[mmaunder]

We all know they're addictive, they're designed to be addictive, and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. The individuals who are profiting from the harm are clearly identifiable. And that harm directly targets children. That this is allowed to continue is a symptom of a sick society.

[the_snooze]

Social media feeds are designed to be slot machines. Each scroll is a pull. You may or may not get something you actually want. You can't predict what's coming up next, so you just keep mindlessly scrolling.

[sidibe]

It's not just the scrolling, the posting side too. They all randomly boost one of your posts so suddenly tons of feedback (especially noticable when I tried threads) and then you try to get that back again. The uncertainty keeps you at it

[munificent]

Related: TikTok has a "heating" feature that can make a video radically more popular: https://archive.is/8YYcH

[georgemcbay]

> and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children.

And society as a whole. Even if you don't participate you don't escape the blast radius of the harm they've caused over the past 10-15 years.

[wincy]

My wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference.

I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out.

The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.

[munificent]

> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.

To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.

Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.

[mlrtime]

The thing I noticed early on is going to VERY nice resorts and seeing families at dinner all on their phones.

I'm talking around $800/night at a beautiful hotel or island resort, perfect scenery, and a couple both scrolling videos.

This is what I keep in my head when I find the urge (and it happens) to pull out my phone and doom scroll around family.

[dingaling]

30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.

50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.

The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.

[chmod775]

Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.

Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.

Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.

But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.

When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.

[brycewray]

> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.

Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.

[watwut]

Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.

That changed into watching youtube now.

[insane_dreamer]

It’s not at all the same. It’s now ubiquitous, available at any moment, any time, always available to fill up every “empty” moment.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Remember when that type of behavior was rude? I had a conversation with a couple in 2011 and they had told me that they saw Steve Jobs and his wife at a restaurant and Steve was on his phone most of the time and how rude it seemed. I've thought about that periodically over the years as I've seen the addiction grow and become commonplace and especially as I've seen those same habits develop in myself.

I remember going on dates a few years later, 2014/15, and the phone usage during the dates seemed rude and slightly offended me. Now it's so common it's not even really noteworthy.

[fc417fc802]

I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?

At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.

[rich_sasha]

Early FB was bad enough when it was your actual friends posting the best (or made up) bits of their lives - and you were only scrolling when you had nothing better to do. Did you know kids, there was a time when the feed was ordered by time and you knew the people who posted stuff?

It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it. But I see that as soon as there is money on the table, it's a race to the bottom, sooner or later.

[LoganDark]

> It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it.

Cohost existed, for, a couple years, before they shut down...

[forsakenharmony]

fediverse?

[ramijames]

It's such a breath of relief to finally hear people talking about this clearly and loudly. May it continue and may this bad behaviour have repercussions. Enough.

[neves]

Hope they also go after the betting companies.

[insane_dreamer]

Polymarkets are a curse worse than casinos

[SpicyLemonZest]

I absolutely do not know they're addictive.

I've lived through this entire story before in the video game wars. People said exactly the same things with exactly the same urgency about Mortal Kombat - what kind of sick society do we live in, where greedy corporations sell you the experience of shooting people and ripping their heads off? Perhaps we have to let adults buy these "murder simulators", but only a disturbed, evil person could possibly argue for letting kids do it.

If that sounds crazy to you, the moral panic over social media will sound just as crazy in a decade or two.

[fnordlord]

Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients. If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.

From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.

[bigDinosaur]

I'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction.

Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It just doesn’t look like addiction to me. The people I know who use classically addictive substances will interrupt random activities to ask if anyone wants to drink or smoke or vape; I’ve never once had someone pull me aside at a party to come take a sip of TikTok.

[intended]

Having lived through those panics, fought against them, and then raised the alarm on Lootboxes and FarmVille the day they came out - these are not the same things.

This isn’t a moral panic.

Mortal Kombat did not result in changed behavior in its users. As I recall, The best study on video games only showed that there was some change in behavior for a short time after playing a game, and then children reverted to their baseline.

On the other hand, social media has not survived that scrutiny, with multiple studies show a causal link between anorexia, depression, anxiety, addictive design and social media.

People defended cigarettes too back in the day, and it took years for people to stop smoking cigarettes in public.

