I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though.
The second one outlined for Meta is:
> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).
This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.
The first one outlined for YouTube is:
> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”
This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:
> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.
This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
> This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
The issue I take with statements like that is that they are saying one thing while doing the opposite. This document [1], for instance, shows that YouTube knew as early as April 2025 that infinite feeds of short form content can "displace valuable activities like time with friends or sleep", but that hasn't stopped them from aggressively pushing YouTube shorts everywhere.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that there are two factions, one worried about the effects of YouTube in teens and a second one worried about growth at all costs. And I don't think the first one is winning.
I think the reality for any product that has >7,000 employees working on it is that some people's job is to prioritize growth at all costs, some people's job is to prioritize the effects of on vulnerable people, and the vast majority of them have other jobs to be doing. This sounds appropriate to me; not everybody can be worried about mental health at all times, and somebody needs to focus on growth.
There are plenty of examples that the mental health people aren't being completely steamrolled. Parental controls allow you to block Shorts for your kids. That doesn't sound like a "growth at all costs" mindset.
> I think the reality for any product that has >7,000 employees working on it is that some people's job is to prioritize growth at all costs, some people's job is to prioritize the effects of on vulnerable people, and the vast majority of them have other jobs to be doing.
... it's not at all costs though, that would be easier, because then the situation would be more obvious (legibility is important, so is plausible deniability)
so of course "growth hackers" (or whatever the folks responsible for growth are called nowadays... other than CFOs and CEOs), simply they are the ones whose judgement and "worldview" regarding whose responsibility is to manage the negative consequences of their increased revenue is very skewed, in other words they mostly have elaborate self-serving explanations (excuses)
and many times that overlaps various user freedom arguments, arguments against paternalism, etc...
My YouTube use definitely isn't healthy, but it's still the only social app that asks me to take a break if I use it too long or late at night. That should be standard in any of these apps.
Does it recommend taking a break? Mostly I've seen it ask if I'm still watching. I've always assumed this is not for user benefit, but in order to not spend bandwidth on a screen that is not being looked at.
The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.
No, it sounds like youtube being fully aware of the consequences of their offering but couched in terms that allows them to pretend they were not. 'could' indeed.
I believe the whole point is that some people inside acknowledge the issue, made leadership aware of it, yet, youtube still pushed sorts aggressively. The documents are prof of awareness, so they can't pretend they were unaware of the issues.
I guess some companies try to limit the harm they do to children while profiting, and some companies try not to know the harm they do to children while profiting. What remains to be seen is how much harm we allow to be done to children in the name of profits. Maybe we even insist that things need to be a positive influence. Less profit, but maybe better to the economy over all. And the kids, if they matter.
Not realistic to reply to all your replies re:youtube, but they've absolutely added some features to mitigate bedtime use and at least for me they were opt-out rather than opt-in.
The "weird" thing about YouTube Shorts is no matter how many times you hide them (by clicking "Not Interested" or "Show fewer of these", however they label it), YouTube will continue to show them to you in your feed. I've hidden that crap 100 times and no doubt it'll be back soon.
Revanced YouTube app, turn off all the crap. Sometimes I open the official YouTube app to check my subscriptions and wonder how anyone uses it. If Google wasn't so ghastly and YouTube Premium had all the features of Revanced I would happily pay for it.
I use the Revanced patched app logged out so Google doesn't decide to ban my account on a whim. Yes, one day I will dump Gmail, its getting closer with the state of things at the moment.
What I find strange about an advertising company’s video service is that when I open my smartphone in a region with a different language my youtube ads also change language.
American tech corps act like cigarette companies but we're still at the point where banning them for kids is considered weird, fringe and even dangerous. Crazy.
The general problem is that nobody actually needs cigarettes but communication is fundamental to the human experience. How do you even propose to define "social media" in a way that can distinguish between it and any other public forum for discussion?
The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.
That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.
In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. And even if people were willing to solve that one, it would take time to actually build new buildings, and doing that would have to be done first.
It's also assuming that we're willing to abandon a technological capacity (not having to personally travel to someone's location to communicate with them) that humans have had since before Moses came down from the mountain, which seems like a fairly silly constraint to impose when there are obviously better alternatives available.
> In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws.
IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops. People also hang out at each others' homes. Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
You're also acting like we can't meaningfully distinguish between social media and other forms of communication and that we have to be all or nothing about it, which is a bewildering take. Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features. Facebook back when it was posting on friends' walls, no likes, comments, shares, friend/follower counts, or feeds, was fun and mostly harmless. LinkedIn was genuinely useful when the feed was nothing more than professional updates. They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems. Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems: most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
> IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops.
How many public discussions have you participated in at a coffee shop? If you have something to say and you go there and start trying to chat up anyone who walks in the door, what response do you expect from the proprietors?
If you go to a park which is within 10 miles of the median home, how many people do you expect to encounter there at any given time, especially in the heat of summer or cold of winter?
You need indoor spaces that don't have some private commercial operator, like community centers or hackerspaces, but those are the things that get priced out by high real estate costs.
> People also hang out at each others' homes.
You move to a new city and want to meet people. Are you expecting many strangers to invite you into their homes without introduction?
> Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
Social media costs time. Physical spaces cost even more time (since you need to travel there) and they cost money (to cover the rent). What happens when you then make the rent high?
> Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features.
So is e.g. Usenet social media or not? Does it matter if it provides ordering options other than search by date?
> They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems.
Because those things increase engagement and the central middle man gets paid for increasing engagement.
> Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems
It removes the perverse incentive to design things that way.
> most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
Then why is Neocities or "add a Bluesky comments section to your blog" so much less toxic than Facebook?
The primary thing driving toxicity in certain federated networks is when they get a huge influx of users after some incumbent social network gets into the news over political suppression, because then a mass of the target's partisans try to switch to something else in protest and partisans are toxic so if you get inundated with disproportionately partisan exiles you've got a problem. Which doesn't happen if you federate the whole main network containing the majority of the population including moderates and apolitical subjects rather than disproportionately one side's most excitable militants.
The problem is when government's solutions go through identifying everyone and collaterally tracking their actions.
In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.
The salesman is at their friends place. And is a prerequisite for soccer team meetups. Etc. You need most parents to cooperate to bar him... but yeah I guess being prudent at home helps.
I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed.
In my first message I was not targeting those parents who try to block this but can't; I was targeting those parents that use Youtube to distract their kids since they are babies, those who give unrestricted access with no control at all, those who don't care. We all know people like that.
