I truly hope something is done about this. I just came back from a nice short bath at the beach, where a family had their towels set a few meters away from mine. While I was laying there, relaxing, I saw two kids begging their dad to accompany them into the water, while their dad watched Reels and ignored them completely. Not even a response.
The kids just wanted to have a fun afternoon and play in the water, but the dad was just scrolling, didn't care at all about his surroundings, probably in the zombie state that these platforms let you in. The kids ended up running to the water on their own, the dad didn't react at all to the situation, zero response (to be fair, I'm not saying he should be alarmed or anything, just a "yeah, go ahead" would've been fine).
I may be exaggerating but I really think that these platforms are the tobacco of these decades, I used to be really addicted as a teen as well, now I'm 23 and left most of the platforms for good. Seeing people act like this, even in my group of friends, makes me feel quite weird about the whole situation.
Last time EU fined Facebook for merging WhatsApp userbase merging with Facebook, that they explicitly forbade. Facebook just paid the fee and moved along.
What would be different here?
For me right now it's not going to any article, but a kind of general landing page for the Eureopean Commission's "Press Corner" which lists a bunch of articles:
this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias.
things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option (but never be forced) to use it. if this is about kids then use california style on device age signals set by parents.
i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting. yes i believe in legalizing all drugs how could you tell.
Addiction is exactly what laws should be fighting, be it social media, drugs, or something else. In a free market, people should be free to choose where they spend their time and money, but people aren't free if they're addicted. Addiction causes them to spend their time and money on things which they wouldn't consent to, if it weren't for addiction. For Instagram, the harm is the lost time, and whatever else they could have done with that time. Addictive stuff disrupts the whole market / society, not just the individual.
This sentence has no meaning in a modern context. The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI". Everything is political.
"Choice" doesn't work. Everyone is under information and attention span overload. There isn't time to research what goes into the food you eat much less everything else going on in your life.
One thing that's potentially different, at least for Facebook, is the network effect. It only takes a few friends to start using Facebook for event planning for people to start missing events or worrying about missing out. That extra pressure cuts against individual choice.
Instagram is different, but you can see something similar happen on platforms with a chat feature. If people start to gravitate towards a singular app for talking, coordinating, etc. then there's the potential for resisters to be socially excluded. For most people, feeling socially excluded is a strong motivator. So far, this has mostly resulted in everyone having a fairly broad set of apps with chat features, so I'm not sure the centralizing power is as strong.
The overwhelming majority of local businesses around me don't have websites, just a FB page. If you want to look at upcoming events, specials, restaurant menus, etc. you either have to hope FB doesn't throw up the "you need an acct to see this page" blocker, or sign up.
Hey nice to hear somebody taking about social feature of a social network when so much of this is about profiling people through infinite scrolling content from strangers.
It'd be hilarious to see the EU demand interop on features like Events, Groups, Marketplace.
The choice already exists: migrate to bluesky, pinksky, mastodon, pixelfed. Create repost bots to start the network effect with content from Instagram. Clearly label the repost bots and choose accounts that aren't reposted yet.
I agree with you, for a an adult, the choice should be given and not enforced, it's same with smoking or alcohol consumptions. Both are terrible for your health on the long term, but the side effects are clear and open and people can make an educated decision.
> choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms
A few years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment however after watching many adults (and children) fall into addictive AI slop alternate reality hell holes, I just want it to stop. Likewise, I prefer not to live in a society that enables drug addicts to walk the streets and used needles to litter the pavements every 10cm like empty Coke bottles.
We regulate things we know will be abused, and we are often the better for it. Social media is no different.
> i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting.
People who say this do not understand how powerful biology is. Nor do they understand that they are putting people with certain genetics more at risk.
"Choice" to people genetically prone to addiction is a trap. So unless you want to figure out the polygenetics of addiction and then have everyone tested for their genetics so they know there risk I will say I strongly disagree with your viewpoint, because there is no informed risk and you are promoting suffering with our beliefs.
Any attempt to ban political bias will reveal huge political bias.
Now I don’t mean all political biases are equal, or that all biases are absolutely wrong. Of course my biases are better™. But this days it looks like even stating that genocides are bad™ is not as consensual as it used to be in Europe over the last few decades, so what do I know.
I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control
Yeah it doesn't work long term because you go back to being addicted in no time. At least that's how it was when I tried to do it by creating new accounts
My solution is to use curbox and repost content on bluesky
Using instagram in a browser (e.g. firefox as it allows for extension on phone) and then installing an extension like control for instagram or hide reels works great, even better to set the https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following as your main page to enter (or is that only available in europe?). Allows to use instagram as old school social media instead of a scrolling app
Where, exactly? I browsed through the account settings and didn't see anything obviously relevant. (Could be that whatever option you're talking about is available only to mobile users, whereas I only ever visit Instagram on a desktop.)
Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
What about calling these stuffs something like "junk media"? Using the words of the offenders to depict the landscape is giving a major concession in this battle for critical thinking.
I am with you and wish you were right, but good luck forcing Meta to change the key dark design patterns of their products (correctly identified by the regulators as "highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll")
This is a step in the right direction, though. It will be a long journey.
When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.
Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)
It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.
With FBPurity: https://www.fbpurity.com/ I have Facebook on my desktop computer exactly as it used to be in the 2000s when I signed up: content only from my "friends" and a few chosen sources (a band I like etc).