Tobacco was not a moral panic.

[abnry]

Europeans are shocked by the portion sizes in America. But they feel normal in the US. Frogs often don't know they are being boiled.

[paulryanrogers]

Frogs actually do know the water is getting hot. They jump out. People too.

That's why we call it addiction when folks struggle with stopping even though they can see the harm in their own actions.

[insane_dreamer]

A big difference between social media and the video games of yore was that social media is predicated on increasing your engagement — companies are spending billions to keep you engaging as much as possible and their profits are linearly tied to your engagement. With MK, the game publisher wants you to enjoy it enough to buy their next game, but their profits remain the same whether you play it once a month or once a day.

[gmerc]

It’s funny since I worked extensively in both industries and the number of absolutely addicted boomers on farmville and match3 canvas and mobile games throwing their life savings and time away was totally competitive with Vegas

[gitaarik]

Interesting argument, but I think statistics about video game addiction & mental problems etc was never really serious, and with social media it is.

[insane_dreamer]

Except the number of people who are on social media daily is exponentially greater than those who played Mortal Kombat. You couldn’t play MK while on a dinner date; except for a few people, it didn’t replace a large fraction of social interaction. It’s not at all comparable. I strongly disagree that it’s a “moral panic”.

[underlipton]

It's also that this is not a function of their nature, but of the way that they've been designed to function. Things were not this bad 15 years ago, and the fact that social media existed and functioned the way that it functioned back then was incredibly important in allowing movements like MeToo and BLM and Dreamers and many others to build momentum.

When social media is a tool of regular people, it's an awesome, awesome tool. But when the companies and people that own the platforms start to see users as tools themselves, for their own sociopolitical ends, that's when they become destructive forces. And there was a clear enshittification line drawn about this time 10 years ago, when the transition from one state to the other got underway.

I fear that we're looking at an attempt to manufacture consent to destroy the tool and not just the malicious function.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

I think a lot of it is the ease of access now that we carry computers with us everywhere. I was tweeting from my phone in 2009, but I had to send the tweets via text message, so there was no infinite scroll accessible all day everyday to suck my mind into the phone. We had to actually make a decision to sit at a computer and go to the website to fully be fully immersed.

[superkuh]

What these corporations were trying to do is bad and vaguely feasible to a degree. I think it's bad enough regulation could apply. But there is an additional consideration that's really important in how we as a society deal with this.

Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.

We should not be passing judgements or making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.

We can't treat screens like drugs. It's a dangerous metaphor because governments kill people over drugs.

Without this distinction the leverage this "screens are drugs" perceptions gives governments will be incredibly dangerous as these cases proceed. If we instead acknowledge that it's corporations that are the problem and not something magical about screens then there's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to large entities acting as gatekeepers.

[hattmall]

It's not the screen, it's the format. It's an engineered gambling addiction where the currency is time and instead of the house taking your money the arbitrage your time to an advertiser, often surreptitiously.

[fc417fc802]

Worse than that, often times the content that fosters the most engagement borders on propaganda that directly damages the social fabric over time. A lot of the extremist content (left, right, and otherwise) fits this description.

[maxaw]

Screens on their own aren’t “uniquely and magically addictive”, but infinitely scrollable short form video delivered through that screen is, because a few companies spent billions on the smartest minds in the world to make it so.

[megaman821]

So you would support banning any form of entertainment that people spend more time on than TikTok since it would be above the threshold of addiction?

[InvertedRhodium]

More or less, yeah. There might be some nuance about the threshold for maladaptive behaviour, but if it’s all or nothing I’ll take all.

[twoodfin]

How would you get around the First Amendment difficulties?

[bjt]

There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.

[InvertedRhodium]

I live in New Zealand, so I don't have to.

[maxaw]

I didn’t mention time? From Cambridge dictionary: ‘addiction: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.’ I am in support of regulating things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing

[twoodfin]

Like potato chips?

[fc417fc802]

If a specially designed endless bag of such were aggressively marketed and chemicals to induce appetite added to them then sure.

[hightrix]

Screens are drugs. They are uniquely and magically addictive.

Try to take away a kids tablet, a teen's phone, or an adult's phone. They will fight just like an addict.