This is just an hypothesis, but if parents were fined every time their kid accessed social media, I'm sure most kids wouldn't be on it.
This is a surprising take. So you know that this gun salesman is targeting the youth, and that parents can only resolve it by massive collective action, but they are to blame, and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?
Do you think a crack dealer should be allowed to hang around on the playground and every kid has to talk to him too (and its up to parents to make sure the kids know not to buy his stuff)?
"I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed."
I see that sentence. Your paraphrase is not accurate to it. They're talking about how to fight back effectively, which is different from allowing him to continue on his merry way.
Your argument is conflating smart phones with social media apps and you seem to be assuming that kids wouldn't have access to their phone in other locations where they are unsupervised, subject to peer pressure, etc.
Devices and networks can be configured with parental controls, and the blockage doesn't need to be 100% effective. The kid accessing Facebook from a friend's phone 15 mins a day is tolerable, while giving them access to drugs or a gun 15 mins a day is not.
There is also the education part that for some reason we are ignoring. Kids are going to be able to access drugs in locations where they are unsupervised, they are going to be subject to peer pressure, etc. The job of the parents is to prepare them for that, as they should prepare them for the negative effects of social media.
Very shocking that you're being downvoted on HackerNews of all places, where I'd expect people to be tech-literate and aware of the harms of internet age verification law etc.
I downvoted it because he invoked the analogy of alcohol and tobacco while simultaneously arguing that it should be totally on the parents. That's not how it's done for alcohol and tobacco! If that were true then any shop could sell booze and cigs to kids, and if that were the case then how could parents possibly hope to stop it?
The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.
Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.
I didn't say that "parenting is wholly on the parents", that's a straw man argument. I said that parents who don't keep their children away from digital dangers should be blamed.
Parents have a huge radius of action, they can:
- Avoid using Youtube for entertaining their babies/toddlers.
- Avoid buying tablets to their children.
- If they buy them a phone, use parental control and restrict app usage.
- Monitor what their kids do on internet.
- And the most important: educate their children to identify dangers.
Do you think a parent who does none of this shouldn't be blamed?
I want parents to embrace responsibility and act as parents. Delegating this kind of education to government is dangerous and has many negative collateral effects we will pay sooner or later.
Yes, to uniq7 and others -- you keep saying "identity verification will be used for nefarious purposes". Lets take the alcohol and tobacco case, was it used for nefarious purposes? Did adults suddenly lose rights and/or have something bad happen to them?
The government can and does already track whatever they want about you. Businesses already track you unless you are extremely thorough about erasing your footprint. Adding a zero-knowledge proof through a trusted system that you are 18+ doesn't seem like the mountain people are claiming. You already have to provide ID and credit card to get ISP access, the byte patterns are traced back to your household. They already have a unique fingerprint on your browser and computer. The real harm is just the obvious encroachment that we can all see and have known about since early 2000s. They don't need a "backdoor", it feels like alarmism over a possible problem, when there is a very real harm to children and teens (suicide rates, depression, bullying, mental health, etc).
to go back to smoking / alcohol / guns, one could argue it is an infringement, but ultimately it does seem to have been the right choice for society at large, and the increased "invasion of privacy" has been pretty minor. If anything, the opt-in stuff like credit cards, cell phones, GPS, car apps, streaming services have all been far larger invasions of privacy that people willingly embrace.
Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.
Also, the fact that gov and companies are already tracking people doesn't mean we should consent to more ways of tracking.
Problem is that social media doesn’t have negative connotations like guns/alcohol/drugs do. That makes it hard or impossible for individual parents to restrict it. They are perceived as crazy or paranoid or controlling. Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?
To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.
> Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?
Government will do a terrible job at it. Society lost the capability of creating good and simple laws that can be disputed on courts based on law intention. Instead, laws nowadays are full of details hard to understand that attack the symptom and not the cause.
For instance, a simple law like "Companies should take measure, even if it lowers revenue and growth, to reduce addictive behavior. They should to it more emphatically on under age users and even more on under 13 years old.". But no. Instead, they will write 40 pages of what companies should implement in their software, and than have the 40 pages be quickly outdated, partially impossible to implement and hell for developers who try to do the right thing to comply. Total crap of standards and regulation bodies that help nothing and slow down all innovation.
Solution will only come from social pressure, movements to delete the apps, parents actually educating their children to avoid adicitive features. It will take time. But Government will solve nothing.
I don't think so. What you're saying is that kids (and maybe adults) don't have enough agency over their own usage of social media; that these social media are so addicting and harmful that we cannot trust users (in concert with their parents, teachers, etc.) not to harm themselves with them, and that we must construct government apparatus to protect them.
This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything?
They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.
Awareness is more important than government regulation. Assuming you are a parent, we as parents should be more concerned and help our kids grow with a healthy relationship with aggressive marketing and addictive features, by actively avoiding it, setting up time restrictions, etc.. No one else can help kids besides their parents. Everything else is too slow to be effective and with mild efficacy.
> In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
Probably, not definitely
It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
China? Say what you will about the CCP they have the balls to jail and execute anyone who is perceived to stand in their way.
Kids spending too much time on TikTok and not doing homework is a danger to the mission of making China number one.
Possibly, yes, but those executives have enough money to cut a deal to not only stay out of jail, but to also fund the re-election campaign for the DA + prosecution team, and to also give a job to the prosecutor's cousin, sibling, and/or in-law.
Based on the aggressive reactions all across the billionaire board toward the European wrist-slap initiative, I would guess Europe is moving in the correct direction with it and the slaps would correctly hurt.
You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said that children needed better food and half the country lost their collective minds. Hard to do anything when corporations control what most legislation is passed.
The way I read it, he takes issue with your assertion that "nobody bats an eye" at sugar in Coke.
This is quite the opposite of everything I've ever seen in my entire life in America.
Or perhaps since you mention sugar, not corn syrup, and list quantities in kilograms not pounds or tons, he suspects you may not actually have first-hand experience with this.
Point is that people do in fact try to change what you're complaining about, your dismissive comments are just sad. Go out and organize rather than shouting into the void if this is what you care about.
I've always wondered if her initiative, which caused some big food companies to reduce fat and salt in their products, and change their frying media, is the reason for the rise of Sriracha in America.
My theory is that the food tasted less flavorful, so people compensated by adding their own.
I don't eat a lot of junk food, but for a long time after the Obama administration, when I did partake, often my immediate reaction was "Wow. These aren't as tasty as I remember."
