peers, not with you.
Anyway, to respond to your points:
> What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure.
What I'm describing is knowing how society works and planning around it. It doesn't mean that I would give unrestricted access to social medias, it also doesn't mean that I would not be there to guide my child about how to use them, what the dangers are etc...
I'm saying that straight up abstinence is not a good idea and doesn't work if your child lives in a society that doesn't abstain. There are also perverse effects whereby preventing your child from completely accessing social medias, you end up with a child who just hides it from you.
> If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate?
I'd probably consider switching my child to a different school.
fwiw fighting is the only thing that mitigated bullying for me too
I was about to say teach your child self-defense and how to fight, and the last sentence of that same paragraph just proved my point.
Look, as a parent, your goal should not be to teach your child how to avoid bullying. That's not within your control, nor your child, and in the real world, even once your child is grown up, there's always some moron out there in the world who's going to bully you or want to beat you up, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for not being like them. That's not an excuse to teach your child to be like other children just for the sake of conformity because that is the wrong thing to teach. You teach them how to fight back when people beat them up for being the way that they are. None of your other points matter against that.
The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.
No, wrong again. It’s not necessary to function and there already are secure messaging apps through which kids and adults can communicate. You don’t have to have a Facebook page. You don’t need an IG profile of portraits where you pose like a model. You don’t need to make funny Tiktok videos.
This entire issue is being murkied by adults who are projecting their deep-seated bullying issues as value judgments on how to raise children when evidently they haven’t sorted themselves out and they are already having kids.
Are you a parent yourself? Just wondering.
It's at the heart of socialization itself, which is an important part of growing up healthy.
The analogies with drugs and gambling are also misplaced, because these things are illegal and/or generally frowned upon by parents, the legal system, and society as a whole. In other words, the exact opposite of what's happening here.
And, those things are illegal/ frowned-upon for reasons you respect enough to use them as examples. That should actually help you see the point?
If your child just tells you “yeah I don’t care about others’ opinions”, then I’ll have a hard time to believe as well. As we age, and grow up, sure those things matter less. But come on, we’ve all been children, we’ve all wanted to be a part of some group. Some of us got bullied, some of us got ostracized, but we always wanted to belong.
This usually means "my close friends and peers have same opinions as I do and nobody else matter to us".
This is more prominent among people who grew up with social media everywhere compared to ones who did not.
That's unnecessarily reductionist. Calling is less convenient and takes longer.
No, I don't think so. The time for me to ring you, tell you this in voice would be far quicker than typing.
Calling conveys so much more than text ever can.
A call can take seconds, "hey mate, want to go to the cinema tomorrow? Ill text you the time" "yeah cool, see ya".
Voice expresses emotion, you can pick up the mood of your buddy if they're up, down, need cheering up.
Its real, you hear a voice and you know it's your mate. Text, you assume. Text leaves you on edge waiting for confirmation.
The only inconvenience is that you could be interrupting something and even if so, then send a text.
The post you I was responding to was talking about "group chat". How long would it take for you to call 6 people? How long would it take for you to text 6 people?
I'm all for calls from one person to another person, if you know that person doesn't mind voice calls. Text and group chats are great for coordination of groups.
Now, every conversation, whether it's by phone or zoom, feels like a struggle of who's going to take up the air time, trying not to talk over one another, dealing with delay, etc... It doesn't feel natural at all and there's little to no presence. Having smart phones makes it so much easier to tune out on a call and scroll reddit, check headlines or play a game. I agree that it's less convenient and takes too long for most things. I'd rather check in once a day with someone via text than have one longer phone conversation once a week.
I would however imagine you have some relationships of some kind that you care about. Can you imagine your relationships changing if these others you cared about changed their behaviours? Then extend this imaginary possibility to the relationships of these others. It's a network we are in we are not operating entirely alone.
Care of the other is wanting what is good for the other.
Sometimes this care is not forcing the other to change, sometimes it's encouraging them to change to benefit them as it benefited you.
While a perfectly fine rule of thumb in general, I think you might find the sticking to "I don't care what other people do" as an overriding principle doesn't hold water in a substantial number of edge cases. One such case is where someone is willfully influencing others to act against their best interests, or against the best interest of society as a whole. That's when one needs to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. Is this such a case? Not sure. I just wanted to point out that "I don't care what other people do" can't be your guiding light, always.
I "don't care" what others do in the strict sense that I don't let it influence me.
But I can tell you that me quitting socials did impact relatives and friends to quit those too, and thus I absolutely do not relate with his statement:
> It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not
example from real life:
My local musicians community decided to use only FB to communicate their gigs dates. I refuse to use FB. I no longer know when or where is the gig. I don't see my fellows anymore.
I even admin and moderate FB groups.
In my case it is home education in the UK. It is what everyone else uses, so its where you can discuss things or ask questions. I just asked about parking at the exam centre where my daughter is doing her GCSEs (UK exams typically taken at 16). It is where I found a GCSE classical civilisation tutor for her. It is where I can use my experience to help others. It is where I can find out about local events and activities.It is where people find resources and courses and can discuss them with others. It is where discussion of approaches and how to do things happens.
not using FB would mean giving up all that.
