The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.
Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.
Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.
Europe is in some capacity doing that. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/facebook-marketplace-t...
Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might want to engage with so and so's content.
How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?
Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving them a second chance.
As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly World News for years, it's just moved online.
This is a massive problem, and not limited to FB itself. I had exact same experience with WhatsApp:
Had an account back when it was $1/year, then deleted shortly after FB acquiring WA. Years later tried to register again, since B&B I booked insisted on using it for key fetch instructions, and... No dice - "can't send SMS, try after 1 hour". Hour and a bit later - tried again, while running packet capture - still same message - and - no network traffic between me tapping "confirm number" and "can't send" message appearing. Clear grey-balling. No explanation, no recourse. Not even an acknowledgement.
Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.
I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?
The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.
We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.
I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.
And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).
So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.
I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.
Is that because of advertising and data monetization?
And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site with some respectable commentary that is so rare people like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people so how is that a social network, it's a community forum at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN helps a fair amount.
Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it, it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them and you.
Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.
Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.
Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.
That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from Facebook until the early 2010s.
But for actual social media? Burn it all down lol
Honestly, Facebook without the push for reels / videos isn't that bad. (now you can crucify me)
I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have the technology, they just reserve it for their real customers.
Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo
Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.
Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.
Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to usenet
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you grew up?
The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one single entity and not indexed like the open web is.
IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.
On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.
I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.
I've thought about this a lot.
I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:
The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.
I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and that's federated/distributed social networks.
The sooner we treat it as an addiction the faster we'll think of treatments.
Not that TikTok should have stayed, but the fact that Meta was pushing for this and now stands to benefit massively should be concerning.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
I'm fine with going back to 100% chronological feeds. Show events as they happen and don't put a hand on the scale.
That's how social networks usually build their base then they switch to an algorithmic feed to satisfy advertisers once their user base is big enough.
"Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed with random memes and shit.
Quite a slide.
One has to be extremely naive to think Google (youtube) lobbyists didn't play a role in this Tiktok ban.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.
Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and decline ???
So there should be a point where things that were not cool, become cool again?
We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.
Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics
If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
If you can use an argument for anything it’s not a very convincing argument.
If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith
This is the second philopsiphical point of economics. Everything is a choice between costs.
Im curious how else you would put it?
>Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
>Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.
Social media is just the demon of the day. In the 80s it was that damn rock music ruining our kids and in the 90s it was violent video games and rap.
Every generation has their "this thing is corrupting the youth" moment.
Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101
Let's stop pretending adults do not do it too.
Children are in a crucial period of their lives when it comes to forging habits, learning skills, developing addictions, &c.
Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.
I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.
Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.
Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
And so on.
There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.
With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.
Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.
“But the masses will be able to access the scripture without guidance! Society will crumble!”
So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.
I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.
I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.
We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.
At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.
Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.
Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.
Not that different from arguing that your average American can’t see through propaganda on TikTok - I think they can.
And if the argument is that it’s addictive, I mean ok? Lots of things are addictive that aren’t severely harmful. We tolerate those as well.
The argument about teens is an entirely different one, I’m talking about adults.
think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.
Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.
1. There's often little or no visibility on how this personalization happens. People with often try to guess and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don't know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia about "shadow banning" and the like.
2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This allows for repetition that really amplifies any biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a period of years from all over the world, seeing them all back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to any political topic...
HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone
that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber
I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.
I've written about this extensively because it's such a consistent phenomenon. Here's one post if you (or anyone) wants a fuller explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. There are plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above
it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?
it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
Well, that's a straight out lie! :)
But nobody ever says "I was banned for breaking the site guidelines". What they do instead is make new accounts to claim "I was banned for my contrarian views". How noble that sounds!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The tell is that they never supply links (e.g. to their previous account(s) or the place(s) they were banned). If moderation is so bad, why not allow readers to see what actually happened and make up their own minds? And yet these complaints are always linkless...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Not always though. For example, in this case you've been using multiple accounts to post in the same thread in ways that are both misleading and abusive. That's clearly over the line, so I'm banning this account and also saying so.
If you would please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with, we'd appreciate it.
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit
That's about the number of social connections the human brain is really meant to handle.
Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"? :)
The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.
Fck around and find out I guess.
Watching news is like begging for nightmares, and most of it's made up anyways.
We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-legislation is going to fill this void.
I like tiktok. I scroll for a bit in the morning and watch some funny videos. Who are you to say that's immoral and shouldn't happen?
We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it used to be entirely possible.
The black box algorithms are the problem.
The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.
I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.
If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just a self publishing utility then keep the section 230 protections
They're acting as editors for a publication. Hold them accountable like the publication companies they are.
Want to continue getting safe-harbor exemptions for user submitted content? No fucking algorithmically chosen feeds.
Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding defamation was that you could hold a newspaper accountable for what they had printed, but not the newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based on their moderation policy: if you published literally anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you decided not to publish certain things then you were a newspaper.
In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal precedent for running any sort of online service. The only services that you could legally run would either be the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever gets published, or everything gets published, including spam and bullshit.
To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding DMCA safe harbor[1] that the use of human curation or moderation strips you of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512 protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or chronological).
So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens decide to sue that day. The social media companies are not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they make money.
