[scottious]

this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.

Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

[_3u10]

Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.

Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.

What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.

[refulgentis]

> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.

Where do you live that this is not possible?

(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)

[mulmen]

It’s illegal to drink in public in Washington state [1]. I believe this is the case in most places in the United States. Las Vegas is a notable exception.

[1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=66.44.100

[refulgentis]

Can't tell if you're being earnest or pedantic (if earnest, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood than HN so maybe I'm just more familiar with the solution. The Wire has a scene that'll explain it better than I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ)

[mulmen]

I don’t see how either of those are relevant. The question is where you can legally drink in public. The answer is very few places in the United States. People break laws all the time.

[jazzyjackson]

Illinois sells liquor in grocery stores but not after 2am. Or maybe it was a local ordinance. The town next to me was 1am then you couldn’t buy liquor at the 24 hour grocer. So not just bars.

[techblueberry]

The person who said smoking and hard drugs, and you said a beer outside after 2am. Those aren't the same thing!

[not_a_bot_4sho]

> Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes

Go on

[_3u10]

https://news.gallup.com/interactives/248240/global-emotions....

[dlev_pika]

For example, smoking tobacco in Japan… wait a minute

[Gormo]

> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.

A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.

> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.

And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.

[scottious]

okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..

> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm

That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.

[kjksf]

As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.

(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).

If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.

In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.

It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.

It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.

[shakna]

Those companies are required to publicise the addictive nature of their products, and required to advertise services to aid those addicted.

Facebook consistently argues they are not a source of harm, and do none of that.

If the consumer isn't proactively being informed, then no, litigation isn't patently absurd.

"Informed consent" is what you're missing, here.

[kjksf]

Since we're being condescending here: what you're missing is absence of laws making a given activity illegal.

As far as I know there's no law that you could use to claim that Facebook did something illegal based on some notion of making addictive products.

Just like there are no laws you could use to claim a winemaker did something illegal based on some notion of making addictive products.

And I think it would be absurd to make what Facebook does illegal before we make what winemaker does illegal.

And we tried with winemakers. Educate yourself on dark times of Prohibition. (you opened the condescension doors).

> Those companies are required to publicise the addictive nature of their products, and required to advertise services to aid those addicted

I've never seen such advertising so I suspect you pulled that factoid out of your ass. Easy for you to correct me: laws have numbers, cite one.

If there is such law for say, alcohol, I wouldn't be opposed to such requirements for Facebook.

I mean, it obviously would end up as ineffective annoyance that doesn't deter or fix anything, like cookie banners, but have at it.

So yeah, it's still patently absurd to sue Facebook claiming addiction.

[shakna]

> I've never seen such advertising so I suspect you pulled that factoid out of your ass. Easy for you to correct me: laws have numbers, cite one.

More than one, but how about we have the FDA do the informing here, as I've apparently pissed you off:

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/labeling-and-warning-st...

[Gormo]

> okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..

But he actually is correct. Use the same term to describe the effects of ingesting biologically active chemicals and the effects of emotionally engaging activity -- which in this case mostly consists of exposure to information -- absolutely is disingenuous equivocation. People in this very thread are comparing Instagram with ingestion of alcohol or tobacco products, and that absolutely is a prevarication.

It's not unreasonable to observe the course of these debates, and suspect that the people invoking the language of addiction are doing so as a pretext for treating what is actually a cultural issue instead as a medical one, so as to falsely appeal to empirical certainty to answer questions that actually demand normative debate.