There are some small, insular scenes where everybody knows everybody and word gets around, but those are getting fewer every day.
This seems so weird to me. I help organize some local groups centered around hobbies and games, and none of them use Facebook because we know not everyone will be there, and we don’t want to exclude people. Sorry, but that musician group seems pretty poorly run.
Luckily, I have other hobbies that are less prone to this, mostly because they don't involve much event promotion if any at all and don't need any audience to exist. Example: my local shooting range uses a mailing list for communication and you can always hang with fellows at the club-house.
No one has "bizarre insistence" on use of social media, they're just there and it's the easiest option for all parties. People like you and me are the ones who are perceived as the ones bizarrely insistent on not being on social media. This doesn't make it wrong, and it's luckily slowly becoming more and more accepted, but it is important to keep in mind.
You are right that ideally groups like these should cater to all audiences but that's a lot of effort, and many organizers do it on a voluntary basis, not as a job. In my case, I know that 98% of people are included in the media that I use for my audience, and catering to the last 2% would double my workload. Not happening.
As far as workload goes, we have not found anything lighter weight and less maintenance than an E-mail list.
I’ve done the same, but it’s not without cost:
- Two hobbies I’m involved with have large local communities on Facebook. I’m not in the loop, and sometimes miss out on events and catchups.
- I’m not on Twitter, and there’s a massive amount of chat about my field (realtime collaborative editing & local first software) that takes place there. I miss out on what’s going on, and I’m reliant on other people to promote my work for me.
Im happier. But it’s you really are cut off from a lot of society - especially in the tech world - if you aren’t on social media.
Also worth noting that it sounds like meta thinks like they already have all earth population in their products because new accounts are really easily banned for no reason. Any temporary account I made to access some information have been blocked minutes or hours after creation.
Before Twitter, you had to go to the coffee shop and listen to people ramble on with their inane political rants and conspiracy theories just to get at the occasional tidbit of useful field-related information. That was depressing.
I left Twitter after it started showing me posts from people I don’t follow that I found annoying and in one case just straight up racist. I replied and he was as surprise as I was. He asked “why are you in my replies?”. I didn’t know why I was there either. I deleted the app and haven’t been back.
Of course, we know enough about these algorithms to know that they are based on your action, not what you claim. Pretending that you find something annoying, but then contradictorily dedicating your attention to it is going to tell the algorithm to give you more of the same. If you don't want to learn the truth about yourself, I can see why you'd want to steer clear.
Wow, um - I don’t know how to say this politely. I know the truth about myself. I know I’m drawn towards stupid stuff like that. That xkcd “I can’t come to bed yet honey, someone is wrong on the internet!” - that’s talking about me.
It’s like an addiction. Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me. I want technology to support the better angels of my nature. Not inflame my worst parts.
The problem with algorithmic news feeds is they’re too compelling for me. I don’t want to live in a constant state of battle, where I need to exert self control to make my attention my own. I want technology to support my life choices. Not to constantly tempt me to doom scroll. Just because I do it, doesn’t mean I enjoy it or that I choose it.
It’s much easier for someone who’s a problem drinker to just not have alcohol around the house. Me? I just can’t use algorithmic news feeds in a healthy way. I think a large portion of society has the same problem, and just doesn’t know how to quit. If it were up to me, I’d ban algorithmic news feeds entirely. They’re bad for us.
Then say it inpolitely? Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
> Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me.
Understandable, but that which annoys you will not produce addict behaviour. You are drawn to the stupid drama because it does the opposite of annoy you.
Emotions aren't an either/or sort of thing. You can love and hate someone at the same time. I love and hate exercising, and junk food. Just like I love and hate algorithmic news feeds. I find social media both annoying and compelling, all at the same time.
The fact I'm compelled to doom scroll doesn't make it good for me, or mean I want twitter in my life. Twitter and FB's news feeds annoy me. I know they're bad for me. But that doesn't magically stop them from also being psychologically compelling. Maybe yours do, but my neurons don't cancel out like that.
> Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
But we aren't software.
Sure, but if they annoy you, truly, that's it.
> But we aren't software.
You might not be. But there is no one else. There is only the software you are talking to. What, exactly, do you think the impolite words floating around in your head are going to do to you if you write them down? They aren't going to do anything to the software, that is for certain.
Maybe anonymity has had a good run and is actually at the root of the issue in many contexts. After all, people don't (generally) walk around IRL wearing ski masks so they can say crazy shit or troll people without consequence. And we also get the courtesy of knowing who the people we're talking to actually are.
And if you say, "yeah but doxxing and death threats" or "my employer might fire me", etc then maybe these are the actual problems that need to be addressed.
And, yes, I realize that's coming from someone who's IRL neither Uncle Buck or Buc Nasty, as his handle might imply. But, obviously that's where we currently are, which is the point.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
> say crazy shit
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.
Maybe this is true in some places. In big cities in Europe and the Americas this is definitely the case. It's done by law enforcement, commercial retail, and private security. It's more or less trivial nowadays to buy a cheap IP camera and collect an database of faces across your camera network.