The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that social media companies have monopolistic control over the client software people use. Even browser extensions intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you using their service as anything other than a slop trough.
So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That means you want legal protections for third-party API clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to another platform without losing access to their existing friends.
[0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work. You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and demand they sell it or face defamation risk.
Bringo.
The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather than the original homepage was the day social media went sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".
I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the dopamine treadmill over time.
Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no more wall posts).
For its first few years, Facebook had no feed at all.
For your health
+5 Insightful
I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it blocked, but check it once daily just in case.
The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses" to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps watching...".
Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.
More than that too, my recollection is that those early social media sites were considered "separate" from the real world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the early days.
The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook posts.
How far we've fallen.
Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech. It would be too much of a threat to their core, calcified beliefs that there is no such thing aa American exceptionalism.
The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.
To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.
Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.
China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.
They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".
Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it harder to control the political narrative and discourse in society when people have access to information. I think Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you know the answer.
I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very questionable if you really care about the scenario you described.
Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
China has secret agents they need to move through an area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that area at the same time?
Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP propaganda on tiktok.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-Reviewed...
"TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market than divest its ownership from the CCP.
That is not the action of a rational corporation and really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."
1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.
2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.
3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.
4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.
What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?
The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by American companies. It’s not sanctioning TikTok à la Huawei.
Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or app bans in this case.
Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".
Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".
You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.
Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.
The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.
Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.
We don't even have free speech, btw.
You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.
The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.
>> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-serie...
The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.
Social Credit Score: -1 -1 -1 ...
We'll be executed tomorrow, it's all on you
have wanted to do this meme for so long
my bad though
By "accounts like yours" I mean ones that express minority views on any divisive topic. That is valuable to the community but, unfortunately, there is a lot of pressure on anyone who wants to comment that way, and it often doesn't go very well. We've seen this over and over.
I wrote a longer reply to you about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714563. Just wanted to add some context.
Seriously though, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. One comment is not enough to know though.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: I took a quick look at your recent comment history and it seems just fine (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713605, also in this thread). If you'd please post like that and not like this, that would be good.
The voting system exists and works more than well enough to bury bad comments. That's why my comment up there is at -4; it was bad. Problem is solved.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm sorry that I didn't understand that you were joking. The problem, though, is, that many other readers won't understand that either and some will react by getting triggered (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42711424 and the replies there), so in the end it sadly doesn't make much difference.
We have to be proactive (not to say paranoid) about this issue because it's one of the worst dynamics that ruins threads. Lots of past explanations here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
As for upvoting, I wish you were right about that—it would be so much less work—but alas, the voting system alone isn't sufficient for this place to survive. (Past explanations about that if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue. Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable for the world to change.
It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.
I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.
I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.
I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.
Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.
I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.
If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...
But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.
Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.
Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.
(Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)
And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.
But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.
Most parents are addicted to smartphone and don't go with their children outside. I would start the investigation into root causes right there.
I didn't expect what I wrote to be that confusing.
If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small town high school, you might see it different.
But social media isn't the cause of alienation. It's a symptom.
My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then they need to use social media as well.
I'm all for removing social media altogether.
Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society, deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are glorified and celebrated because "freedom".
Social media happened after we destroyed community and any sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a consequence of that. They didn't cause it.
Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5. Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all the so-called "third places".
Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems, bizarre and out-of-touch.
The problem is capitalism.
This is the USA, we don’t do that here. (Except when we do, as in this terrible case, but it’s not what we are about.)
If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Don’t force other people to share your views and opinions. We like social media and choose every day to continue to use it.
App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It’s a real shame we don’t have methods of sideloading to bypass such idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and Google.
At least tiktok.com will still work.
Also note that the law doesn’t force TikTok to shut down, it requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest says a lot about how they view the platform.
Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content itself, if you take away the means for your content to spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.
I find this quite disturbing.
The companies are big because they’re advertising machines with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great place for advertisers to spend money.
Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or problematic.
If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?
I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don’t use it and neither does most of my network. My parents, despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started using it more and more to “connect” with family. In reality, I’ve seen their usage and it’s mostly generic groups and memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think society can survive without that.
To postulate, I think there are a million “better” ways to connect with friends and family, but I also think that there’s no one App that can do everything for everyone. My extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I think people would be better served finding what works for them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.
At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.
Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."
Video for more insight, if you are interested: https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0
The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.
It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social media on mental health it should suffice:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-sho...
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-conten...
The causes for suicide might've changed in the last 50 years.
Also, the number of children suicides was in a downtrend before it went up again:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-...
The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.
I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.
> When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.
Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?
According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up over 33% from 1999.
(Obviously, social media doesn't have to be the only cause. But something is producing a material difference and it's hard to say social media isn't a leading one.)
Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.
Problem solved.
You could use the exact same argument with the Earth temperature: it was higher 50 millions year ago.
Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.
There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.
Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.
This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.
The "disorder" is gender dysphoria. The "cure" for that is being able to live as your chosen gender, eg being transgender. People aren't trying to "spread" it anyway, what gave you that idea? All the trans people I've met haven't been trying to convince other people to be trans, they're giving people advice when they need it. You cant make someone transgender just by trying to convince them they are if they aren't
And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.
Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you have to combine your online interactions with people with the interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off, and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.