But so is cable television designed to be addictive. So are most restaurants and ice cream parlors and grocery stores designed to get you to spend more. Most loyalty programs are designed to be addictive to get you to come back, etc. etc.
I just worry we left no levers for the public to regulate these entities and this is the worst option of very few options. Who isn't liable under this kind of logic?
The personalization component takes this a step above. Making something very broadly appealing is one thing. Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.
So if social media removed personalization from their algorithms and only applied them broadly across large demographic groups you'd be fine with them? (Genuine question I'm curious)
Maybe. It's hard to know what kind of world that would result in.
I could well see it being so much less effective as to not be a problem. Or maybe they'd be even more effective, and if we caught them explicitly knowing that they were harming children, it would still potentially be tortious.
This would be great, yeah. Disable infinite scrolling and page caching (so that you’re not infinitely scrolling horizontally) and video autoplay too. Also add opt-out time limits and breaks.
Imagine a feed that actually just ends when you run out of posts from people you follow instead trying to endlessly keep your attention by pushing stuff it thinks you might like
If I've read all of the posts from my friends I would prefer to not see anything else, but that doesn't maximize engagement for ad platforms so
The problem isn't X domain of business is more scummy than Y. They all are. That's kind of the problem. Tech is just egregious though in it's non-reliance on physical matter, meaning anything that can be digitally rendered is instantly a world scale fucking problem.
If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. That doesn't work with digital products that started benign, then had the addictive qualities turned up to 11. That's malice, at scale. If every ice cream parlor, or link in the ice cream supply chain started adulterating ice cream with drugs, regulators would have dropped the hammer at the site of adulteration. Meta et Al have had no such presence forced upon them due to lack of regulation in some jurisdictions, or being left to self implement the regulation, thereby largely neutering the effort.
Ice cream isn't engineered to be addictive. Ice cream is, for most people, actually enjoyable and costs money. If ice cream were free but you only got a small amount on random visits to the ice cream parlor then it would be engineered to be addictive.
I don't think that is really true though. People aren't becoming addicted to grocery stores, ice cream parlours and restaurants, or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree. None of those are engineered to addict you in nearly the same degree or magnitude.
I haven't seen anybody making any claims about social media usage leading to clinically meaningful addiction. So why are you asking for evidence of that?
Also fwiw I'm not in favour of regulating social media, but I am in favour of bringing lawsuits to companies who engage in societally harmful behaviour, and punishing them financially.
No. It's been established that social media use can produce addiction-like behaviors, that it uses mechanisms similar to gambling and substance addiction, and that a subset of people experience significant impairment as a result of social media consumption. It's still debated if it should be classified as a form of Substance Use Disorder, which is what the term "clinically meaningful" refers to, but the debate is more a matter of classification and semantics, not if the issue exists at all. And not what people are referring to in the context of this case and discussion.
If you're interested in the topic further, you could consider reading 'Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria', which should shine some more light on what people are referring to as "addiction" in this circumstance :)
If you're interested in the neuroscience, consider reading "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review".
Believe it or not, you might find the answer to that question inside the paper I shared with you called "Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria".
I’m not asking about the criteria for establishing new disorders. I’m sure there are many.
I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Nobody’s ever written a paper about Candy Crush addiction?
Everyone seems very excited to throw Meta and others in the bucket with Big Tobacco, and I don’t see how in the world that makes sense without much stronger clinical evidence on the harms of social media to non-mentally ill people.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.
It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
> On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.
> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.
But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
Also at least partially explained by being priced in. The trial was known about and given the conditions described in GP it's not surprising that the verdict went this way.
Realistically they will hire expensive lawyers, pay out hundreds of millions to billions in settlements, fire lots of people (workforce is predominantly American), etc.
Even if they do what you're saying, lots of people who've used any Meta property in the last 15 years has a potentially viable case, and no future work can swat those away
I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc.
Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of profit compared to what they provide to the average person that makes people squirm.
But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? It's like saying cable television is responsible for people who binge watch TV.
It's hard to square this circle while sports gambling apps and Polymarket / Kalshi are tearing through the landscape right now with no real pushback
By this logic your Grocery store can be sued for you gaining weight because they use an algorithm to time notifications to advertise to you on your phone if you install the app
Yes, and they should be if they promote products that are known to cause harm, this is why we have labels (or at least they try) to inform users that what they are buying is bad for their body and will harm their health, there is no such thing right now on Tiktok despite knowing it's likely to harm you. The fact that teenagers think it's normal to take a hundred selfie a day is a direct sign of psychological distress imo, for a young teen.
We don't promote cigarettes (or at least in countries that have decent consumer laws) because it harms users, candies should be in the same category, it should probably exist but it shouldn't be promoted. When social media actively promote things that cause psychological harm while being aware (as we do have countless studies that proves it) of it to CHILDREN, then yes, screw them, we must force a change.
We should also more forward, imagine now if instead of having a thousand of engineers & businessmen VS teenagers, we could leverage their intellect to actually help the world (and still make money out of them), it is possible, we must force innovation if corporations aren't complying.
Do more? They have not done anything. These trials have shown they have long had extremely detailed understanding of what is going on with their product, and instead of trying to mitigate the problems, they have intentionally made the problems worse in order to profit more.
> why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do?
Misunderstanding of what is happening. They have terms and conditions with their private property that anyone can choose to accept or decline. The DoD wants to them turn around and say these terms for a private company's contract around licensing of their private property are so egregious that the government and all government contract holders should be forced out of using any products by that company
These are because of post-training. You have to give it such directives in post-training to correct the biases they bring in from scraping the whole internet (and other datasets like books, etc.) for data
I just worry we left no levers for the public to regulate these entities and this is the worst option of very few options. Who isn't liable under this kind of logic?
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