"No one bats an eye" is a weird take when the Federal Government, via the Department of Health and Human Services, has literally just declared war on added sugar. [1] Also, lots of people have already changed their diets [2] regarded added sugar.
Sugar has been vilified for longer and more vociferously than social media use by kids, but that may be changing now.
Well the narrative has already been promulgated that they are "anti-science" so it's being ignored. Sugar is good. Hey Mom, send down more Pixie Stix!!
You must run in different circles than I, most people I know have reduced their added sugar consumption. My point was that there has been a swelling wave of anti-sugar sentiment over the last decades and it's reach the point were even RFK loudly said sugar is bad. That's the opposite of "no one bat's an eye". Of course people will ignore all sorts of advice for all sorts of reasons, but the sentiment (as shown by the decline of added sugar consumption) is there, and growing.
The Coke Classic is still selling. Coke Zero has not replaced Classic. Both "no one bat's an eye" and your use of "most people" (even with the "I know" qualifier) are clearly extremes of both sides of the conversation being intentionally used. The fact that things like Diet, Zero, etc version of Coke and other soft drinks exist show people are paying attention to sugar. The fact that sugary products are still being purchased shows that not everyone has changed their habits.
Shouting extreme positions doesn't really move the conversation
I recall a discussion here recently whereupon the list of items eligible for nutrition assistance (food stamps) in the USA were changed to exclude unhealthy foods, especially those with added sugar. Which BTW affects poorer communities disproportionately with long-term health problems like diabetes.
Elimination of processed sugar is a good thing.
Despite this, the discussion quickly pivoted to "how dare you keep poor children from enjoying birthday cake".
Not only teens but the whole population, from birth till death. The teens are just the easiest and most addicted target group. They don't want yoy to press anything out of their f browser tab.
This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here.
That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.
Where are the smoking guns? All I see is normal talk for how to get customers. A smoking gun would be "Teens love posts about X even though we know X is really bad for them. Let's promote lots of X". But I don't see any of that. I just see market research etc.
I could post every quote on the page and respond to it how it's not a smoking gun but not one of them seemed like a smoking gun to me. Anyone care to point to one that seems like a smoking gun to them?
A key feature of many platforms being banned is algorithmic feeds. Nobody has to choose what to promote. The algorithms automatically promote what results in the most engagement. The most addictive content ends up being force fed due to natural selection. And platforms choose to keep them, even if they would otherwise avoid the growing age restrictions, because they are profitable.
To be clear social media is not as clear cut bad as the endless news/for you feeds which are designed to keep you scrolling vs seeing what friends are doing
Why Zuckerberg is any better than the jeevacation?
Both cases makes teens as victims, both cases was a great deal for them but only from the first look. Both cases are piramid-like schemes when the victims attract new victims to keep benefitting from the system. Is it just like in alcohol case, when having too many victims justifies a bad spirit as the new norm?
He's arguably even worse if we consider just how much harm social media has done to teens and kids, but I'm sure the Meta folk here would prefer to believe that that's not the case. "Just following orders", right?
I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.
I think the possibility of banning certain sites at least for minors is being discussed, after Australia set the precedent. But this of course has downsides, too, as some form of verification has to be implemented, that would almost certainly reduce anonymity and carry risks to personal data protection. A complete ban is unrealistic since people actually like to use these platforms. Plus, it would certainly entail massive political repercussions from the US government. This is already happening when US American companies are simply fined in the EU.
Does that outweigh the loss of privacy involved? I really don't think it does personally, I should not have to show anyone ID to have an Instagram account, privacy and anonymity is a feature not a bug.
To me, the claim of privacy is the wrong concept. Anonymous would be a better description. People are posting things on a public website to be viewed by the public.
The idea of banning meta or Google is indeed not serious. What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive. Admittedly there's nobody doing that in Europe seriously yet, but that's because the current unhinged head of American state has meltdown every time American bigtech get a wrist slap.
If that's so, then is it realistic to expect that to somehow change? These corps have been fined more times than I can count, but it's clearly not working.
Much if not all of Europe already has ISP level bans. If they can use those bans against football streaming sites, why not Facebook?
And actually I think just banning them from conducting any business, accepting payments/etc, would be mostly sufficient. They could continue to operate at a loss, but it would put American corps at such a disadvantage that domestic social media might be able to compete, and enforcing regulations against domestic companies should be far more feasible.
Your name sounds finnish... Finland ISPs have only primitive dns based blocklists which can be bypassed by any kid, they need to purchase dpi-capable hardware to block websites by (still not encrypted) SNI
Man it's nice to live in the country not prioritizing internet censorship
On which grounds would you punish some companies which are using a fully legal platform? If you had beef with the ad contents, you'd punish them already for that. But if you have beef with the platform algorithms, punish them for exactly that. Not over proxies! As long the algorithm was designed for creating dependence, than regulate that - exactly like you (should) regulate other substances creating dependence. And some countries are going exactly this way: not only Australia but also Finland, Spain...
Ok, imagine a law punishing a platform comes out. How will it be enforced? You can fine the companies but they can just close presence in europe. YouTube will continue to work even if all the YouTube's servers in europe are gone.
Or should the only outcome of the law be that the police could confiscate phones from kids? punish parents for allowing social media?
Laws are not useless, at least teachers and parents will have a clear call to action. But still
Social media is being banned for minors in multiple countries, and more are seriously considering it.
But if people keep proselytizing that nothing will happen and all is hopeless, it's going to be hard to get people together to support a change. You and others here are doing the work of social media companies by spreading that - on social media. In fact, nothing can stop the public if they want something.
This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.
This is all relatively new in human timescales. My parents as children saw the start of modern advertising, with ads targeted at them. But they did not see entertainment engineered to sell them product. I think in the 60s you started seeing bands manufactured and aggressively marketed to youths (such as The Monkeys), because companies wanted their share of Beatles money. And 70s, when George Lucas and Kiss realized how much money was in branded merchandise. And late 70s, when He-Man reversed things and media was created specifically to sell merchandise. On human timescales, the results are starting to come in on this experiment.
By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term.
I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got.
I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc.
If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal.
2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast.
It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.
And why not? AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive.
We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive. We seem to be fine with expanding gambling - where I live (not Nevada!) slot machines are everywhere. Nice restaurants even will dedicate corners to slot machines - not just seedy bars. Sports betting apps are all over streaming ads, and their legality is expanding even though when they are legalized in an area the divorce and loan default rates go up measurably.
Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?
The kids are just the latest victim of a long ongoing trend.