My guess is that there's more of this going on, but I'm only listing stuff I have personal knowledge of.
The anonymity we're talking about here is WRT the latter.
With that in mind, my point is that it's a social problem that people have to worry about death threats for expressing political opinions. It's not solved by people becoming anonymous at scale to offer up their opinions. In fact, this adds to the problem, in that anonymity tends to lead to increasingly offensive forms of expression (absent the social governor that is present IRL). Anonymity changes the motivation for engaging and removes the constraints that have social value.
It also makes it easy for bad actors to do their work.
Put simply, if people don't feel comfortable offering an opinion in person, then maybe it's not a good thing to give them an opportunity to offer it anonymously at-scale.
>Crazy shit is very culturally and contextually dependent
No. I'm speaking WRT the context of our discussion. That is, saying things anonymously online that one would not say in-person for understood social (or legal) reasons. e.g. threatening people, being overtly snarky, trolling, etc.
So-called "edge lords" and people for whom provocativeness is their brand, perhaps.
But, I don't think that's true for the average person at all. I think we all know this intuitively / empirically, but there have also been studies that bear it out. [0]
>Internet hostility is more analogous to road rage.
No. Road rage is a function of losing one's temper and acting outside of one's self in the moment. Distinctly different from purposely shedding one's identity to engage socially.
Besides that, we're not just talking about hostility, but an overall disposition when one is acting without the social constraints of identity and accountability.
[0]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...
I wasn't aware there was a sizable effort to this effect, and I'm not even sure that I'm proposing it. More just observing the impact of anonymity on society/civility and considering aloud that perhaps the price of anonymity is not worth its perceived benefits.
>Most of the negative effects and hostility of social media (youtube, twitter, facebook, etc.) come from named and publicly-identifiable individuals.
Citation? Because this seems counter to the accepted understanding, multiple studies (see my previous comment) and, anecdotally, my own observations.
But, even allowing that wouldn't preclude that a significant amount of toxicity is also coming from anonymous usage.
Because we live in a society?
Would you care if everyone around you was smoking crack, sociopathic or seriously mentally ill?
Perhaps I just have boring friends that we resort to sometimes talking about what is going on in our lives. I also wouldn't feel like less of a friend if they didn't tell me something, but important life events in their lives are usually important to them, which means that they ultimately end up talking about them in some way or another.
I think a lot of the complaints from people who "cannot stop" is just laziness. They need the government to construct an excuse so they won't have to man up and take control of their own lives.
That is also sad, because it means those people will never grow up but will be constant children in the eyes of the state.
Then I would say there are the 0.01% who do have psychological problems and they need to see a doctor.
If you do live in a society, you do need to care, as "what others do" affects society in general, including you in the end. Affects how they behave, how they vote, what causes they support, their mental health, and tons of other things, all of which end up also affecting those who don't use those apps.
This is libertarian virtue signalling that simply does not stand up to reality.
Yep. The other problem is that not having social media and mobile devices can be alienating and ostracizing, especially for teenagers.
Avoiding the problems of social media requires skills and restraint that even most adults don’t have.
It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
We grew up at a time where SMS was a thing when I became 16. I know that keeping up is cool, but social media is a disease. The amount of dumb and uneducated people that couldn't even listen to expert advice during a fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
I'm annoyed mainly because people around me make bad decisions that have an influence on my own life.
If you stay home and others don't, it doesn't affect you. If you're isolated and safe, why would you care if others go out and do what they want?
A commenter in a sibling thread asked why "people are so nitpicky" and "why people are so hostile to each other". This comment is why. It's exemplary even. You should look inward and figure out if you're part of the problem.
Meanwhile, it transpires that the outside world is full of people who I am sure are upstanding and willing to self-sacrifice for their fellow man in theory, but will point blank refuse to bear the mild inconvenience of a piece of cloth over their face in shared spaces for the comfort of those around them in practice.
I mean, it's not news; most humans have never cared much about the welfare of strangers; people doing what they want and ignoring the externalities happens all the time - smoking in public spaces, drink driving... the pandemic simply served to viscerally ram home just how self-centered we all are.
And thus we come full circle to the start of the thread. Hell is other people. The more we interact with other people, the more obvious this becomes. As our world becomes more connected, no room is left for illusions on the subject; it's little wonder teens end up holing up in their rooms avoiding everyone.
The core problem is the ostracization of opinion on social media. It also doesn't play very well when social isolation has had other consequences, such as the proliferation of viruses and the broad economic impact. Plus, COVID is now integrated in our society, thus giving more ammunition to those who thought that social isolation was pointless (even if it wasn't at the time).
We need to move on from the isolationism and vitriol of others with differing opinions.
To be clear, I'm not arguing whether the lockdowns were good or bad. I do think they were necessary. I'm more arguing that we shouldn't suppress and ostracize people who disagreed with them. It's okay for people to disagree.
For arguments sake, let’s call it - individual only scenarios vs collective scenarios.
Individual only: What thoughts you say at home in the privacy of your house.
Collective: The vote.
In collective scenarios, the median/average choice dominate.