[fc417fc802]

This is not particularly insightful if you stop and think about it. Try to unilaterally snatch a book that someone is in the middle of reading and you will probably be met with a hostile reaction. Grab the tool someone is using to do a task, similar. What you're describing is the natural reaction to messing with someone else's possessions. Without further context it's blatantly toxic behavior even if you happen to have the authority to force the matter.

[durzo22]

You aren’t reading or using a hammer for 6 hours a day. It’s hard to find a tone ppl aren’t using their phone that would be appropriate to take it away if it’s only while not using it

[fc417fc802]

Phones and computers are used for more than one thing; in that sense they aren't analogous to a single item such as a book or hammer but rather an entire closet filled with odds and ends. Keeping in contact with acquaintances, checking traffic and looking up other day to day information, reading a book during down time, these are three completely distinct activities that have all been nearly entirely subsumed by screens for me.

[burnished]

Motherfucker you try to take my fork while I'm eating and you're going to get a stabbed hand. Are forks addicting?

[ineedasername]

so… choices, as you see them in this issue, the lenses through which on the one hand you think is extreme and the other appropriate… are either screens-as-drugs or sports fishing?

Some middle ground might be there somewhere. But if forced to choose… the choices for interpreting behavioral engineering funded by $billions in research for over a decade + data harvesting on a scale unprecedented, for the purpose of manipulating users:

Doesn’t sound a lot like fishing to me.

[jfengel]

Maybe governments should stop killing people over drugs.

[buttersicle]

Sure, but this is also how these companies make money. You need to actually pass a law that prohibits this before you fine the companies that do it.

Letting juries rob them just because the jury doesn't like it is nothing more than fascism.

[wheelerwj]

Theres already laws that protect kids. Thats why they just lost in court.

[buttersicle]

Please provide a link.

[mocheeze]

http://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/99%20Regular/FinalVersions/SB013...

[buttersicle]

You're linking to new mexico state law?

If you're going to pick a law from one of the smallest states in the union, the least you could do is quote the relevant excerpts.

This is a pathetic rebuttal.

[Paradigm2020]

Meta is also reeling from a separate $375m verdict delivered on Tuesday.

New Mexico prosecutors convinced a jury the company enabled child exploitation on its platforms.

[yabutlivnWoods]

Lol @ "rob them"

The outcome followed laws that enable the jury to conclude as they did! So there you go, laws passed.

Is this Zuckerberg's burner account?

[buttersicle]

No, there is no law banning anything these companies did. You know this; that's why you didn't link to the law in your comment.

There should be a law banning the addictive practices of these apps. Until there is, fining the companies that make these apps is unjust.

[yabutlivnWoods]

Not how the legal system works.

There are laws enabling the judiciary to operate as it has to give plaintiffs a platform in the first place, in the absence of specific laws because legislative bodies are slow to adopt new laws for various excuses.

For example; not hard to pay off a handful of legislators to vote no. Then what? People just suck up living at the mercy of the rich?

Judiciary has leeway to allow such cases and outcomes to bubble up useful context for changes to law. Longstanding precedent and in some cases is codified in law itself.

The lack of a specific legal language banning social media actions is also irrelevant because of similarities to other situations that are enshrined in law. That human biology is susceptible to psychological manipulation is already well understood. Tiny little difference in legal context does not invalidate known truth of biology.

Society doesn't exist in your head alone and has existed for some time. Much of this is not truly new territory.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

[goodluckchuck]

I keep seeing the phrase “the harm” as if we’re all supposed to know exactly what that means. What is it?

[hattmall]

Depression, anxiety, suicide, wasted time, irritability.

[broof]

My attention span is greatly reduced for example. I have a much harder time reading physical books than I did as a kid. It should be the opposite as you age

[twoodfin]

In what sense do you mean Instagram is “addictive” to a neurotypical adult?

[samrus]

I feel like this is a somewhat bad faith argument becuase its shifting blame onto the user.

Its addicting the same way gambling is addicting. Its ridiculous to say that people who get addicted to it are not neurotypical.

[maxaw]

I don’t know a single person who after exposure to short form video has not had to exert special effort to regulate their consumption.

[dolebirchwood]

Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.