The newsfeed is very slow to load, as to fill the screen the extension must make twenty plus requests while hiding 99% of what Facebook's addiction machine returns.
Forcing alcoholic drinks to have a less addictive product is a much better way to protect young people’s brains than an alcohol age limit is (and frankly adults need help there too).
Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.
Yes, that would help. Putting regulatory caps on the strength of alcoholic drinks would probably go a long way towards reducing harm across all of society.
Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.
And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.
Good idea. There’s an objective measure of alcohol content. All you need to do to make this analogy work is to create one for social media. Best of luck with that.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.
And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.
Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.
Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".
If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.
I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.
I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,
it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development
Agreed. HN feed is also addictive. EU should ban HN feed and only allow searching for new posts.
Quite honestly, I've been addicted to using my air fryer for cooking nowadays. The design is too good and convenient and the food comes out too tasty. I think EU should focus on making them less addictive.
Online advertisements should be forbidden as a whole. The attention-stealing and engagement-maximising internet with all it horribly effects only exist, due to advertising. And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
This is a wild take. Most serious media companies would collapse without online ad revenue. Google would be dead, along with all the products that sorta run the world like maps. But even local publications, like your independent city news site, which you presumably think is good, also die instantly.
The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.
> And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
We're in an information crisis. Most people don't know what is true or false anymore. Google and Meta didn't make it better and in fact might have contributed to it. I'd say let's go back to 1996.
Real household median income in the US has risen by more than 25% since 1996, largely driven by technology built for and by the ecosystem you want to pull out by the roots.
assuming 2% inflation over 30 years, that means that a dollar in 1996 is now worth $1.81. 80% depreciation versus 25% increase in income is not comparable.
The wealth inequality in the past 30 years has dramatically shifted in favor of the ultra rich.
Technology has been used to create illegal monopolies -> too big to fail -> surely we can't / don't need to regulate this -> tech companies get away with murder and laugh all the way to the bank.
A company like Meta could finesse their algorythms to bias people against antitrust action and you would never know.
To repeat the talking point of tech companies that "technology has helped us, therefore we should not regulate it in any way" is to accept the premise of people that spend every waking hour of their day figuring out what they can get away with to screw you over.
They buy ads too. It’d adversely affect their campaign budgets. (Sure, it would adversely affect their competitors’ too, but second-order effects are usually too complex for politicians to understand.)
MEPs want to write rules that mean they get to fine rich US companies. Local advertising might be worse for you overall but you'd have to do more work to get less free money.
True but the whole “influencer” and “creative” industry would collapse overnight. A few large ones would survive on their patreon income, most would collapse and have to get a real job, if those are still around.
Mostly true but there are a few good channels with very practical information for picking up new skills (gardening, woodwork, playing an instrument, etc) as well as looking up troubleshooting information.
Those too would be lost.
Sure some drag out three minutes into fifteen, but whatever…
In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.
Magazines primarily make money through advertising.
Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.
In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.
If it's really that good, you'll pay for it with the money you saved in advertising. You're paying for the ads, don't forget. Plenty of people used to pay for things like woodworking classes, back when there was money. Doing a woodworking class in person at a woodworking shop will teach you much better than youtube.
The addictive design is in service of ads. Instead of regulating software, tax ad revenue to disincentivize building a business model around user profiling and tracking.
Vendors now cannot get X pounds with Y pounds advertising outlay to make Z pounds per unit of wares. To continue making Z money per unit of wares, with previous S pounds price charged to consumers per unit, add significantly more than reduction in Y advertising per unit to S to offset reduced "brand" "awareness".
No one buying shit anymore. People still buying shit elsewhere. GDP and tax revenues fall relative to others. Deflationary aspects. Market leaders complain through lobbying groups. Repeal. Back to square one.
I don't agree. They are two separate depictions of what might happen as a result of applying a tax on advertising. They may well coincide with each other, however. Saying that the second is a restatement of the first is like saying two interpretations of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" are restating the same fact.
Governments see reduction in tax income and GDP and repeal taxes. In UK: Signal "mansion" tax on properties valued above X price to collect recurring Y pounds total tax. Market adjusts valuations based on probability of tax. Number of houses still worth at least X now diminishes. Now cannot collect recurring Y pounds. "Mansion" tax delayed.
You have this complex system that has reached some sort of relative equilibrium based on say a set S of ten sorts of tax rates, along with a set F of factors (size millions), with the government's tax revenue R being one of those outputs. Then some guy in the government called G signals to the government and public that he can increase R by X by fiddling with a member of S, or maybe adding a member to S (of size say ten).
Is G stupid, or does he just lean towards retaining the public's affection, his relatively low salary, potential under the table payments and whatever networking opportunities his job provides? I lean towards the latter.
The downside to this is that services become class based again then.
Instagram is the same service for everyone, regardless if you are homeless or a billionaire, it is exactly because it is an ad based model. Same for google and facebook.
These models are "classless business" incarnate, and people absolutely hate them. It's part bewildering and part bemusing.
This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.
Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”
I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.
We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.
But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.
But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.
People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.
Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.
However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).
I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
A functioning democratic leadership listens when told they've done good, and listens when told they messed up.