Not to mention strict limits on advertising of these products, licensing required to sell them, and very highly taxed.
If that's not enough, in the US we created a federal level agency that oversees 3 things only. Two of those things are alcohol and tobacco. And the third thing isn't even regulated half as much as those two.
Why on earth anyone thinks these things are unregulated is beyond me.
Just looking at the US, tobacco comes with warnings, there are limits on advertising (see any tobacco product commercials on TV?), and the manufacturers lost a lawsuit leading to massive fines and many of these outcomes.
The idea that we don't regulate things would be shocking to the anti-regulation crowd, and the staffs at the FDA, FCC, etc.
> AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive.
> We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive.
My exact point. Our current moment seems to be us being happy to expand societal harms for whatever reason. I'd hazard a guess it's our political system getting more and more susceptible to lobbying money.
I know Doom Eternal had one, I believe she was even credited. But the line between "making a game more fun" and "making a game addictive" is a little blurry.
I think the solution is to ban social media networks from being ad-based and force them to be subscription based.
Once you're a subscriber, there's no incentive to get you to increase your engagement (beyond the threshold that makes it interesting and useful to you so you continue to subscribe) because unlike an ad-based network you're not generating more revenue the more you use it (in fact, you're increasing costs)
The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.
“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years
How did that work mechanically though? At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data, even if we only suspected they might possibly not be an adult -- no A/B tests, no ML, no ad targeting, no nada. Did leadership design a system where those sorts of things would happen anyway? Were there just enough rogue teams to cause problems?
For business, government, and religion: achieving scale and centralization necessarily leads to corrupt outcomes. This is also where Marx’s legitimate criticisms of capitalism turn into a solution which is essentially its doppelgänger, a scaled system of corruption with absolute authority with the rhetorical veneer of democracy.
Are people surprised by this. Clearly this was a tactic widely used in the tech industry. Their aim is to keep people on the platform specifically teens. Why else would you need curated algorithms for users.
Indeed, I've been paying attention to the market share of the biggest companies in advertisement, its clear that Google and Meta are the largest share by a large margin. Almost not even comparable to other players other than Reddit recently. which it's exposure is dependent on Search engines like Google and Bing for that matter. users within the platform are a different story. I personally think the internet is not being utilized wisely when it comes to current context. There is still so much to be done and innovated and there are gate keepers keeping this from happening.
Companies don't necessarily have to suffer when restrictions are placed on them.
Ask any educator what the biggest positive change was to U.S. high schools in the 1970s and they'll probably answer that it was the ban on smoking in schools.
I expect a similar response in the future regarding bans on social media.
I can only imagine what it's like right now in schools. I can't see how anybody arguing the point that student are allowed to use social media in school is an okay activity. I know there are some countries banning the use of such activities in Europe and some others i can't think of right now.
Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.
I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them.
The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?
Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.
They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.
If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.
> every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it
You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.
Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.
Edit:
> They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.
All of these guys should end up behind bars. To purposefully prey on vulnerable kids like this, it is absolutely disgusting. And here I am as a parent trying to stem the floodgates against people wielding billions of $ and armies of programmers and psychologists to harm my kids. Fuck them. And if you work for them then...
I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though.
The second one outlined for Meta is:
> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).
This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.
The first one outlined for YouTube is:
> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”
This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:
> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.
This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
> This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
The issue I take with statements like that is that they are saying one thing while doing the opposite. This document [1], for instance, shows that YouTube knew as early as April 2025 that infinite feeds of short form content can "displace valuable activities like time with friends or sleep", but that hasn't stopped them from aggressively pushing YouTube shorts everywhere.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that there are two factions, one worried about the effects of YouTube in teens and a second one worried about growth at all costs. And I don't think the first one is winning.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
I think the reality for any product that has >7,000 employees working on it is that some people's job is to prioritize growth at all costs, some people's job is to prioritize the effects of on vulnerable people, and the vast majority of them have other jobs to be doing. This sounds appropriate to me; not everybody can be worried about mental health at all times, and somebody needs to focus on growth.
There are plenty of examples that the mental health people aren't being completely steamrolled. Parental controls allow you to block Shorts for your kids. That doesn't sound like a "growth at all costs" mindset.
> I think the reality for any product that has >7,000 employees working on it is that some people's job is to prioritize growth at all costs, some people's job is to prioritize the effects of on vulnerable people, and the vast majority of them have other jobs to be doing.
Growth at all costs should be no one's priority.
... it's not at all costs though, that would be easier, because then the situation would be more obvious (legibility is important, so is plausible deniability)
so of course "growth hackers" (or whatever the folks responsible for growth are called nowadays... other than CFOs and CEOs), simply they are the ones whose judgement and "worldview" regarding whose responsibility is to manage the negative consequences of their increased revenue is very skewed, in other words they mostly have elaborate self-serving explanations (excuses)
and many times that overlaps various user freedom arguments, arguments against paternalism, etc...
My YouTube use definitely isn't healthy, but it's still the only social app that asks me to take a break if I use it too long or late at night. That should be standard in any of these apps.
I get those on TikTok. There’s a video of someone asking if you’ve been scrolling/watching for too long and recommending to take a break
Does it recommend taking a break? Mostly I've seen it ask if I'm still watching. I've always assumed this is not for user benefit, but in order to not spend bandwidth on a screen that is not being looked at.
The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.
HN is a marketing platform for ycombinator :p
Instagram has it as a tool, not as default. You need to actively go, find, and enable timeframes for it to alert within your rest period.
Earthbound even did this on the SNES back in 1994
TikTok does this as well.
What country are you in? I have never seen this in the US although I have been a very long time subscriber to YouTube Premium.
I get it too, in France. You can disable it in the settings.
No, it sounds like youtube being fully aware of the consequences of their offering but couched in terms that allows them to pretend they were not. 'could' indeed.
With the looping TikTok-style shorts, YouTube seems to be more habit forming than ever.
I believe the whole point is that some people inside acknowledge the issue, made leadership aware of it, yet, youtube still pushed sorts aggressively. The documents are prof of awareness, so they can't pretend they were unaware of the issues.
I guess some companies try to limit the harm they do to children while profiting, and some companies try not to know the harm they do to children while profiting. What remains to be seen is how much harm we allow to be done to children in the name of profits. Maybe we even insist that things need to be a positive influence. Less profit, but maybe better to the economy over all. And the kids, if they matter.
YouTube Shorts exist, which they brag about hours watched, so I don't think they really care about those things at all.