Eg: The chemical expert knows that chemical X is going to kill humans and avoids it.
The collective votes Yes to elect a representative who advocates for chemical X to be added to all food packaging.
——-
This is a very common trick question where Free Speech argument proponents falter.
Free Speech is a principle for ordering the world. With the internet, this principle needs to be applied to people who would skew or influence collective decisions.
The best solution to this problem in general is social welfare. One such choice that countries did during the pandemic was to encourage or force work-from-home, and reducing the economical friction of sick leave. When the situation is so bad that people have to choose between externalities and major negative personal impact, society can help by stepping in by pushing the right choice while at the same time reducing that negative personal impact. It is a social solution to a social issue.
People as a group can be good and evil, just as an individual. Society can choose to ignore those logistical and financial problems while at the same time expect people to act altruistic. A major reason for that will ironically also be the logistical and financial situation of that country, so they may as an alternative choose an better than nothing solution to it. Sub-optimal as it is.
It does, because there are places I have to go to and I am at higher risk there.
Because they'll get sick and fill up the emergency room. If I have a heart attack or stroke at home, that's a problem for me now.
To answer this question:
Because almost nobody was isolated. Most people couldn't stay at home exclusively and indefinitely. You gotta get groceries, lots of people have to go to work, lots of people have partners and family members that can't work from home, you gotta receive parcels, you had to receive food deliveries, and some people had to be the ones delivering parcels and food, some people could get OTHER diseases. The list goes on.
Take this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0?error=coo...). How many people on HN will agree with the ranking of those interventions? Early restrictions on travel and preventing people from gathering are the most effective measure to prevent an pandemic, but what people want to form sides around are the discussion around masks. Shutting down airports and imposing general self isolation are not in alignment of what either smart and dumb people believes in.
I don't believe in completely forbidding access to everything when my son is older but there's a time to introducing things like this and it's not this young.
My nephews school allows basic 'dumb' phones but not smart phones which seems a fair compromise.
Dumb phones is definitely a smart compromise...
Elsagate videos got many tens (hundreds?) of millions of views at the time. If you know where to look you can see the cumulative engagement of babies in front of their tablets.
There's also this hypothesis I saw the other day, that the above is a misattribution: it's not the working-age women who somehow have time to play so much, but rather babies and kids playing on their mothers' devices.
I also wonder what the breakdown of Netflix streaming hours is. I suspect a huge chunk of it is just toddlers and pre-schoolers watching the same episodes of Cocomelon over and over again.
50M views with lovely comments such as "Ujhgjjgfgk", "ĤĎĎ hcl jdjdsewi10000000000", "nnnmkkk", etc.
This sort of shit gets billions of views...
Yes, expert opinions do change as new data comes in, and yes, public policy is as much influenced by politics as by science. But during the beginning of the pandemic, the OP is absolutely correct that a shocking number of people showed very poor judgment based on social media.
And this has not changed. Social media continues to be a cesspool of conspiracy theorists and deliberately provocative content that increases "engagement". Please don't dismiss this point by putting "expert advice" in quotes.
It is shameful that citizens had to sue for the release of the partial protocols in the first place, for sure, but the conclusions are more than hasty. Anyhow, you seem to have made up your mind, so I'm leaving you to it.
So, like smoking in restaurants?
The amount of dumb, educated people that blindly accepted everything that was fed to them during the fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
"Just two weeks to flatten the curve!"
Sorry, I see this a lot but: oh well? They'll get over it. Social media on the other hand gets its hooks in deep.
If every teenager were guzzling gallons of soda everyday and telling them to stop "alienated and ostracized" them, I'd still do it for the good of their health.
Alienation and ostracization is not something to be taken lightly.
We know that kids on social media are suffering depression and etc.
So… if you keep your kid off of that drug, you are saying they’re not going to be accepted by the addicts and peers that are suffering?
Ok? Good?
We know what conformity to the group of damaged friends can do to a kid.
I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
We know it raises likelihood, that doesn't mean they're all depressed and anxious across the board, and those afflictions are on a gradient. Younger generations appear to be optimizing for it more effectively.
It doesn't make sense to cast society at large as "suffering and addicted". Downstream from that, the downsides of sheltering your children from society loom larger than their being socialized among peers who use social media.
> I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
You do that.
> You do that.
You don't hear really about Amish kids killing themselves. Maybe there's something there.
Kids having problems because of social media sucks.
Kids having problems because they don't have social media and gets peer pressure because of it also sucks.
I'm just saying what happens when you force "individual responsibility" onto parents and children, without addressing the root societal problem.
I agree 100% that using social media is unhealthy.
The parent commenter propose that you can not escape the negative consequences of social media, even if you fully restrain yourself, as you have the second order effects from your friends using it.
The parent commenter says that this is not an individual problem and cannot be solved on an individual level. It is a macro issue.
Just like you stopping eating meat will not really make a dent on global warming.
I think that is very insightful.
Its easy to say, that's the parents responsibility and that is a correct statement but most families require 2 working parents these days, most of whom are not tech savvy enough to understand how to limit social media or access to questionable sites.