[maxaw]

I watched my 78yo step mother become addicted to reels so older people are definitely not immune. But she was able to go cold turkey as she only communicated with her sister over instagram so it wasn’t a problem to just continue with WhatsApp. Young people real life networks are too enmeshed with instagram to have the same option.

Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!

[nunez]

Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)

Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.

[wredcoll]

Please, I beg you, stop and think about these things.

"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.

You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.

There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.

I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.

[fc417fc802]

I find casinos unpleasant but plenty of people obviously don't. I also find games with a narrow FoV unpleasant; I was never able to enjoy DotA 2 because of this and League was only just barely tolerable. Similarly I detest modern web design and gravitate towards sites with an HN or spreadsheet style information dense layout.

I think that's all related, is at least partially a matter of what I'm accustomed to, but is largely just an inherent part of how I am.

[twoodfin]

Really? I watch a lot of long-form YouTube while doing the dishes, and occasionally poke at the Shorts. Some funny, mostly dumb and I move on.

Maybe a generational thing, but for most of the latter half of the 20th Century most folks had to “exert special effort to regulate their consumption” of network television. Should there have been lawsuits and regulation of couch potatoes?

[bigDinosaur]

If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.

Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.

[twoodfin]

Using behavioral psychology in commercial speech should be illegal?

Good luck with that one. Somebody probably used 18th Century behavioral psychology to try to sell George Washington a horse!

[bigDinosaur]

You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.

Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.

[bbrks]

Reels are non-stop dopamine hits, just like TikTok. It's incredibly addictive to scroll through. That is by far the worst part of Instagram for anybody.

Everything else outside of reels is the usual social media fake life facade, and everything amplified to the max for engagement to get it pushed to feeds via "the algorithm" (note: Interactions don't need to be positive to promote it to feeds)

[twoodfin]

Some quick Googling tells me Instagram has something like 3B users who spend an average of around 30 minutes a day in the app.

Rewind 30 years or so, how long did the typical New York Times subscriber spend with their paper every day?

Was the Times addictive?

And I won’t even get started on network television for half a century.

[wredcoll]

"average of 30 minutes" covers a pretty massive range.

Lots of people can get drunk once a month and suffer or cause no real harm. Some people get drunk everyday which is slightly more harmful.

[twoodfin]

So any producer of X should be regulated or otherwise held liable for the injuries of unhealthy individuals who misuse X?

[fc417fc802]

Depends. Was the product intentionally designed to be that way? The addition of caffeine to soda is the closest example that immediately comes to mind but in that case many individuals are specifically seeking the additive.

There are many physical products that are today designed to minimize harm and misuse after facing liability historically. So I suppose the direct answer to your question would be "yes, absolutely, and there's a figurative mountain of precedent for it".

[shoobiedoo]

Reminds me of soda. Why the hell liquid poison is allowed to exist turns my stomach. You could fill libraries with data linking it to a myriad illnesses and causes of death. Yet they are even allowed to juke it with caffeine for no other reason than to up the addiction level. Like... what are we doing here.

[jimmyjazz14]

its called freedom, do we really need the government to protect us from everything they deem bad or unhealthy?

[ehnto]

At some point we end up defending the freedom for corporations to exploit people though. I think addiction is one of those times.

If a company has a product that relies on addiction mechanisms to succeed, that is a different situation, that is a corporate entity exploiting citizens for profit.

Cigarettes are a great example of where we can draw lines in the sand. If you want to smoke them go ahead you have that freedom, but I think companies should be banned from putting nicotine in them. Simple and obvious lines in the sand.

Vapes, whatever, smoke your bubblegum water. Vapes with nicotine? Clearly exploitive behaviour. Yes they can help you quit, but quit what? Nicotine addiction! If it weren't in cigarettes already you wouldn't need to quit it.

Social media is harder to draw lines in the sand for, but I think algorithmic feeds may be one place to target regulation.

[slopinthebag]

Both cigarettes and vapes are ways of consuming a drug. Are you just plainly against drugs? We know how blanket bans on drugs have gone historically and besides the obvious personal freedoms that are lost by mandating what people can and cannot put into their bodies (hello bodily autonomy??), trying to prevent people from consuming drugs does more harm than good (like prohibition, the war on drugs etc).