Not realistic to reply to all your replies re:youtube, but they've absolutely added some features to mitigate bedtime use and at least for me they were opt-out rather than opt-in.
>This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
Maybe if they actually did any of those things...
Are they taking actual steps though? Or was that letting a team do the work to make them feel better but never actually implementing it.
> This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
And yet here we are years later without change. So we've got proof that they knew this and have done nothing. Don't need to speculate at all.
No, they actually added a bedtime reminder feature for all users that they couldn't verify to be adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1pmcr04/what_the_h...
lol yes, every software company's answer to a problem, no matter how pervasive: a new setting
but I guess you're right, it's a little more than nothing
[flagged]
The "weird" thing about YouTube Shorts is no matter how many times you hide them (by clicking "Not Interested" or "Show fewer of these", however they label it), YouTube will continue to show them to you in your feed. I've hidden that crap 100 times and no doubt it'll be back soon.
Revanced YouTube app, turn off all the crap. Sometimes I open the official YouTube app to check my subscriptions and wonder how anyone uses it. If Google wasn't so ghastly and YouTube Premium had all the features of Revanced I would happily pay for it.
I use the Revanced patched app logged out so Google doesn't decide to ban my account on a whim. Yes, one day I will dump Gmail, its getting closer with the state of things at the moment.
Dumping Gmail is a long process. I've had people sending to my old address for 5 years. Better start sooner than later.
What I find strange about an advertising company’s video service is that when I open my smartphone in a region with a different language my youtube ads also change language.
I started using an extension called “social focus”. Allows me to hide all kinds of distractions on social media and YouTube, can highly recommend
It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.
American tech corps act like cigarette companies but we're still at the point where banning them for kids is considered weird, fringe and even dangerous. Crazy.
The general problem is that nobody actually needs cigarettes but communication is fundamental to the human experience. How do you even propose to define "social media" in a way that can distinguish between it and any other public forum for discussion?
The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.
That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.
> but communication is fundamental to the human experience.
Humans survived well before the internet, the telephone, the telegraph, or even international post.
In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. And even if people were willing to solve that one, it would take time to actually build new buildings, and doing that would have to be done first.
It's also assuming that we're willing to abandon a technological capacity (not having to personally travel to someone's location to communicate with them) that humans have had since before Moses came down from the mountain, which seems like a fairly silly constraint to impose when there are obviously better alternatives available.
> In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws.
IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops. People also hang out at each others' homes. Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
You're also acting like we can't meaningfully distinguish between social media and other forms of communication and that we have to be all or nothing about it, which is a bewildering take. Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features. Facebook back when it was posting on friends' walls, no likes, comments, shares, friend/follower counts, or feeds, was fun and mostly harmless. LinkedIn was genuinely useful when the feed was nothing more than professional updates. They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems. Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems: most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
> IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops.
How many public discussions have you participated in at a coffee shop? If you have something to say and you go there and start trying to chat up anyone who walks in the door, what response do you expect from the proprietors?
If you go to a park which is within 10 miles of the median home, how many people do you expect to encounter there at any given time, especially in the heat of summer or cold of winter?
You need indoor spaces that don't have some private commercial operator, like community centers or hackerspaces, but those are the things that get priced out by high real estate costs.
> People also hang out at each others' homes.
You move to a new city and want to meet people. Are you expecting many strangers to invite you into their homes without introduction?
> Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
Social media costs time. Physical spaces cost even more time (since you need to travel there) and they cost money (to cover the rent). What happens when you then make the rent high?
> Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features.
So is e.g. Usenet social media or not? Does it matter if it provides ordering options other than search by date?
> They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems.
Because those things increase engagement and the central middle man gets paid for increasing engagement.
> Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems
It removes the perverse incentive to design things that way.
> most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
Then why is Neocities or "add a Bluesky comments section to your blog" so much less toxic than Facebook?
The primary thing driving toxicity in certain federated networks is when they get a huge influx of users after some incumbent social network gets into the news over political suppression, because then a mass of the target's partisans try to switch to something else in protest and partisans are toxic so if you get inundated with disproportionately partisan exiles you've got a problem. Which doesn't happen if you federate the whole main network containing the majority of the population including moderates and apolitical subjects rather than disproportionately one side's most excitable militants.
At least they are not running commercials saying 9 out of 10 doctors agree social media is good for you. That's the best thing I can say about them.
Ha, true. But I wouldn't put it past them if it ever gets to the point where they genuinely feel threatened.
if social media trends * related data suggested it would work they'd totally do it
The problem is when government's solutions go through identifying everyone and collaterally tracking their actions.
In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.
This is like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman sells a weapon to their 12 year old.
More like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman enters their home every day, talks for hours with their children, and sells them weapons.
Have these parents tried to not let the salesman in?
The salesman is at their friends place. And is a prerequisite for soccer team meetups. Etc. You need most parents to cooperate to bar him... but yeah I guess being prudent at home helps.
I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed.
In my first message I was not targeting those parents who try to block this but can't; I was targeting those parents that use Youtube to distract their kids since they are babies, those who give unrestricted access with no control at all, those who don't care. We all know people like that.
This is just an hypothesis, but if parents were fined every time their kid accessed social media, I'm sure most kids wouldn't be on it.
This is a surprising take. So you know that this gun salesman is targeting the youth, and that parents can only resolve it by massive collective action, but they are to blame, and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?
Do you think a crack dealer should be allowed to hang around on the playground and every kid has to talk to him too (and its up to parents to make sure the kids know not to buy his stuff)?
> and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?
I see nothing in their comments to suggest that.
They argued against the government tracking people, that's it.
I was responding to this:
"I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed."
I see that sentence. Your paraphrase is not accurate to it. They're talking about how to fight back effectively, which is different from allowing him to continue on his merry way.
Your argument is conflating smart phones with social media apps and you seem to be assuming that kids wouldn't have access to their phone in other locations where they are unsupervised, subject to peer pressure, etc.
The "just say no" argument, basically.
Devices and networks can be configured with parental controls, and the blockage doesn't need to be 100% effective. The kid accessing Facebook from a friend's phone 15 mins a day is tolerable, while giving them access to drugs or a gun 15 mins a day is not.
There is also the education part that for some reason we are ignoring. Kids are going to be able to access drugs in locations where they are unsupervised, they are going to be subject to peer pressure, etc. The job of the parents is to prepare them for that, as they should prepare them for the negative effects of social media.
Not even “sell” but “give for free, constantly, every day, delivered directly to their house, disguised as a toy”
Very shocking that you're being downvoted on HackerNews of all places, where I'd expect people to be tech-literate and aware of the harms of internet age verification law etc.