Social media is an addictive, mind altering poison by design. Through the pervasiveness of echo chambers and intentionally addictive features such as endless scrolling and recommendations it seeks to do nothing except turn its users into revenue by keeping them online and seeing / clicking ads.
I lost my sister to it as she became so wrapped in the political side of it that any belief besides hers and those she followed meant you were a borderline nazi.
if thats the case, then surely it would be reflected in the studies? (assuming that the studies are reproducible....)
If you run against convention too much, even when convention is wrong, you become the zealot guardian, which conjures a family situation with its own distinct pathologies.
You could say the same thing about the Bible, or Harry Potter, or any number of things too
The scale, extent and addictiveness of these two things are nothing compared to algorithmic social media though.
I guess I'm saying that it was worth it, dubious morals aside.
They all use Discord and/or Snapchat here in Australia. No one I've every asked about this cares about Android vs iPhone. No one.
No one apart from the Parents uses the built in messaging and SMS.
But then the Parent groups all use Facebook Messenger for most group comms.
The whole green / blue bubble thing is either over played by the Press or purley a US Phenomenon.
But given the marketshare of the iPhone with teenagers in the US, it seems it's possibly less of an issue its made out to be due to the fact that most people have iPhones anyway!
They wouldn't necessarily tell if they did though...
This is more like "I asked 100 men if they worry their D is small, and nobody said yes".
But not really IMHO, as it’s not a status thing.
They say they don’t care because the my don’t care. They just don’t use the built in message apps outside of texting a parent to be picked up LOL
But I understand the point well.
Discord and SnapChat are available for iOS and Android.
With Discord being available as good as everywhere.
So using Android does not exclude you socially in my experience, here in Australia.
Similarly in Europe and the UK, the What’s App was hugely popular and the default cross platform messenger.
I don’t entirely believe the rhetoric around Green and Blue bubbles that the press repeat without any real evidence. :-)
The fact is if everyone else uses it, this precludes them from many normal interactions that get replaced by social media. It's a cultural thing as much as it is a personal thing. You will feel excluded if you don't use it, so unless everyone changes, it's hard for you to change. That takes a determination even many adults lack.
The harmful effects of social media are not eliminated by choosing not to participate. They have a cultural impact (both benefit and harm) that expands beyond an individuals choice. We should reconsider how to handle teenagers on social media as a society. Not just tell them to preclude themselves if it's harming them.
I wonder if they still do. Ironically, this was in Florida - probably be considered too woke by Desantis.
except it is, because law is dumb, stupid, and slow-witted. if you ban facebook specifically, the next day it will think that means mailing lists should also be banned. btw ive witnessed lots of mailing list and then web forum addicted deadbeats before social media came out but whatever
the legal solution is nothing (i realize not all of you have asked for the legal solution yet but thats essentially the only point of this thread that is brought up routinely on places like HN)
teh fact that every techie and his mom seems to think the law will work out in his favor when it backfires each time (or they just ignores that downsides) is no different than how people keep thinking you can put a web server in every embedded device and they oh so surprisingly have the same RCE vulns as the 90s, every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-medium-is-the-massage-revis...
I suspect that a lot of the anxiety about how difficult it would be to quit is the mind's way of rationalizing a psychological addiction, like saying you can't stop smoking because things are just so crazy right now.
I quit social networks in 2008, it wasn't hard at the time and it's not been hard to stay away. Yes, there are consequences of being the one guy in the friend group who doesn't use whatever app everyone else is using, but to call those consequences meaningful is an overstatement. A minor annoyance, easy for everyone to adapt to.
You're right that other people are still influenced by social networks. Speaking from the outside, I wouldn't even use the word 'subtle' to describe its effects. But, I don't know that that really matters. You surround yourself with people you like, despite their flaws. You hope the good things about them grow, and that they work through their flaws. That's just having friends.
Your good friends and friendships will survive that, no doubt, but you do lose out on opportunities to make additional or deeper connections.
You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?
There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.
Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).
The more pertinent comparison would be alcohol IMO: none of the people who want "something" done about social media seem to have a problem with the widespread, massive use of alcohol within society and the incredible amounts of continuous and ongoing damage it does.
I think the point is exactly that you can.
If a table saw could only remove your hand after years of dedicated usage, then sawstop wouldn't be the obviously good idea it is.
Hence why the comparison to alcohol is much more apt, and yet, mysteriously - absent in the discussion.
Damage from social media use is gradual and insidious. Additionally, it's designed to be addictive, slowly pulling users in. There is no threshold that announces itself when users are addicted or have begun to "ignore a lot of good advice".
There's also no absence of discussion around the dangers of alcohol or drugs. And, there are actual laws regulating or outright banning their use.
But, even if it was absent from the discussion, that would not absolve social media. Is every world issue rendered illegitimate if we don't also mention the dangers of alcohol with equal fervor? It seems a random, meaningless requirement.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion.
Alcohol is a useful yardstick, because it was banned (to considerable disaster), almost everyone likes it, the misusers tend to not realise it till considerably later, and we've got studies which look dire on the cost to society of it in fiscal terms.
