Mark Zuckerberg, the modern Bond villain, is now coming for your children | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg, the modern Bond villain, is now coming for your children

theguardian.com

55 pointsFairDune45 comments

I don't get the hyperventilating about this. If you don't want your kids to use children's Instagram, then prohibit them from doing so. There's a lot of stuff on the internet children shouldn't see or be involved with. If you think Instagram Kids is a member of that set then treat it that way.

It is way worse than cigarettes, on so many levels. It is much more profound than one would initially assume.

Social media and modern micro targeting advertising, which plays strongly into your individual hopes and fears (to maximize the likelihood of getting a response from you—which is abusive), creates a validation feedback loop commonly seen in Cluster B Personality Disorders.

Young people (as in developing minds that have not mentally reached adulthood—occurs around age 25) have been primed and trained to make fake, empty, and unthoughtful posts needlessly (i.e. daily or several times per day) just to gain “likes” (also known as approval) from their peers. They also post to social media so that the algorithm treats them nicer, even if they are unaware of this on an explicit level.

Psychologists have been warning about this: how an entire generation of currently developing minds is going to be a lot more narcissistic and a lot less empathetic than previous generations due to this invasive and traumatic long-term exposure.

I am luckier than most: as an adult (with a print-related disability) I almost never have to go on websites that serve ads, as I have access to special libraries and news repositories (with breaking news sources) that legitimately keep me endlessly entertained (see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26829865). I also use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and Curio to augment those databases. I probably have not used YouTube in 6 months, due to the above and I am no Luddite! The only social media account that I have is HN.

It's already way too late to hyperventilate about insta for kids. Most of my friend's and colleagues kids are on tiktok and they are around 9-12.

You can't take away phones from them else they feel peer pressure.

People over here are blaming facebook but video apps like tiktok should carry a heavier burden for a lot of the personality disorders in kids

> You can't take away phones from them else they feel peer pressure.

I don't think that this is sufficient justification for abdicating parental responsibility to moderate and limit phone usage.

A lot of people allow their kids to do unhealthy or unsafe things out of ignorance. It's completely reasonable to advocate against the sellers of those things.

People can always choose not to buy your unethical or unsafe product. That doesn't make it suddenly ethical and safe, nor does it exempt you from criticism.

Do you think it’s OK to market cigarettes to kids?

You’re arguing a strawman. This is like when someone has an opinion against war and the war hawks ask, “Why do you hate America?” I don’t think there’s any equivalence between tobacco products and social media. I personally use social media to stay connected with family and some college friends. Do some people have a toxic relationship with social media and pretend to be the Jones’? Absolutely. Some people also have an unhealthy relationship with food. Should we prevent McDonalds from selling happy meals? Should we prevent companies from selling sugary cereals?

Do you think cigarettes and Instagram are comparable products?

Yes, in the sense that they are both products that should not be marketed to kids.

Your basis for claiming that these products are comparable seems to be an entirely arbitrary opinion of yours. If you think Instagram is harmful then feel free to do some parenting and keep your own children away from it. But if you think that Instagram and cigarettes are comparably harmful, then you have an incredibly niche opinion that you shouldn’t expect anybody else to give much consideration to.

I agree with his opinion. The analogy holds quite well if you don't try to stretch it. Both products are attractive to kids, in different ways, but ultimately harm them - also in different ways. Nonetheless, they are comparable in this regard.

In that same sense cigarettes and bicycles are comparably harmful. Both products are attractive to kids, in different ways, but ultimately harm them - also in different ways.

As a parent, it’s your responsibility to choose what risks your children are exposed to. The basis of the comparison is that use of either product entails a certain level of risk, just as every single thing you can possibly do entails a certain level of risk. However the risks associated with each of those products are not comparable at all, and neither is the reward side of the equation.

There is an established consensus that cigarettes are bad for kids. Sure, parents should keep parenting, but it’s acceptable to create messaging that Instagram is bad for children. It’s a public health issue.

No one is creating messaging that bicycles are bad for kids. There are safety guidelines for using bicycles.

There is no need for safety guidelines for cigarettes or Instagram for children, because there’s no benefit for children to use those things.

> It’s a public health issue.

It’s really just a parenting issue.

> There is no need for safety guidelines for cigarettes or Instagram for children, because there’s no benefit for children to use those things.

It’s a social tool, there’s plenty of risk for harm with any form of socialization, especially with children. There’s also plenty of benefit for children to have with socialization, so your comments here just seem very obviously wrong to me.

If you’re a parent you may find those risks to be unacceptable. Especially if you’re a parent who relies on other parties to do most of your parenting for you. But all the arguments put forward here just make the claim that there’s a risk for harm, and as such instagram must be comparably harmful to cigarettes. This is simply an anti-rational argument. It’s a risk decision, just like all the other risk decisions parents make for their children.

It is comparably harmful to cigarettes. It is not for children.

Instagram is not a social tool. Instagram is a commercial marketing tool where the users are the product being sold, at the whims of the latest behavioral psychology tactics. It is thinly veiled as a social tool.

This is not comparable to typical socialization in children.

Bicycles aren't "ultimately harmful". The risk of Instagram and cigarettes causing permanent, irreversible damage is very high. Also, neither offers any health benefits.

