Comment by Memosyne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Memosyne | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of the Person of Interest episode "Q&A" where a software company was specifically targeting people with mental illnesses and debt to satisfy their advertisers. Some serious effort needs to go into preventing algorithms from suggesting this stuff, lest we risk a few negligent developers threatening the lives of millions.

Then again, that course of action could be a slippery slope: what happens if the algorithms start censoring things that could potentially upset us? We could end up in bubbles, completely unprepared and unwilling to face the hardships that life presents.

I think the problem with personalized advertising is that it often isn't personal, since the algorithms base their assumptions on data gathered by observing people who haven't lived through the same experiences. I mean, yes, we can average things out and disregard outliers in the hopes of maximizing our finances, but by doing so we'd be neglecting the individual circumstances befallen a person.

I suppose this is the million dollar ethical dilemma that advertising companies are struggling with right? Too much moderation makes content stale, but a lack of it makes things dangerous.

I would think that the impact of this content is overrated. You aren't not prepared for the hardships of life just because you are in an algorithmic filter bubble. People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content. This reminds me of the discussion in the early 2000s about first person shooter games. You don't turn into a school shooter because you played those.

There's a life outside the internet.

>People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content

This was never the point. The article describes how people who have a predisposition to self-harm get an above-average amount of content related to that, which just compounds the negative feelings they may already have and thus possibly accelerate them actually making the step of harming themselves. Respectfully, but you seem very insensitive to the subject matter.

Is there research on the matter? Can displaying graphic content actually nudge somebody into committing suicide? While this may sound insensitive to the matter, I'd rather opt for having data than join into the generall HN hatred of algorithmic optimization of content.

Yes, there is ample research that shows suicide and self-harm feature elements of contagion and suggestibility. See eg "werther effect"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

eg this example of media reporting guidelines that appear to have reduced deaths by suicide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110

> In Austria, "Media Guidelines for Reporting on Suicides", have been issued to the media since 1987 as a suicide-preventive experiment. Since then, the aims of the experiment have been to reduce the numbers of suicides and suicide attempts in the Viennese subway and to reduce the overall suicide numbers. After the introduction of the media guidelines, the number of subway suicides and suicide attempts dropped more than 80% within 6 months. Since 1991, suicides plus suicide attempts - but not the number of suicides alone - have slowly and significantly increased. The increase of passenger numbers of the Viennese subway, which have nearly doubled, and the decrease of the overall suicide numbers in Vienna (-40%) and Austria (-33%) since mid 1987 increase the plausibility of the hypothesis, that the Austrian media guidelines have had an impact on suicidal behavior.

Interesting, thank you! Is this effect specific to suicide or are other behaviours such as mass shootings also related to this?

It seems quite likely that the inevitable publicity of mass shootings encourages copycats. Occasionally the shooters even leave a note / manifesto explaining this.

I don't mean to be a weekend psychiatrist, but sending the girl who committed suicide pictures of hangings -- consistently -- seems unhealthy, or at least unethical to me. The father spoke about "helping to kill" his daughter, and the social media being "partly responsible". I agree with that phrasing: they're not wholly responsible, as much as I don't believe that everyone who plays shooter games becomes a real-life killer. But there seems a clear (to me, again, not a subject matter expert) that there is a correlation, and if you get your social media in front of a few billion people, the numbers add up and you can't just absolve yourself of all responsibility. We have to look after each other, take care of the weaker and more vulnerable.

Here in the UK, gambling and gambling advertising is legal. Gambling companies are licensed by the Gambling Commission and are required to follow a code of conduct with respect to social responsibility.

If a gambling company sent sales representatives to Gambling Anonymous meetings to offer free bets to recovering addicts, there would rightly be a public outcry and that company would likely be penalised or stripped of their license. I can open an incognito tab right now, visit an online support forum for gambling addiction and almost immediately start seeing advertising for gambling; thanks to ad tracking algorithms, those advertisements will start following me around the internet. That behaviour isn't any less antisocial simply because it's automated and online.

The idea that gambling companies should be allowed to specifically target gambling addicts is not a popular policy position, but it's the default behaviour of online advertising platforms. Personalisation and targeting algorithms are innately amoral; they only reflect the values of a company or a society if they are specifically engineered to do so.

This isn't a binary argument between "the internet should be a lawless free-for-all" or "the internet should be regulated until it resembles network television". It is primarily an argument about corporate social responsibility - companies should not be insulated against the externalities of their business practices. We're never going to completely agree on how social media companies should behave and moderating content at scale is immensely challenging, but that doesn't give them a free pass to ignore the risks and negative effects of their platform.

Given the gambling example, should we be mad at the advertisers or at the forum for making money off of allowing such ads?

If the Gambling Association made a bunch of posters about their new lotto and paid anyone who put them up in buildings, and the person running the Gambling Anonymous meeting came and picked up a few to put up during their meetings, do you blame the Gambling Association or the one who picked up the posters?

Ads are currently such a nightmare because almost everyone making money off of them has chosen to go with services that handle everything instead of filtering their ads and hosting them locally because letting those services handle it all pays better. It allows for far more tracking and targeted ads, sometimes for better and sometimes for much worse.

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