If what you're calling for would seem ridiculous if it were applied to alcohol, then maybe it's just going be ineffective or you just don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak: after all, both serve a considerably important social cohesion function as well.
Which to loop it back around is why trying to compare social media regulation to something like mandating sawstop is especially disingenuous.
Also, seems like an odd gating criteria for whether or not people support the idea of regulating social media (i.e. per the specific thrust of the original question).
Of course the trick is that social media access doesn't require folks to pay an upfront cost, so it's harder to slap the cost of this additional service on the transaction. But of course as financial regulation makes banks do KYC and file SARs (suspicious activity report) social media regulations could do something similar. (Hurray more surveillance saves the day!)
SawStop says they'll release one patent (which is about to expire anyway) but they've got a huge portfolio of other ones, and companies like Grizzly say that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology.
Bosch released a saw with similar tech, except unlike SawStop it didn't use overpriced consumables every time it triggered. SawStop sued the product off of the market.
The company founder also serves as an expert witness when people shove their hands into moving saw blades, then sue the saw makers - testifying that the makers should be held liable because they haven't licensed his invention.
Of course, I'm sure for SawStop getting all their competitors banned will be a highly profitable decision; it's no surprise they're lobbying for it.
Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.
Arguably, the presence of social media homogenizes the speech we're allowed to have.
a lot of ppl got reeled into the narrative that social media can democratize (free) publication of conversations and ideas, thou it is dominated by monetary incentives that mandate propaganda/advertising and in turn moderation and censorship.
The proper analogy would be banning books with certain content, which we already do. You can't distribute a book calling for a specific person to be killed or doxxing them. Doing this on social media in Ethiopia is encouraged, as it drives engagement and has lead to actual deaths of people I know. They have a policy not to moderate this content despite having the resources. Just like they have a policy to make the apps as addictive as possible.
More importantly, Facebook is not a "printed book", it is the printing press. It owns the internet. It's not remotely comparable. And that's why it is a threat to free speech
It would be as if printing presses were so complicated and expensive that the barrier to entry was so high as to price out everyone but a few select publishers. I wouldn't try to over-extend that metaphor though.
The historical existence is simply irrelevant. Just like existence of pre-TV/newspaper speech is not a relevant factor in determining whether banning all TV/newspapers in 1950 restricts free speech
Naomi Klein went into this in No Logo with shopping malls replacing public spaces where you also don’t have a right to free speech and can be evicted arbitrarily at the owners discretion.
You’ll find virtually all of social media platforms have moderation, usage policies and user banning practices that go well beyond allowing the fully legally protected free speech you are afforded in a public space (in many countries).
Edit: removed unnecessarily inflammatory phrasing.
> if the addition of seatbelts say doubled the price of car
Seatbelts are brought up so often precisely because they are an intervention with a huge benefit-to-cost ratio. Seatbelt laws were made long after the fact - seat belts for cars started to appear in the 1950s, with the common three-point variant in 1955; the first seatbelt law appeared in 1970 (in Australia). The US started introducing seatbelt laws for cars in the 1980s (though as far as I know, some organizations/insurers required them earlier for employees driving for business).
Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.
Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.
It's like we have this generation of people who believe government overreach is a) inevitably the outcome in every scenario; b) present in every situation; c) always the worst possible thing that could happen. As in, literally worse than mass sickness and death.
At least in theory, my government representatives are accountable to me. To whom is Facebook accountable?
They don't realize it's really a question of who will rule over them, and whether there's any chance it will be themselves.
Sure, our democracy has been crippled, but the solution is to fix it, not dismantle it.
And ironically the people who are crippling it (Citizens United, lobbying, regulatory capture, etc) are the same who would rule over us if it were completely abolished. That is, essentially, their project.
That said, a government can be passive and not regulate a field and non-intervention stays non-intervention, be it conscious or not. But that is besides the point. A government that tries to regulate all aspects of life is usually connected to totalitarianism, an that isn't only a libertarian position.
Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.
In most countries whether children drink alcohol at home is up to their parents. In some countries an adult can buy teenagers a drink (in the UK they increased the required age from 14 to 16 - and I think its a bad thing).
There are people who think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.
Kids cannot buy guns, but can use them. I did a bit of rife shooting at school.
There is a difference in being granted unsupervised abilities vs supervised ones.
At least until their character is formed and they have developed essential human traits like being able to read a book, being able to be patient, being able to communicate in person, and to hand-write. You know, that sort of ancient wisdom.
Edit for clarification.
But if properly done, it can work. I was/have been the kid in this scenario, and now I'm being the parent and bracing for it.
Social pressure might be a tidal wave, you can either give up, or you can try to stand against it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
I never saw myself as capable of withstanding the stress of parenting and so I never even really thought about having kids. I thought I was a far outlier, but, given trends in fertility, I think I may have just been early in realizing this.
It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.
People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.
Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.
your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.
Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.
My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted.
Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.
Thanks to the screen time stats from their mobile, they can reflect on the time wasted per week. This works great for the oldest ones, but not for our youngest.