I downvoted it because he invoked the analogy of alcohol and tobacco while simultaneously arguing that it should be totally on the parents. That's not how it's done for alcohol and tobacco! If that were true then any shop could sell booze and cigs to kids, and if that were the case then how could parents possibly hope to stop it?
The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.
Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.
I didn't say that "parenting is wholly on the parents", that's a straw man argument. I said that parents who don't keep their children away from digital dangers should be blamed.
Parents have a huge radius of action, they can:
- Avoid using Youtube for entertaining their babies/toddlers.
- Avoid buying tablets to their children.
- If they buy them a phone, use parental control and restrict app usage.
- Monitor what their kids do on internet.
- And the most important: educate their children to identify dangers.
Do you think a parent who does none of this shouldn't be blamed?
I want parents to embrace responsibility and act as parents. Delegating this kind of education to government is dangerous and has many negative collateral effects we will pay sooner or later.
"Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification"
In my state, buying cigarettes requires presenting your driver's license, which is scanned at every purchase. Not sure about alcohol.
Yes, to uniq7 and others -- you keep saying "identity verification will be used for nefarious purposes". Lets take the alcohol and tobacco case, was it used for nefarious purposes? Did adults suddenly lose rights and/or have something bad happen to them?
The government can and does already track whatever they want about you. Businesses already track you unless you are extremely thorough about erasing your footprint. Adding a zero-knowledge proof through a trusted system that you are 18+ doesn't seem like the mountain people are claiming. You already have to provide ID and credit card to get ISP access, the byte patterns are traced back to your household. They already have a unique fingerprint on your browser and computer. The real harm is just the obvious encroachment that we can all see and have known about since early 2000s. They don't need a "backdoor", it feels like alarmism over a possible problem, when there is a very real harm to children and teens (suicide rates, depression, bullying, mental health, etc).
to go back to smoking / alcohol / guns, one could argue it is an infringement, but ultimately it does seem to have been the right choice for society at large, and the increased "invasion of privacy" has been pretty minor. If anything, the opt-in stuff like credit cards, cell phones, GPS, car apps, streaming services have all been far larger invasions of privacy that people willingly embrace.
Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.
Also, the fact that gov and companies are already tracking people doesn't mean we should consent to more ways of tracking.
Problem is that social media doesn’t have negative connotations like guns/alcohol/drugs do. That makes it hard or impossible for individual parents to restrict it. They are perceived as crazy or paranoid or controlling. Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?
To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.
> Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?
Government will do a terrible job at it. Society lost the capability of creating good and simple laws that can be disputed on courts based on law intention. Instead, laws nowadays are full of details hard to understand that attack the symptom and not the cause.
For instance, a simple law like "Companies should take measure, even if it lowers revenue and growth, to reduce addictive behavior. They should to it more emphatically on under age users and even more on under 13 years old.". But no. Instead, they will write 40 pages of what companies should implement in their software, and than have the 40 pages be quickly outdated, partially impossible to implement and hell for developers who try to do the right thing to comply. Total crap of standards and regulation bodies that help nothing and slow down all innovation.
Solution will only come from social pressure, movements to delete the apps, parents actually educating their children to avoid adicitive features. It will take time. But Government will solve nothing.
That’s pretty much the whole purpose of government and if it isn’t doing that then it has abdicated its primary responsibility.
I think many people would disagree with you that the primary responsibility of government is to protect people from themselves.
I’m talking about protecting people from evil actors with immense power to do harm.
I don't think so. What you're saying is that kids (and maybe adults) don't have enough agency over their own usage of social media; that these social media are so addicting and harmful that we cannot trust users (in concert with their parents, teachers, etc.) not to harm themselves with them, and that we must construct government apparatus to protect them.
Yes
This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything?
They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.
Nothing to see here.
Awareness is more important than government regulation. Assuming you are a parent, we as parents should be more concerned and help our kids grow with a healthy relationship with aggressive marketing and addictive features, by actively avoiding it, setting up time restrictions, etc.. No one else can help kids besides their parents. Everything else is too slow to be effective and with mild efficacy.
> In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
Probably, not definitely
It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
> It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
In what universe would this be possible?
China? Say what you will about the CCP they have the balls to jail and execute anyone who is perceived to stand in their way. Kids spending too much time on TikTok and not doing homework is a danger to the mission of making China number one.
In the world where Epstein killed himself.
What a world that must be.
Possibly, yes, but those executives have enough money to cut a deal to not only stay out of jail, but to also fund the re-election campaign for the DA + prosecution team, and to also give a job to the prosecutor's cousin, sibling, and/or in-law.
All capitalism is crony capitalism.
Based on the aggressive reactions all across the billionaire board toward the European wrist-slap initiative, I would guess Europe is moving in the correct direction with it and the slaps would correctly hurt.
Meanwhile 2 billion Coca Colas are sold per day. That's over 75 million kgs of sugar/day - no one bats an eye.
Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority.
Social networks is a sugar for minds.
You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said that children needed better food and half the country lost their collective minds. Hard to do anything when corporations control what most legislation is passed.
> You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said
My kids were born long before Obama took the office.
What's your point again? That president can't control the quality of the food in the country under their control?
The way I read it, he takes issue with your assertion that "nobody bats an eye" at sugar in Coke.
This is quite the opposite of everything I've ever seen in my entire life in America.
Or perhaps since you mention sugar, not corn syrup, and list quantities in kilograms not pounds or tons, he suspects you may not actually have first-hand experience with this.
> you may not actually have first-hand experience
Sigh ( in canadian )
Thank you for proving my point. Unless Obama was also president of Canada. I may have missed that.
Point is that people do in fact try to change what you're complaining about, your dismissive comments are just sad. Go out and organize rather than shouting into the void if this is what you care about.
I've always wondered if her initiative, which caused some big food companies to reduce fat and salt in their products, and change their frying media, is the reason for the rise of Sriracha in America.
My theory is that the food tasted less flavorful, so people compensated by adding their own.
I don't eat a lot of junk food, but for a long time after the Obama administration, when I did partake, often my immediate reaction was "Wow. These aren't as tasty as I remember."
/I'm looking at you, Cool Ranch Doritos.
Can you point to any examples of big food companies actually making changes for Michelle Obama's campaign?
Sisco, e.g. public school cafeterias. That's probably about it. The way in which school menus were actually changed was very misguided however.
First two results from this new-fangled thing they call a "search engine:"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768807?re...