Arguing that they should receive no support or positive reactions because they also deserve blame is how the center and left break down their own power: Believing that disengagement from one another is a stronger moral obligation than working together and fixing shit with people who are willing to listen and work.
This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.
EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.
The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.
The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.
This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.
They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.
They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.
The EU is an institution that is democratically legitimized at every level (Either through direct elections in the parliament or through elections to the appropriate national government in the case of the Council / Commission). Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes the Conservatives do some messed up lawfare to introduce fucked up things like Chat Control, but at least they were voted in and can be voted out again.
Big Tech is some foreign rich dudes being dictators of their little fiefdom doing whatever they can to make themselves even richer. We have zero control over them and what they do to our society in this pursuit. No elections. No recalls. No public votes.
The only correct reaction is for the sovereign to assert its sovereignty and lay out some ground rules.
Maybe you missed it but the commission and parliament consists of a lot of people and groups that are all pushing for different things. While we have chat control being actively pushed by some groups actively funded by Facebook we have other groups like this working against Facebook.
If social media was just your family, friends and acquaintances sharing stuff like it used to be you may have a point. But with the algorithm feed its turned into a der sturmer like propaganda pipeline.
Would love to see the overlap between the average anti-Big Tech HN commenter cheering on this regulatory advance, and the average HN commenter who thinks hard drugs should be legalized and that the War on Drugs is bad. Because these are contradictory positions! Either you think people should be free to do things that are addictive or you don't
This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.
> are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.
I’m sorry but this is just not real.
There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.
If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.
Which is exactly the problem with this whole discussion. On the far side, you hear that it's heroin! It's fentanyl! It's alcohol! Facebook groups are the modern opium den! But when actually challenged, it's oh no no, that's a metaphor, it's metaphorical fentanyl, not real fentanyl. People on Instagram are metaphorically injecting metaphorical drugs into their metaphorical veins.
It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.
The academic literature funded by what grants from what stakeholders? Like the social media research from Harvard Kennedy now? The research that came after its social media research lead was fired and a $500mm Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant occurred somehow in parallel [0] [1]?
That recent research?
Or the research that was occurring on social media before that? Surely you're not arguing in that bad of faith, despite where I could speculate your RSUs might have came from. But this seems an extremely naive take if not made in bad faith.
These apps should be banned or be forced to only show feeds from accounts you follow in chronological order, nothing more. Perhaps with some basic search if you want to discover something new, but cumbersome enough so that you don't spend hours on it.
I know someone he keeps scrolling the minute they wake up. They are behind on chores, life stuff, but keep scrolling.
That wouldn't be too bad in itself if not for sheer amount of misinformation that is being served. Especially health related. Thanks to AI enhanced videos showing parasites everywhere, person now has developed eating disorder and thinks their poor health is due to parasites and not the fact they spend whole day on Instagram. Now they started ordering "supplements" and "courses" those people peddle. I tried to report these accounts, but Meta insist they are no breaching any T&C.
Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
So, how do we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts of the free flow of information on social media, where all citizens are invited to broadcast?
Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart. A nice natural protection against extremes.
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
I don't follow, the argument is against the addictive design of the feed algorithms, not the information being shared per se.
Nothing in this is geared towards curtailing platforms like social media to exist, it's trying to curtail the design of psychological manipulation for "engagement". Ragebait is the most common case, it makes people interact with content if it enrages them; another common case is to feed kids with slop content that makes them fixated on the platform, scrolling endlessly trying to get the elusive dopamine hit quite similar to the feeling of playing a slot machine.
I think framing this as the EU trying to censor platforms because people post content against the current order is a big cynical leap. I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that? Maybe you have ulterior motives as well?
Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.
> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?
Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
> Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Other kinds of ragebait: creating a whole profile dedicated only to take the most extreme view on issues (on both sides), only to make people angry so they comment or like/interact with the content.
> Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue. You verge into the false equivalency territory, something before was addictive so now that we have something even more addictive it's ok just from precedence? Different levels and degrees demand different solutions.
> So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
That's absolutely cynical and a thought-terminating cliché since it's impossible to contradict you. I understand it's your opinion but it verges into conspiratorial thinking which I don't think anyone can de-escalate you from except for yourself.
> As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
Not really but you constantly rehash similar arguments in topics surrounding the EU so I'm trying to figure out what exactly is behind that. Ulterior motives don't need to be that drastic, it can simply be "I don't support the EU as a project" since you never state that but consistently take that side of the argument.
> Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Thank you! That's the first time I heard a sensible explanation of the word that's being used so much. That's indeed something different and malevolent.
> When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue.
But if social media was non-existent, then people would carry these devices with them for traditional broadcasts.
Let me make a comparison that I think is very on-topic: Alcohol is a traditional drug, less addictive and less harmful than many of the worst drugs. But more addictive and more harmful than many other drugs. Wouldn't it be strange if governments, regulators and rulers only focused on the other drugs and said nothing about alcohol? Would I be a Russian, Chinese or Iranian spy or a jew (as another poster just insinuated) if I said "Hey, what about alcohol?".
Traditional mass media regulation vs Internet regulation is not only an EU issue. What I said about the EU regulators could just as much be said about any other government doing the same. I don't think it's unjustified conspiratorial thinking to look at how rulers want to control speech and the flow of information for their own benefit. It's expected. If screen addiction was what they truly wanted to fight, then the EU Commission would also act against traditional broadcasts in the same way they act against social media. Just like rulers and regulators have acted in all kinds of ways against alcohol, including prohibition and other extreme measures.
> Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
More outlandish conspiracy theories on hackernews...
You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
What messages are not being allowed to be 'streamed into the brains of the population' exactly? Are you suggesting, for example, that claims made by the US president should not be shown on TV? Are you suggesting that these are not then analysed and scrutinised by people on TV?
Speaking from the UK, the state controls the media.
There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.
And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.
UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.
> You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.
> It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
Also known as Russian, Iranian, Israeli and Chinese bot farms.
"As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator."
Seems like I predicted your behaviour almost perfectly, you accusing me within minutes of being - let's see: a Russian, a Jew, an Iranian, and a bot. Probably you'll accuse me of being the other things as well within little time.
I'd say: the fediverse. Everyone can "broadcast" and discuss freely without having a central power that can censor or subtly manipulate the broader discussion.
While it is genuinely a huge concern, the legal measure are not going to address it. One has to consider the overall picture, not just a corner of it.
The ship has sailed. There will be addictive designs, products, services etc. The very theme of a business is centered around keeping the customers addicted. It's just a matter of time, every business on this planet would, with the help of AI, make their products and services extremely addictive.
I personally think the answer should be mandating user controls of said algorithms. If you have a large social media site that suggests results or provides a feed then you must allow users to configure said feed.
The default should be simple, something like time-ordered of followed only with opt in for recommendations. Ideally I'd love to be able to swap algorithms for something open source but setting a standard there rather than just mandating a level of control seems a bigger hurdle.
It seems entirely anti-consumer that I am just the behest of whatever Google or Meta decide is most profitable to show me instead of finding important news or entertainment in a way that I want.
The entire advertising industry is predicated on the principle of preempting personal preferences with paid placements. (Sorry, didn’t start out that sentence expecting to alliterate it all but it just came out like that).
Literally every ad you see is a business deciding ‘instead of showing you what you came here to see, here’s something else, which I am showing you only to benefit my business.’
I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
> I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
That's a baby I'm happy to lose along with its bathwater.
Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.
Fun sidenote: On a recent Hotmail post on here, I saw a screenshot of hotmail V1 (way before M$ took over). They had a prominent button on their homepage about privacy.
I truly hope something is done about this. I just came back from a nice short bath at the beach, where a family had their towels set a few meters away from mine. While I was laying there, relaxing, I saw two kids begging their dad to accompany them into the water, while their dad watched Reels and ignored them completely. Not even a response.
The kids just wanted to have a fun afternoon and play in the water, but the dad was just scrolling, didn't care at all about his surroundings, probably in the zombie state that these platforms let you in. The kids ended up running to the water on their own, the dad didn't react at all to the situation, zero response (to be fair, I'm not saying he should be alarmed or anything, just a "yeah, go ahead" would've been fine).
I may be exaggerating but I really think that these platforms are the tobacco of these decades, I used to be really addicted as a teen as well, now I'm 23 and left most of the platforms for good. Seeing people act like this, even in my group of friends, makes me feel quite weird about the whole situation.
Last time EU fined Facebook for merging WhatsApp userbase merging with Facebook, that they explicitly forbade. Facebook just paid the fee and moved along. What would be different here?
Full title: "Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act"
Edit: for some reason, the URL has been changed. The page I tried to post is here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
It's because the page you posted contains this incorrect tag:
For me right now it's not going to any article, but a kind of general landing page for the Eureopean Commission's "Press Corner" which lists a bunch of articles:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/home/en
this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias.
things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option (but never be forced) to use it. if this is about kids then use california style on device age signals set by parents.
i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting. yes i believe in legalizing all drugs how could you tell.
Addiction is exactly what laws should be fighting, be it social media, drugs, or something else. In a free market, people should be free to choose where they spend their time and money, but people aren't free if they're addicted. Addiction causes them to spend their time and money on things which they wouldn't consent to, if it weren't for addiction. For Instagram, the harm is the lost time, and whatever else they could have done with that time. Addictive stuff disrupts the whole market / society, not just the individual.
> ban any kind of political bias.
This sentence has no meaning in a modern context. The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI". Everything is political.
"Choice" doesn't work. Everyone is under information and attention span overload. There isn't time to research what goes into the food you eat much less everything else going on in your life.
One thing that's potentially different, at least for Facebook, is the network effect. It only takes a few friends to start using Facebook for event planning for people to start missing events or worrying about missing out. That extra pressure cuts against individual choice.
Instagram is different, but you can see something similar happen on platforms with a chat feature. If people start to gravitate towards a singular app for talking, coordinating, etc. then there's the potential for resisters to be socially excluded. For most people, feeling socially excluded is a strong motivator. So far, this has mostly resulted in everyone having a fairly broad set of apps with chat features, so I'm not sure the centralizing power is as strong.
The overwhelming majority of local businesses around me don't have websites, just a FB page. If you want to look at upcoming events, specials, restaurant menus, etc. you either have to hope FB doesn't throw up the "you need an acct to see this page" blocker, or sign up.
Hey nice to hear somebody taking about social feature of a social network when so much of this is about profiling people through infinite scrolling content from strangers.