My impression is that getting older is enough for them to start reflecting as we are as adults also struggling. Screentime hygiene is for us a tooic we try to address like mouth hygiene, think about it every day, but do not make a big fuss about it.
happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other.
If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.
Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.
I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA.
The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.
As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes.
Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability.
Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia
Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.
That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).
In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.
There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
Wikipedia has a better definition right at the top than I can offer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
The crucial point is it is characterised by neurological changes that lead to short circuited reward pathways. The idea of addiction to social media a perfectly consistent with its action and moreover, consistent with the notion that its effect can be enhanced by design.
Everything that's enjoyable in life can meet that definition. For practical purposes, we only consider severe cases to be addiction, but it's not well-defined. The article you linked says:
> However, there is no agreement on the exact definition of addiction in medicine. Indeed, Volkow et al. (2016) report that the DSM-5 defines addictions as the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses. It is a definition that many scientific papers and reports use.
> The DSM-5 and ICD-10 only recognize gambling addictions as behavioral addictions
I don't think the DSM-5 has any principled reason for recognizing gambling addictions but not video game addiction or shopping addiction, other than gambling addiction being particularly harmful.
Whether social media is beneficial or causing substantial harm is not well defined or easily measured. It's a subjective thing that will be debated and rely on judgement.
That's part of why it can be contentious; people can declare themselves addicted but one suspects they sometimes do it to avert blame for some related action.
And whilst many things in life can have this property and need to such that we get enjoyment out of particular aspects of life.
There are particular things which short circuit reward pathways to a greater degree. Such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, smartphone addiction.
Smart phone/video games are designed to constantly reward us as much as possible
""" More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:
1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. """
While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".
> That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also.
This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.
As a town square, it's more akin to Times Square.
The town square analogy couldn't be further from reality.
If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.
Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.
There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?
If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.
It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.
That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.
> prevented access to education medical information ... you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
This is pretty important to me:
Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.
I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;
This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.
> I don't use any of these products
I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.
> to agree to being eaten by a friendly cannibal
They had standards though, you'd have to work to gain the respect for anyone to want to eat you as a mortuary ritual.
1. the right to not have someone else do stuff to your body
2. your right to do anything to it
Number 1 is pretty well established.
Number 2 less so, and I think that comes down to us as a society noticing that many people can't be trusted with full access here. Ask any clean addict and they will tell you what a colossal mistake it was to start using the drug in the first place. The regulation of what you can do with your own body is, in my opinion, a regulation to protect future you from present you. Because we all know what the present you has worse impulse control and judgement than future you would like.
My country is an example where it failed anyway. Whether we are considered to have tried regulating it or not is a bit complicated.
US companies have a qualified right to free speech https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speec...
How about AI? If it is an algorithm that is talking to you, does it have the right to do all the things that are protected by 'free speech'?
And does it matter if the AI is commercial, or a home hobby project effort?
This somebody is using his right to free speech, AI is just a tool.
What is the explicit difference between 1 person and 10 persons when it comes to their rights?
Explicit, I want to know what rights we lose as soon as "I" transforms into "we".
None.
> Explicit, I want to know what rights we lose as soon as "I" transforms into "we".
In this case a company isn't "we". It is usually the owner.
> None.
> > Explicit, I want to know what rights we lose as soon as "I" transforms into "we".
> In this case a company isn't "we". It is usually the owner.
Awesome, I'm glad that rights do not change between 1 to 1 billion, let's not assert that these rights disappear in conditions that make no difference in quality.
I have heard similar arguments about corporations hehe
Very Rothbardian, Mises and Say would be proud too
I can give you that an AI trained to make a mixin of a lot of input texts and output a mashup of those texts, the output might not be the same of their creators. That said, it's known that AI creators/trainers can make their AI lean towards certain "opinions", as we saw recently with the case of Gemini and their understanding of diversity (https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...).
Corporations can't do that. Corporations don't ask for everybody's in the corporation opinion and then do an aggregate with all of them to write a press release. They have some people choosing what to say in the press release that goes in the interest of the corporation.
Who are these people? Are they people or something that are not people?
There doesn't even seem to be much speech of the companies running the platforms on their own platforms. All they do is quote their users.
you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.
you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.
> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.
What's the secret to doing that? No really. How do I unsubscribe from the tracking that these platforms do on the web and in my apps?
That's the rub! I can't not use (or be used) by these platforms -- no one can!
After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.
In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?
This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.
If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.
Companies are constantly inventing new ways to get people hooked on their platforms (or products), and it's a pretty tough race for teachers.
Note also the difference in salaries for high school teachers and developers at Meta.
If Huberman can teach you a basics of nutrition so can a formal educational process. The problem with relying on youtube educators is then that it is down to luck if someone will come across it.
This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?
It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.
We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?
Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.
Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on multiple levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.
I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.
Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.
Just like porn? Do you think kids would find a way around it?
But that would be a fraction of what it is now
The biggest problem with the social media systems is that they are normalized. Lots of school and government stuff only comes out on Xitter or Facebook. That's horrible.
It's like dealing with a car salesman. If you engage, you've already lost as you have sooooo much less experience than who you are fighting against.
Relevant bit from the essay:
"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."