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/3/12866484/michelle-obama-childh...
I appreciate you sharing those links, even if you had to get a jab in doing it :-)
sriracha has a ton of sugar in it, ditto for things like ketchup.
in all likelihood it's just enshittification, as those big corps make more slop for the plebs to eat in the cheapest way possible
"No one bats an eye" is a weird take when the Federal Government, via the Department of Health and Human Services, has literally just declared war on added sugar. [1] Also, lots of people have already changed their diets [2] regarded added sugar.
Sugar has been vilified for longer and more vociferously than social media use by kids, but that may be changing now.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-01-07/trump-admin...
[2]: https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)02461-9/pdf
Well the narrative has already been promulgated that they are "anti-science" so it's being ignored. Sugar is good. Hey Mom, send down more Pixie Stix!!
You must run in different circles than I, most people I know have reduced their added sugar consumption. My point was that there has been a swelling wave of anti-sugar sentiment over the last decades and it's reach the point were even RFK loudly said sugar is bad. That's the opposite of "no one bat's an eye". Of course people will ignore all sorts of advice for all sorts of reasons, but the sentiment (as shown by the decline of added sugar consumption) is there, and growing.
The Coke Classic is still selling. Coke Zero has not replaced Classic. Both "no one bat's an eye" and your use of "most people" (even with the "I know" qualifier) are clearly extremes of both sides of the conversation being intentionally used. The fact that things like Diet, Zero, etc version of Coke and other soft drinks exist show people are paying attention to sugar. The fact that sugary products are still being purchased shows that not everyone has changed their habits.
Shouting extreme positions doesn't really move the conversation
I recall a discussion here recently whereupon the list of items eligible for nutrition assistance (food stamps) in the USA were changed to exclude unhealthy foods, especially those with added sugar. Which BTW affects poorer communities disproportionately with long-term health problems like diabetes.
Elimination of processed sugar is a good thing.
Despite this, the discussion quickly pivoted to "how dare you keep poor children from enjoying birthday cake".
> no one bats an eye.
Untrue
My six year old grand child made up a food related game for me to play with them that involved penalties for choosing food with sugar.
Somebody is getting to them, good
Not only teens but the whole population, from birth till death. The teens are just the easiest and most addicted target group. They don't want yoy to press anything out of their f browser tab.
This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here.
That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.
Snap and TikTok have been willing to settle
Meta and Google have not
If they lose at trial they will likely be settling thousands of cases in the future
Time will show the wiser
A jury will decide
Win or lose, going to trial means more public disclosure of what these companies do behind the scenes
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBxDVuD1l-Xqswgpr7XaFA
Example of high quality, low viewcount
Where are the smoking guns? All I see is normal talk for how to get customers. A smoking gun would be "Teens love posts about X even though we know X is really bad for them. Let's promote lots of X". But I don't see any of that. I just see market research etc.
I could post every quote on the page and respond to it how it's not a smoking gun but not one of them seemed like a smoking gun to me. Anyone care to point to one that seems like a smoking gun to them?
A key feature of many platforms being banned is algorithmic feeds. Nobody has to choose what to promote. The algorithms automatically promote what results in the most engagement. The most addictive content ends up being force fed due to natural selection. And platforms choose to keep them, even if they would otherwise avoid the growing age restrictions, because they are profitable.
We know teens love endless feeds but we know endless feeds is bad for them so we give them endless feeds…
To be clear social media is not as clear cut bad as the endless news/for you feeds which are designed to keep you scrolling vs seeing what friends are doing
Not just teens, addiction has been weaponized and monetized relentlessly - the whole concept of "whales" is contingent on fostered addiction.
Gross, creepy, and sleazy behavior that if any other industry targeting such a vulnerable population would be regulated out of existence
Why Zuckerberg is any better than the jeevacation?
Both cases makes teens as victims, both cases was a great deal for them but only from the first look. Both cases are piramid-like schemes when the victims attract new victims to keep benefitting from the system. Is it just like in alcohol case, when having too many victims justifies a bad spirit as the new norm?
He's arguably even worse if we consider just how much harm social media has done to teens and kids, but I'm sure the Meta folk here would prefer to believe that that's not the case. "Just following orders", right?
Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc
Awesome song. Gives me chills. Wish I believed in a just God like that.
you are made either of reason or of faith, but the choice what you are made of you can not make nor with reason nor with faith
reason can not choose reason, and faith can not choose faith
I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.
I think the possibility of banning certain sites at least for minors is being discussed, after Australia set the precedent. But this of course has downsides, too, as some form of verification has to be implemented, that would almost certainly reduce anonymity and carry risks to personal data protection. A complete ban is unrealistic since people actually like to use these platforms. Plus, it would certainly entail massive political repercussions from the US government. This is already happening when US American companies are simply fined in the EU.
Does that outweigh the loss of privacy involved? I really don't think it does personally, I should not have to show anyone ID to have an Instagram account, privacy and anonymity is a feature not a bug.
To me, the claim of privacy is the wrong concept. Anonymous would be a better description. People are posting things on a public website to be viewed by the public.
The privacy issue is one of the reasons I favor a total ban.
The idea of banning meta or Google is indeed not serious. What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive. Admittedly there's nobody doing that in Europe seriously yet, but that's because the current unhinged head of American state has meltdown every time American bigtech get a wrist slap.
> What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive.
Europeans have been saying that for what, 20 years now? How long does it have to not work before we stop saying that it's a realistic solution?
There were no serious attempts at enforcing the rules.
If that's so, then is it realistic to expect that to somehow change? These corps have been fined more times than I can count, but it's clearly not working.
The fines were too low. If Europe is serious now, it can change.
how would you ban it?
I don't want the russian-style ban enforced by ISPs
Probably punishing companies who pay YouTube for ads would work
Much if not all of Europe already has ISP level bans. If they can use those bans against football streaming sites, why not Facebook?
And actually I think just banning them from conducting any business, accepting payments/etc, would be mostly sufficient. They could continue to operate at a loss, but it would put American corps at such a disadvantage that domestic social media might be able to compete, and enforcing regulations against domestic companies should be far more feasible.
Your name sounds finnish... Finland ISPs have only primitive dns based blocklists which can be bypassed by any kid, they need to purchase dpi-capable hardware to block websites by (still not encrypted) SNI
Man it's nice to live in the country not prioritizing internet censorship
On which grounds would you punish some companies which are using a fully legal platform? If you had beef with the ad contents, you'd punish them already for that. But if you have beef with the platform algorithms, punish them for exactly that. Not over proxies! As long the algorithm was designed for creating dependence, than regulate that - exactly like you (should) regulate other substances creating dependence. And some countries are going exactly this way: not only Australia but also Finland, Spain...