This ruling was about liability, in that an entity created a product with risks without disclosing them. It's actually worse, they purposefully engineered the product to be harmful. Thus they are liable for that harm. This is subtly different from banning these products - arguably many products that are sold are harmful, the difference is that they either are not acutely harmful (junk food), or the acute harm is well known (alcohol, cigarettes). Some countries mandate disclosure at sale or on the packaging as well.

[slifin]

I won't use new Reddit because of its infinite scroll but old Reddit you have to press next which I find doesn't keep me as addicted

I wish all companies had to provide a non infinite scroll option for their products, YouTube, Facebook, Google, Tiktok

[SR2Z]

But an adult is and should be allowed to develop a nicotine addiction. The reason why people do above all else is that nicotine is an intoxicant and (to most people) pretty pleasant. It's a rational choice.

It's addictive, but the price of quitting is a few weeks of cravings. It's not like alcohol (which is relatively uncontroversial) or opiates.

Don't let them sell to kids. Include scary images on the box. Whatever you do, the truth is that human beings like their drugs and this one isn't really that bad.

[gzread]

Should an adult be allowed to develop a heroin addiction? Why or why not?

[SR2Z]

The difference between heroin and nicotine, practically speaking, is that one of them will ruin your life and make you a burden to everyone around you and the other one will make you a little grumpy.

[wyre]

>But an adult is and should be allowed to develop a nicotine addiction.

Says who? Addiction is never rational, that's what makes it addiction. Ffs.

[samrus]

Yeah. I think we should let the free market decide if our children do heroin too. Whatever happens, at least it'll be economically efficient

[16mb]

I mean, I think they should at least be required to display its negative effects on your health prominently on the product.

[aprilthird2021]

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?

[jfengel]

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.

[aprilthird2021]

> Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.

Your grocery store app does this and gives you personalized coupons. Will everyone who buys groceries get a $100k+ settlement?

[cmeacham98]

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)

[jfengel]

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.

[nunez]

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.

[bluefirebrand]

This would be a substantial improvement yes

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

[Dumblydorr]

And feeding toxic content to children while doing so.

[conk]

Show me one ice cream parlor that has license psychologists on the payroll for “persuasive design” or GTFO with your bad faith argument.

[CamperBob2]

Any ice cream company that has ever hired a major ad agency.

[wheelerwj]

Not even close and you know it.

[CamperBob2]

You don't know much about the advertising or food businesses, I take it.

Suggest Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It'll open your eyes.

[salawat]

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.

[megaman821]

Yes, ice cream palors are famous for only using shades of gray and never adorning their products with things like sprinkles.

[munificent]

A match is designed to start fires. So is a flamethrower.

That doesn't mean they are equivalent and must regulated the same way. Scale matters.

[aprilthird2021]

This isn't about regulation. Regulation would be welcomed because you can follow it and avoid liability.

We are now saying Meta, YouTube, Snap, and nearly every major media app (maybe Netflix and HBO next!) are liable retroactively for the past when people got addicted to the content on the apps despite that the companies did not violate any regulations at the time

[bjt]

The nice thing about laws passed by a legislature is that they don't need to have some airtight logic to stop us falling down every slippery slope.

If cable television or restaurants or ice cream start causing harm that we want to deal with, we can vote on that when the time comes.

[hattmall]

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.

[slopinthebag]

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.

[twoodfin]

What the best evidence that otherwise psychologically healthy people are becoming clinically addicted to social media?

People used to spend an awful lot of mindless time watching TV. They weren’t “addicted” in a clinically meaningful sense.

[slopinthebag]

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.

[twoodfin]

So what the heck are we talking about ITT?

“I’m so addicted to Firefly!”

That kind of thing?

[slopinthebag]

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".

[jen20]

> or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree

24-hour commercial cable news (in the US) is the original sin of addictive media.

[slopinthebag]

I'm not seeing any signs of addiction even within an order of magnitude of social media.

[jen20]

Probably not looking in the right places then. The over 50s are a prime candidate (also for Facebook addiction, but largely reposting nonsense from cable news).

[insane_dreamer]

You don’t have a cable TV or ice cream parlor in your pocket dishing it out to you any time you desire wherever you may be.