Banning is exactly the argument against this. They are saying we should do that to protect the mental health of teenagers.
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.
So, either you participate and feel isolated through your social connections by social media, or you don't participate and feel even more isolated because you don't have social connections.
30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.
Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").
On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.
For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.
In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.
What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.
To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.
Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...
This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.
My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.
Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…
This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.
I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.
The problem is how to stop the mob attacking you from using them.
An American equivalent might be if social media existed a 100 years ago and was being used to encourage lynchings. Yes, it really is that bad in some places.
The problem is that FB does moderate things relevant to the US but ignores the rest of the world. They will remove white supremacist material in the US, but not the equivalent elsewhere.
Yes. As an extreme example: watching cheese pizza is not allowed by governments. We have collectively also come together to consider murder as socially and legally unacceptable. We can and should regulate social media if posts read as follows:
- we should invade and bomb that country to bits - we should destroy all places of worship belonging to XYZ religion - we should vote for XYZ because only he is going to save our religion from PQR - and much worse which I can't type here as moderation team of HN would omit those
IMHO: give the current form of social media another few decades and it will come out shinning bright just like opioids did in the USA.
These same social media platforms, when required by law, become very effective in moderation but there's next to no moderation in my country and most of the hate and abuse is counted as just another engagement metrics.
One can and should be able to espouse those beliefs, regardless of whether they are true or not, because the alternative is much worse, where the rights of such exposition are severely curtailed. Hell, someone got arrested for taunting the Queen in the UK, something that legally cannot happen in the US had a similar person taunted a government official.
I think the underlying issue is that American companies view everything through the lens of American culture and if its not a problem in the US, then it is not offensive.
I once reported a racist comment on FB. Someone said that people of their race should not "interbreed" with people of another race because the latter are evil. FB said it did not violate their community standards.
IMO it was probably because it was a comment by a black person (probably American) about white people. That is not the major problem is the US so its fine.
Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.
Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"
Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.
You either play the sisyphean game of personally blocking a billion dollar company from including you. Or you reach for the long arm of the law.
We all know FAANG gave us no choice but to use government ruling.
100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".
What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms.
Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny.
Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.
But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law really matters.
Now the controversial bit:
What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.
Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book about it [1].
The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is utterly unnecessary.
Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to mandate it.
Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain plurality of access;
No services for government, schools, health available *only* on
proprietary and "smart" platforms. Requirement to maintain
traditional paper and interpersonal modes.
End the insanity of a "cashless society", and "smart societies"
that exclude basic human interaction and require and assume
smartphones with apps.
Strongly protect the rights of parents to choose how their kids use
technology, for example in schools, and the attitudes they are
raised with.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...
> No services for government, schools, health available only on proprietary and "smart" platforms
I wish this were a movement, I feel very strongly about this.
This is a snarky comment, but this is the consequence of this "negative freedom".
I do think that there's some merit to these ideas, but I think it would always leave the choice to the individual. But we also have to realize that some things you just can't opt out of, eg electromagnetic radiation from cell towers.
Is this something to do with the US healthcare system? Can you elaborate please?
(BTW if it is, one of my friends who is a type-1 diabetic was involved in the very political "humanitarian airdrop" of insulin to the USA. - so I kind of get it)
Asthma inhalers just happen to fall under a prescription requirement in my country like most other drugs. Sure, this has its benefits, but also downsides. That's really all there is to it. I only brought it up, because I rarely see this side mentioned. Everybody seems to think that prescriptions aren't a barrier, but from my experience that's not true.
Yeah I used to be more pro-control, particularly because of antibiotic overuse. Now it's clear restraint made little difference I'm more inclined to a free market. Thing about food, drugs and stuff you put in your body though, is quality really matters.
> Restrict your children'ss access to these platforms.
sure, but not everywhere is America and some places seem to manage without slippery-sloping to eternal damnation.
Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.
The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.
Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.
> those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.
That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.
That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.
The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.
Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.
And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.
If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.
I don’t think this is a stupid comparison, as I believe these platforms can be very harmful to children.
And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?
People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.
I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked. I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.
I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.
Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!
> Restrict your children's access to these platforms
That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"
They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.
There's a very clear causal relationship between IG and mental health that goes beyond a moral choice and ideals of free speech
That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).
Now they are psychological manipulators (remember https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every... ?) in a quest for advertising dollars at the expense of everything else.
Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.
Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.
Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).
Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.
In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.
Public institutions, however, should not be restricting information dispersal to third-party private companies who force even a casual viewer to agree to extensive legal contracts.
These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.
“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.
You don't have kids do you?
I imagine in the US there could be cases, where parents with the required pocket change can sue the school or something, to get it done, but if I think about my own home country, I have my doubts, whether anything would be resolved, before the time of a child in that school is over and in addition to that, there is no accountability for abysmal tech decisions in institutions such as schools. No one is losing their job for forcing children to use social media, unfortunately, even though every adult, especially one to work with children, should know by now, that this cannot be conforming with data protection laws. We simply punish incapable reckless behavior way too rarely.
That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.
You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.
I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.
To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)
And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.
But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.
We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".
No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.
You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.
And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.