It'd be hilarious to see the EU demand interop on features like Events, Groups, Marketplace.
Open sourcing the algorithm and showing the weights used to generate the feed each time would be great.
The choice already exist: don't use social media like Instagram and TikTok. Yet everyone keep choosing it despite being addictive.
So you can't really trust people, even less teenagers, to make a disciplined choice of not using an addictive algorithm.
> Yet everyone keep choosing it despite being addictive.
Let me fix that for you. Everyone keeps choosing it because it is addictive.
Because the network effect prevents them from using alternatives. Bluesky is a desert in the global south
The choice already exists: migrate to bluesky, pinksky, mastodon, pixelfed. Create repost bots to start the network effect with content from Instagram. Clearly label the repost bots and choose accounts that aren't reposted yet.
Don't you get it? No one is on those sites because they are not addictive. It is like trying top tell an alcoholic to just drink mocktails.
I agree with you, for a an adult, the choice should be given and not enforced, it's same with smoking or alcohol consumptions. Both are terrible for your health on the long term, but the side effects are clear and open and people can make an educated decision.
> more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option
This seems like a hot take given the (justifiably) illegality of stuff like fentanyl.
> choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms
A few years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment however after watching many adults (and children) fall into addictive AI slop alternate reality hell holes, I just want it to stop. Likewise, I prefer not to live in a society that enables drug addicts to walk the streets and used needles to litter the pavements every 10cm like empty Coke bottles.
We regulate things we know will be abused, and we are often the better for it. Social media is no different.
> i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting.
People who say this do not understand how powerful biology is. Nor do they understand that they are putting people with certain genetics more at risk.
"Choice" to people genetically prone to addiction is a trap. So unless you want to figure out the polygenetics of addiction and then have everyone tested for their genetics so they know there risk I will say I strongly disagree with your viewpoint, because there is no informed risk and you are promoting suffering with our beliefs.
> strictly ban any kind of political bias.
Any attempt to ban political bias will reveal huge political bias.
Now I don’t mean all political biases are equal, or that all biases are absolutely wrong. Of course my biases are better™. But this days it looks like even stating that genocides are bad™ is not as consensual as it used to be in Europe over the last few decades, so what do I know.
I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control
Only tangentailly related, but, there is an option in Instagram to reset your algorithm. I highly recommend this if you find yourself doom-scrolling.
Not sure if it's also in FB on account of me not having an account there.
Yeah it doesn't work long term because you go back to being addicted in no time. At least that's how it was when I tried to do it by creating new accounts
My solution is to use curbox and repost content on bluesky
After resetting my algorithm the content I’m served now is even more clickbaity and trying to forcibly hold my attention
Using instagram in a browser (e.g. firefox as it allows for extension on phone) and then installing an extension like control for instagram or hide reels works great, even better to set the https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following as your main page to enter (or is that only available in europe?). Allows to use instagram as old school social media instead of a scrolling app
Thank you so much for sharing that URL! Works in US of A.
I highly recommend not using Instagram. Also ketamine I hear is bad for people brain. Stay safe.
What happen when wanna-be-free-market interests have some lucrative addictive crap to sell, hmm? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Where, exactly? I browsed through the account settings and didn't see anything obviously relevant. (Could be that whatever option you're talking about is available only to mobile users, whereas I only ever visit Instagram on a desktop.)
Not sure about desktop, but on mobile it is under Settings and activity -> (What you see) Content preferences -> Reset suggested content.
I kind of wish they had developers that know how to get a video upload working from the website.
Alas, it all must have gotten scrapped for a llama workflow.
Website is worse than 15 years ago (code AND contents).
Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
What about calling these stuffs something like "junk media"? Using the words of the offenders to depict the landscape is giving a major concession in this battle for critical thinking.
Junk media is the shoe that fits.
I'm definitely going to start calling it that when discussing it from now on.
I am with you and wish you were right, but good luck forcing Meta to change the key dark design patterns of their products (correctly identified by the regulators as "highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll")
This is a step in the right direction, though. It will be a long journey.
> good luck forcing Meta
When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.
Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)
It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.
Exactly. If social media apps had a configurable old style non-algorithmic feed the problem would be dramatically smaller.
With FBPurity: https://www.fbpurity.com/ I have Facebook on my desktop computer exactly as it used to be in the 2000s when I signed up: content only from my "friends" and a few chosen sources (a band I like etc).
The newsfeed is very slow to load, as to fill the screen the extension must make twenty plus requests while hiding 99% of what Facebook's addiction machine returns.
> highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll
Didn't tiktok get hit with this earlier in the year? Has tiktok removed these features for European users?
Forcing alcoholic drinks to have a less addictive product is a much better way to protect young people’s brains than an alcohol age limit is (and frankly adults need help there too).
Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.
We do not care where we get our dopamine hits. The most likely place is the easiest, and right now, for teens, it is social media.
I am afraid this is setting kids up for abusing drugs and alchohol in the future.
Yes, that would help. Putting regulatory caps on the strength of alcoholic drinks would probably go a long way towards reducing harm across all of society.
Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.
And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.
Good idea. There’s an objective measure of alcohol content. All you need to do to make this analogy work is to create one for social media. Best of luck with that.
What’s your point? We do this.
NA beer now exists. Beer and wine places can’t sell liquor. Alcohol sales aren’t 24/7 in many places.