Ok, imagine a law punishing a platform comes out. How will it be enforced? You can fine the companies but they can just close presence in europe. YouTube will continue to work even if all the YouTube's servers in europe are gone.
Or should the only outcome of the law be that the police could confiscate phones from kids? punish parents for allowing social media? Laws are not useless, at least teachers and parents will have a clear call to action. But still
Social media is being banned for minors in multiple countries, and more are seriously considering it.
But if people keep proselytizing that nothing will happen and all is hopeless, it's going to be hard to get people together to support a change. You and others here are doing the work of social media companies by spreading that - on social media. In fact, nothing can stop the public if they want something.
This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.
This is all relatively new in human timescales. My parents as children saw the start of modern advertising, with ads targeted at them. But they did not see entertainment engineered to sell them product. I think in the 60s you started seeing bands manufactured and aggressively marketed to youths (such as The Monkeys), because companies wanted their share of Beatles money. And 70s, when George Lucas and Kiss realized how much money was in branded merchandise. And late 70s, when He-Man reversed things and media was created specifically to sell merchandise. On human timescales, the results are starting to come in on this experiment.
"make customer come back" - every (good) car dealer
By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term.
I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got.
I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc.
If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal.
2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast.
It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.
And why not? AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive.
We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive. We seem to be fine with expanding gambling - where I live (not Nevada!) slot machines are everywhere. Nice restaurants even will dedicate corners to slot machines - not just seedy bars. Sports betting apps are all over streaming ads, and their legality is expanding even though when they are legalized in an area the divorce and loan default rates go up measurably.
Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?
The kids are just the latest victim of a long ongoing trend.
> Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?
I’m pretty sure we do, in fact, ban under 18s from tobacco, alcohol, and real-money gambling.
> real-money gambling
this is doing a lot of heavy lifting for how loose we have become with under 18 questionable products.
Let's check in on how we're doing preventing the tobacco industry from marketing to children.
Hmm, candy flavored vapes both for THC and nicotine. Teen psychosis from THC. Popcorn lung. Not so good it seems!
https://www.lung.org/research/sotc/by-the-numbers/8-things-i...
Not to mention strict limits on advertising of these products, licensing required to sell them, and very highly taxed.
If that's not enough, in the US we created a federal level agency that oversees 3 things only. Two of those things are alcohol and tobacco. And the third thing isn't even regulated half as much as those two.
Why on earth anyone thinks these things are unregulated is beyond me.
Just looking at the US, tobacco comes with warnings, there are limits on advertising (see any tobacco product commercials on TV?), and the manufacturers lost a lawsuit leading to massive fines and many of these outcomes.
The idea that we don't regulate things would be shocking to the anti-regulation crowd, and the staffs at the FDA, FCC, etc.
> And why not?
Because it is simply wrong.
> AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive. > We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive.
Three wrongs don't make a right I guess.
My exact point. Our current moment seems to be us being happy to expand societal harms for whatever reason. I'd hazard a guess it's our political system getting more and more susceptible to lobbying money.
This is defeatist. Just because something is bad doesn't mean we shouldn't care at all and just let everything be bad.
I know Doom Eternal had one, I believe she was even credited. But the line between "making a game more fun" and "making a game addictive" is a little blurry.
Addictive in this case you mean could be out of spite? Like, I don't like this but it's pissing me off and by god I will beat it?
I found the gameplay loop really fun, but the rest of it was definitely not up to the standard of Doom 2016.
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Big Tech of 2020s is like Big Tobacco of the 1990s. May they meet the same fate.
I think the solution is to ban social media networks from being ad-based and force them to be subscription based.
Once you're a subscriber, there's no incentive to get you to increase your engagement (beyond the threshold that makes it interesting and useful to you so you continue to subscribe) because unlike an ad-based network you're not generating more revenue the more you use it (in fact, you're increasing costs)
The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.
“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years
How did that work mechanically though? At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data, even if we only suspected they might possibly not be an adult -- no A/B tests, no ML, no ad targeting, no nada. Did leadership design a system where those sorts of things would happen anyway? Were there just enough rogue teams to cause problems?
Because the product is made to appeal to that particular demographic. The data doesn't really matter if you have that kind of reach.
> At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data
I guess things are different at Google now.
For business, government, and religion: achieving scale and centralization necessarily leads to corrupt outcomes. This is also where Marx’s legitimate criticisms of capitalism turn into a solution which is essentially its doppelgänger, a scaled system of corruption with absolute authority with the rhetorical veneer of democracy.
Are people surprised by this. Clearly this was a tactic widely used in the tech industry. Their aim is to keep people on the platform specifically teens. Why else would you need curated algorithms for users.
Anyone paying attention knew. A smoking gun means that legal action is possible. Or it would be in a better time.
Indeed, I've been paying attention to the market share of the biggest companies in advertisement, its clear that Google and Meta are the largest share by a large margin. Almost not even comparable to other players other than Reddit recently. which it's exposure is dependent on Search engines like Google and Bing for that matter. users within the platform are a different story. I personally think the internet is not being utilized wisely when it comes to current context. There is still so much to be done and innovated and there are gate keepers keeping this from happening.
It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.
Tobacco paid billions of dollars, and we've heavily restricted where it can be used, where it can be advertised, and who can buy it.
Companies don't necessarily have to suffer when restrictions are placed on them.
Ask any educator what the biggest positive change was to U.S. high schools in the 1970s and they'll probably answer that it was the ban on smoking in schools.
I expect a similar response in the future regarding bans on social media.
I can only imagine what it's like right now in schools. I can't see how anybody arguing the point that student are allowed to use social media in school is an okay activity. I know there are some countries banning the use of such activities in Europe and some others i can't think of right now.
Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.
Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.
I hope that all the engineers who went along with this are able to sleep well with their stock options.
I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them.
The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?
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This reads like an Onion headline.
Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.
They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.
If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.
> every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it
You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.
Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.
Edit:
> They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.
Social media is a marketplace business. Both parties are your customer.
Only one party is paying anything.
All of these guys should end up behind bars. To purposefully prey on vulnerable kids like this, it is absolutely disgusting. And here I am as a parent trying to stem the floodgates against people wielding billions of $ and armies of programmers and psychologists to harm my kids. Fuck them. And if you work for them then...