Bicycles are fitness toys that do not harm the user directly, unlike cigarettes and instagram.

Of course they do. Children hurt themselves all the time on bicycles.

Children also hurt themselves running. That's not the same thing as a product that is designed to cause harm.

Social media is not intentionally designed to cause harm. It simply has the potential to cause harm.

>Social media is not intentionally designed to cause harm

Disagree 110%.

It’s not a niche opinion that Instagram is considered harmful for a person’s health. Products that are considered harmful to health need extra scrutiny when children are involved.

Cigarettes destroy your mouth, lungs, and cause cancer. And they’re so bad we passed laws that you cannot sell them to minors. I’m no fan of Instagram, but if you don’t want your kid on social media, don’t let them go on social media. Should we also ban porn sites, Internet forums? Since search engines can be used to find inappropriate websites or set the wrong expectation about body image, sex, etc - should that all be banned?

I don’t care for social media but I certainly can’t get behind all this unnecessary cancel culture.

How can parents prevent their kids from using Instagram? Even if you block it on your router and phone they’ll get around it. I see this argument a lot and people never give an exhaustive way to stop their children from doing so called bad things. It’s not that simple lol. Parenting™ is not a cure all nor is it even a specific technique to be employed...

Anyways, can’t your logic be extended to everything? Agree or disagree it’s pretty easy to see why some parents would disagree with the decision

I guess one could just not give their kid a phone, or if they do, make it a BlackBerry.

Why prohibit my kid from doing something when I can abdicate my responsibility to the child completely and rely on mass hysteria or government intervention to do my job for me? That’s basically the argument against what you’re saying.

Can we just take a moment to reflect on what Zuckerberg did with regular Instagram? The typical pattern of abuse: say you won't do x, then do x (namely that he would keep it independent and not merge anything with facebook), then bully the original founders out of their company

If you sell your company you lose your company. Everyone with the sophistication to be in a position to sell a company to Facebook for ten figures knows this. The main purpose of Zuckerberg saying “I won’t do X” is to give the Instagram some reputational repair so that when they get tsk-tsked on Twitter or at fancy parties in Napa that they can say “Hey he said he wouldn’t!” They knew he would.

If the sale contract says, "In the event that Acquirer does X, Acquirer will pay $100B to the EFF.", one might reasonably believe it, especially if $SUBSTANTIAL is held in escrow.

Yeah those seem like terms that acquirers will just be cool with

They won't mind at all if they never intend to do X and it helps them get a discount.

Poison pills like that are common in conservation easements, for example. Our family owns land with an easement which, if I recall correctly, states that anyone wishing to break the easement will owe back-taxes reaching back to 1992, with compounded interest, on the development rights to the land.

In return, we were able to keep the family farm when my grandparents passed away.

> then bully the original founders out of their company

They sold Instagram. It was no longer their company.

It’s too bad, too. Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it.

> Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it.

Would they? Why do you assume that they’d be able to grow to their current levels without Facebook money, engineering and know how?

Building, growing and sustaining big social network is truly challenging, as we can see by how few companies were able to do it successfully. Even companies with bottomless pockets like Google failed at it spectacularly.

Didn't they already have a large market share before selling to Facebook? They might not have grown as quickly, but considering that they had a foot in the door, and people were already considering Facebook to be the "old-person" social media, they might have done well otherwise.

adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity, they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

> adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity

Then why did Google fail?

> they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

They had few million users - that’s pretty good, but far far for being really successful. Everyone (including me) thought that Facebook was crazy for spending one billion on some random hipster photo app.

Technical talent is necessary but not sufficient. You need other things: a niche that hasn’t already been taken over due to network effects, the right design to address that market, possibly the marketing chops to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you can try to tilt the playing field by exploiting advantages that you have. That is not a guarantee of success either.

Technical talent is plentiful in Silicon Valley as long as you have the secret ingredient, stock options actually worth a lot of money.

Google+ bungled the very first part, the need they were serving. It is somewhat common for tech giants to hire renowned technical experts whether in design, engineering, etc but totally bungle the very first part. Just throw money at these experts and they will suddenly appear. As you can see, money isn’t much of an advantage tech giants have against fast growing upstarts, especially with valuations of high growth tech companies.

Doesn't that describe his behavior in creating Facebook as well?

hmmm thats what happened at oculus...

If this corporate fetish isn't on the same borderline as pedophilia. I don't know what is. I absolutely despise this form of capitalism. Businesses nowadays have no moral responsibility. No ethical responsibility.

What makes this worse, is now even the adults (ahem parents) will have an extra excuse of a babysitter. Out of the lack of effort or just plain ignorance. I am sad for this new generation of kids being targeted from their formative years. Being hooked on social media psychologically. Not being able to form an opinion that is of themselves. Being cogs in the SM machine.

It's almost funny I just saw some startup the other day, forgot the name, that wants to sort of be a LinkedIn network for young kids. I almost lost it.

> Businesses nowadays have no moral responsibility. No ethical responsibility.

This is the natural outcome of capitalism plus separation of church and state. We're feeling the results now.

AOL had me early. I think you know what happened.

I don’t necessarily believe Instagram or any social media for children is a good idea, but these kinds of headlines “the modern Bond villain” are a bit hard to take seriously.

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