In quite a few countries, you can drink less-acoholic drinks, eg. beer and wine, much younger than high-alcohol drinks, eg. whiskey, vodka, etc.
Germany is one such example.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.
And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.
Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.
Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".
If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.
I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.
I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,
it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development
Just ban the discovery feed. Search only.
Agreed. HN feed is also addictive. EU should ban HN feed and only allow searching for new posts.
Quite honestly, I've been addicted to using my air fryer for cooking nowadays. The design is too good and convenient and the food comes out too tasty. I think EU should focus on making them less addictive.
That's hilarious. Are you accusing dang et al of unscrupulously designing HN to maximize time spent on the site?
HN openly violates GDPR and is proud of it. Why would they follow this?
Your posts are archived really fast once submitted, removing comments would not be an effective approach to improve people's privacy on this site.
That could be their punishment. Also subscribed feed.
And what about the addictive design of advertisements that keeps us hooked on consuming more and more stuff?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382310867_Methods_o...
Online advertisements should be forbidden as a whole. The attention-stealing and engagement-maximising internet with all it horribly effects only exist, due to advertising. And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
This is a wild take. Most serious media companies would collapse without online ad revenue. Google would be dead, along with all the products that sorta run the world like maps. But even local publications, like your independent city news site, which you presumably think is good, also die instantly.
The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.
Did you not read:
> And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
We're in an information crisis. Most people don't know what is true or false anymore. Google and Meta didn't make it better and in fact might have contributed to it. I'd say let's go back to 1996.
Real household median income in the US has risen by more than 25% since 1996, largely driven by technology built for and by the ecosystem you want to pull out by the roots.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
That would be a staggering cut to everyone’s standard of living.
assuming 2% inflation over 30 years, that means that a dollar in 1996 is now worth $1.81. 80% depreciation versus 25% increase in income is not comparable.
The wealth inequality in the past 30 years has dramatically shifted in favor of the ultra rich.
Technology has been used to create illegal monopolies -> too big to fail -> surely we can't / don't need to regulate this -> tech companies get away with murder and laugh all the way to the bank.
A company like Meta could finesse their algorythms to bias people against antitrust action and you would never know.
To repeat the talking point of tech companies that "technology has helped us, therefore we should not regulate it in any way" is to accept the premise of people that spend every waking hour of their day figuring out what they can get away with to screw you over.
Oh no, would Google and Meta be dead? How will we manage?!
Why do you think podcasters give you recommendations for mattresses?
Yeah, but why don't we ever hear any MEPs talk about it like that?
They buy ads too. It’d adversely affect their campaign budgets. (Sure, it would adversely affect their competitors’ too, but second-order effects are usually too complex for politicians to understand.)
MEPs want to write rules that mean they get to fine rich US companies. Local advertising might be worse for you overall but you'd have to do more work to get less free money.
True but the whole “influencer” and “creative” industry would collapse overnight. A few large ones would survive on their patreon income, most would collapse and have to get a real job, if those are still around.
…and nothing of value would be lost.
Mostly true but there are a few good channels with very practical information for picking up new skills (gardening, woodwork, playing an instrument, etc) as well as looking up troubleshooting information.
Those too would be lost.
Sure some drag out three minutes into fifteen, but whatever…
In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.
Magazines primarily make money through advertising.
Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.
You do realize that sponsored stories aren’t modern invention? Magazines were full of it too, sometimes disclosed, most often not.
And? They’d be banned too.
In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.
It’s a bit harder to find stuff in a magazine that helps troubleshoot a water pump at night…
I’m going to shock you, but you can pay for magazine-like content through the Internet right now.
That information used to come with the water pump
If it's really that good, you'll pay for it with the money you saved in advertising. You're paying for the ads, don't forget. Plenty of people used to pay for things like woodworking classes, back when there was money. Doing a woodworking class in person at a woodworking shop will teach you much better than youtube.
We should do something about that too, yes.
The addictive design is in service of ads. Instead of regulating software, tax ad revenue to disincentivize building a business model around user profiling and tracking.
Tax ad revenue. Increase advertising prices. Advertisers pay more to sell their wares. Consumers pay more to consume their wares.
Vendors won’t see RoI on their ad spend and will stop buying. Simples.
Vendors now cannot get X pounds with Y pounds advertising outlay to make Z pounds per unit of wares. To continue making Z money per unit of wares, with previous S pounds price charged to consumers per unit, add significantly more than reduction in Y advertising per unit to S to offset reduced "brand" "awareness".
Brand awareness is a Red Queen’s race. Attention is a finite resource, and ad spend mainly exists to counteract the spend of your competitors.
No one buying shit anymore. People still buying shit elsewhere. GDP and tax revenues fall relative to others. Deflationary aspects. Market leaders complain through lobbying groups. Repeal. Back to square one.
That’s just a restatement of your previous point. Pretend I restated my response.
I don't agree. They are two separate depictions of what might happen as a result of applying a tax on advertising. They may well coincide with each other, however. Saying that the second is a restatement of the first is like saying two interpretations of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" are restating the same fact.
Governments see reduction in tax income and GDP and repeal taxes. In UK: Signal "mansion" tax on properties valued above X price to collect recurring Y pounds total tax. Market adjusts valuations based on probability of tax. Number of houses still worth at least X now diminishes. Now cannot collect recurring Y pounds. "Mansion" tax delayed.
You have this complex system that has reached some sort of relative equilibrium based on say a set S of ten sorts of tax rates, along with a set F of factors (size millions), with the government's tax revenue R being one of those outputs. Then some guy in the government called G signals to the government and public that he can increase R by X by fiddling with a member of S, or maybe adding a member to S (of size say ten).
Is G stupid, or does he just lean towards retaining the public's affection, his relatively low salary, potential under the table payments and whatever networking opportunities his job provides? I lean towards the latter.
Why instead of?
Do both.
The downside to this is that services become class based again then.
Instagram is the same service for everyone, regardless if you are homeless or a billionaire, it is exactly because it is an ad based model. Same for google and facebook.
These models are "classless business" incarnate, and people absolutely hate them. It's part bewildering and part bemusing.
And yet the Mata price jumped yesterday. For some investors this is apparently a feature.
This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.
Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”
I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.
We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.
But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.
But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.
People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.
Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.
However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).
Unless they regulate how algorithms can work rather than filtering what they can show?
I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
A functioning democratic leadership listens when told they've done good, and listens when told they messed up.
Arguing that they should receive no support or positive reactions because they also deserve blame is how the center and left break down their own power: Believing that disengagement from one another is a stronger moral obligation than working together and fixing shit with people who are willing to listen and work.
This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.
EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.
The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.
The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.
This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.
They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.
They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.
The EU is an institution that is democratically legitimized at every level (Either through direct elections in the parliament or through elections to the appropriate national government in the case of the Council / Commission). Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes the Conservatives do some messed up lawfare to introduce fucked up things like Chat Control, but at least they were voted in and can be voted out again.
Big Tech is some foreign rich dudes being dictators of their little fiefdom doing whatever they can to make themselves even richer. We have zero control over them and what they do to our society in this pursuit. No elections. No recalls. No public votes.
The only correct reaction is for the sovereign to assert its sovereignty and lay out some ground rules.
Maybe you missed it but the commission and parliament consists of a lot of people and groups that are all pushing for different things. While we have chat control being actively pushed by some groups actively funded by Facebook we have other groups like this working against Facebook.
If social media was just your family, friends and acquaintances sharing stuff like it used to be you may have a point. But with the algorithm feed its turned into a der sturmer like propaganda pipeline.
Would love to see the overlap between the average anti-Big Tech HN commenter cheering on this regulatory advance, and the average HN commenter who thinks hard drugs should be legalized and that the War on Drugs is bad. Because these are contradictory positions! Either you think people should be free to do things that are addictive or you don't
No, those positions aren't inherently contradictory. There are plenty of viewpoints that make them consistent.
This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.
> are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.
I’m sorry but this is just not real.
There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.
If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.
Which is exactly the problem with this whole discussion. On the far side, you hear that it's heroin! It's fentanyl! It's alcohol! Facebook groups are the modern opium den! But when actually challenged, it's oh no no, that's a metaphor, it's metaphorical fentanyl, not real fentanyl. People on Instagram are metaphorically injecting metaphorical drugs into their metaphorical veins.
It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.
> all of the recent academic literature
The academic literature funded by what grants from what stakeholders? Like the social media research from Harvard Kennedy now? The research that came after its social media research lead was fired and a $500mm Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant occurred somehow in parallel [0] [1]?
That recent research?
Or the research that was occurring on social media before that? Surely you're not arguing in that bad of faith, despite where I could speculate your RSUs might have came from. But this seems an extremely naive take if not made in bad faith.
[0] https://www.thecrimson[.]com/article/2023/2/2/donovan-forced... [1] https://www.npr[.]org/2023/12/04/1217086770/disinformation-r...
Really? Would you mind pointing us to all that academic literature?
And compulsive behaviour is definitely something that medication can help with.
These apps should be banned or be forced to only show feeds from accounts you follow in chronological order, nothing more. Perhaps with some basic search if you want to discover something new, but cumbersome enough so that you don't spend hours on it.
I know someone he keeps scrolling the minute they wake up. They are behind on chores, life stuff, but keep scrolling.
That wouldn't be too bad in itself if not for sheer amount of misinformation that is being served. Especially health related. Thanks to AI enhanced videos showing parasites everywhere, person now has developed eating disorder and thinks their poor health is due to parasites and not the fact they spend whole day on Instagram. Now they started ordering "supplements" and "courses" those people peddle. I tried to report these accounts, but Meta insist they are no breaching any T&C.
Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
So, how do we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts of the free flow of information on social media, where all citizens are invited to broadcast?
> all citizens are invited to broadcast
Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart. A nice natural protection against extremes.
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
I don't follow, the argument is against the addictive design of the feed algorithms, not the information being shared per se.
Nothing in this is geared towards curtailing platforms like social media to exist, it's trying to curtail the design of psychological manipulation for "engagement". Ragebait is the most common case, it makes people interact with content if it enrages them; another common case is to feed kids with slop content that makes them fixated on the platform, scrolling endlessly trying to get the elusive dopamine hit quite similar to the feeling of playing a slot machine.
I think framing this as the EU trying to censor platforms because people post content against the current order is a big cynical leap. I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that? Maybe you have ulterior motives as well?
> Ragebait
Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.
> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?
Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
> Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.
Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Other kinds of ragebait: creating a whole profile dedicated only to take the most extreme view on issues (on both sides), only to make people angry so they comment or like/interact with the content.
> Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.
When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue. You verge into the false equivalency territory, something before was addictive so now that we have something even more addictive it's ok just from precedence? Different levels and degrees demand different solutions.
> So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.
That's absolutely cynical and a thought-terminating cliché since it's impossible to contradict you. I understand it's your opinion but it verges into conspiratorial thinking which I don't think anyone can de-escalate you from except for yourself.
> As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.
Not really but you constantly rehash similar arguments in topics surrounding the EU so I'm trying to figure out what exactly is behind that. Ulterior motives don't need to be that drastic, it can simply be "I don't support the EU as a project" since you never state that but consistently take that side of the argument.
> Ragebait = fanning flames through misinformation or disinformation. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that anything inciting rage is true? I constantly get fed content on Instagram and YouTube with outright lies about my country (verifiable lies, not something I judged as lies) which are intended to cause rage and engagement. That's ragebait.
Thank you! That's the first time I heard a sensible explanation of the word that's being used so much. That's indeed something different and malevolent.
> When it gets to a device that you are carrying with you 100% of the time it's a whole other level and degree of an issue.
But if social media was non-existent, then people would carry these devices with them for traditional broadcasts.
Let me make a comparison that I think is very on-topic: Alcohol is a traditional drug, less addictive and less harmful than many of the worst drugs. But more addictive and more harmful than many other drugs. Wouldn't it be strange if governments, regulators and rulers only focused on the other drugs and said nothing about alcohol? Would I be a Russian, Chinese or Iranian spy or a jew (as another poster just insinuated) if I said "Hey, what about alcohol?".
Traditional mass media regulation vs Internet regulation is not only an EU issue. What I said about the EU regulators could just as much be said about any other government doing the same. I don't think it's unjustified conspiratorial thinking to look at how rulers want to control speech and the flow of information for their own benefit. It's expected. If screen addiction was what they truly wanted to fight, then the EU Commission would also act against traditional broadcasts in the same way they act against social media. Just like rulers and regulators have acted in all kinds of ways against alcohol, including prohibition and other extreme measures.
> Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.
More outlandish conspiracy theories on hackernews...
You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
What messages are not being allowed to be 'streamed into the brains of the population' exactly? Are you suggesting, for example, that claims made by the US president should not be shown on TV? Are you suggesting that these are not then analysed and scrutinised by people on TV?
Speaking from the UK, the state controls the media.
There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.
And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.
UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.
> You are in fact wrong - see the myriad of rules advertising, especially what can be advertised on children's TV.
That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Not even that, it is just an off-topic rant about government censorship.
> It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.
Also known as Russian, Iranian, Israeli and Chinese bot farms.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/experts-w...
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/09/g-s1-9010/russia-bot-farm-ai-...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/facebook-bot-fa...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-allies-using-armies-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...
People calling this stuff "popular movements" and "citizen journalists" are either naive or complicit.
"As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator."
Seems like I predicted your behaviour almost perfectly, you accusing me within minutes of being - let's see: a Russian, a Jew, an Iranian, and a bot. Probably you'll accuse me of being the other things as well within little time.
I'm not sure what you mean.
I have not accused you of being any of those things, please make sure to read messages you respond to carefully before deflecting to outrage.
Those "citizen journalists" threatening "those in power" (e.g. our democratic societies) however? Yeah no shit they're malign actors.
I'd say: the fediverse. Everyone can "broadcast" and discuss freely without having a central power that can censor or subtly manipulate the broader discussion.
Or websites. Everyone can "broadcast" via their website.
The US should start fining all EU created software.
On what grounds? Retaliation?
While it is genuinely a huge concern, the legal measure are not going to address it. One has to consider the overall picture, not just a corner of it.
The ship has sailed. There will be addictive designs, products, services etc. The very theme of a business is centered around keeping the customers addicted. It's just a matter of time, every business on this planet would, with the help of AI, make their products and services extremely addictive.
I personally think the answer should be mandating user controls of said algorithms. If you have a large social media site that suggests results or provides a feed then you must allow users to configure said feed.
The default should be simple, something like time-ordered of followed only with opt in for recommendations. Ideally I'd love to be able to swap algorithms for something open source but setting a standard there rather than just mandating a level of control seems a bigger hurdle.
It seems entirely anti-consumer that I am just the behest of whatever Google or Meta decide is most profitable to show me instead of finding important news or entertainment in a way that I want.
The entire advertising industry is predicated on the principle of preempting personal preferences with paid placements. (Sorry, didn’t start out that sentence expecting to alliterate it all but it just came out like that).
Literally every ad you see is a business deciding ‘instead of showing you what you came here to see, here’s something else, which I am showing you only to benefit my business.’
I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
> I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.
That's a baby I'm happy to lose along with its bathwater.
"The ship has sailed."
Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.
Do you think people made similar arguments about privacy before the GDPR?
Fun sidenote: On a recent Hotmail post on here, I saw a screenshot of hotmail V1 (way before M$ took over). They had a prominent button on their homepage about privacy.
GDPR ship has largely sailed too. E.g. the illegal Pay or Okay is widespread, including in Instagram.