Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today?

Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media and disinformation in the same way we did leaded gas. The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused but they did everything in their power to cover it up in the name of profit. Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.

View on HN

Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers.

Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. They are hyper-attuned to the way people respond to their content, and they'll do anything to get a reaction, the more intense the better. And if that means siccing a mob on somebody, so be it. If it means doing stunts that endanger people in the real world, fine. And polarization is the best technique they've stumbled onto yet: say stuff that enrages people to get them to engage with the post, and then pick up followers among those that watch the rage with glee.

Just about every successful influencer has done a post about how hard it is to be internet-famous. It's almost always about how the negative effects of their work get reflected back at them. They know how the things they say harm people, they just want the negativity to be directed elsewhere.

There's a lot of debate about how social media companies should be regulated, how much censorship should be allowed, how much platforms should subsidize legacy media etc. But none of it will matter if we don't rein in what's considered acceptable in the creator economy.

> Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators.

This is like blaming smokers instead of Philip Morris.

I think your analogy is pretty apt. However, even though I don't think you can give corporations a free ride just because 'people could choose not to use the product', this is not an absolute! 'People could choose not to use the product' does hold a lot of truth.

When social media companies are trying to make the media as addictive as possible to keep you scrolling and viewing ads, and employing psychological exploits to do so, it's not quite as simple as 'people can just choose not to use it'.

It's hardly a free choice when they're actively undermining your ability to choose freely.

Sounds like you agree with OP then. Content creators have the same motivation as the platform company. They want to make as many people view their content as possible, failing that they would like to make their exiting community see their content as much as possible. Exact same motivation just at a smaller scale, as they are just one part of the system.

See also gambling and addictive gambling behaviors in video games, like loot boxes

Yup. It's blaming smokers for second-hand smoke. We need to figure out the social-media equivalent of "no smoking" signs.

A circle-cross with the Twitter bird in the middle would do.

Pre covid there was a pub chain in london that banned use of electronic devices, presumably to get people talking instead of tweeting.

Went in with a colleague to have lunch and go over some diagrams. Got laptop out so we could see the diagrams and then got kicked out, had lunch down the road instead.

If I’m eating out on my own I’ll read a kindle. That’s not allowed. Read a dead tree is fine though. Pathetic.

Sooo... Use a notebook or printouts?

I think it’s a little bit more like blaming advertisers and Hollywood for promoting smoking, rather than the producer or consumer

More like blaming the tobacco farmers instead of Phillip Morris, although it falls apart at the point that I’m not sure tobacco was seen as anything more than a commodity.

Smoking hurts oneself primarily, whilst angry internet mobs hurt others

Sure, it's the influencers pumping the oil, but it's social media networks running the pipelines, and they're splitting the profits.

Unfortunately, toxic content is a lot harder to regulate than toxic chemicals, when one man's truth is another man's fake news.

This may be a "don't hate the player hate the game" type situation. Influencers or aspiring influencers are doing what they do because they are working inside a construct that's set up to reward them for it. They are not blameless, but they are not conspiring to create that damage that social media had done to society, they are in s sense being put up to it by the platforms and users (who by the way I don't think should get a free pass either - PSA: delete twitter)

I guess I put more of the blame on the influencers because they are the ones making editorial decisions. Sure the platforms are optimizing for engagement too, but it's all content-agnostic. The influencers choose their words carefully, and they choose harmful words because it makes them more money.

I don't think it's quite fair to label it content-agnostic. I mean it sort of technically is, but practically it isn't.

By pushing 'engagement' at all costs, it's essentially inevitable that all the terrible behaviors we see from 'content creators' happen. I agree that they are far from blameless, but when your entire platform is practically globally available to anybody and you only reward unsavory behavior... you're going to get unsavory behavior.

There could be many, many people behaving ethically, and most people may never even see any of them due to the way the platforms are set up.

It's technically content-agnostic in the most technical sense, but practically it's one big system designed to incentivize and surface unethical behavior.

> and you only reward unsavory behavior... you're going to get unsavory behavior

They don't only reward that. They reward any engagement, and some content creators have raced to the bottom in terms of creating divisive content.

Setting up an incentives structure for racing to the bottom is still more blameworthy than reacting to the incentives by racing to the bottom. It's a question of relative power: being in a position to even be able to set up incentives for others is inherently a position of power.

It's not about power. Making cars doesn't mean you're responsible for people murdering other people with those cars, even though you're in a position to supply cars and they aren't. There is no power involved - no one is being coerced into behaving badly.

And the reason that it makes them more money is because that is exactly what the algorithm is designed to encourage and what it pays out the most for.

If we were still in the era where feeds were just a chronological list of posts by people you're subscribed to, that might be a little different.

But the feed is manipulated by algorithms that dump any non-toxic things away into obscurity while upranking and featuring the most controversial things in order to get more engagement. That's by design.

Both are absolutely to blame. Both the social media companies and the content creators.

Both are choosing to ignore the damage which is a direct result of their actions and they both ignore long term damage in the name of an immediate profit return.

There no reason we have to choose one or the other when both are clearly willing to destroy.

I agree, and they both refuse to change (moderate the platforms, make good faith efforts to reduce or disclose bias, etc.) because money trumps ethics.

I’m not sure what solutions exist though, I’m in favor of regulatory action but it’s often just moving the goalposts as there are always loopholes to be found.

It's a false notion that these influencers are the ones making these editorial decisions. Imagine you are in charge of ad spend for a large corporation. You majored literally in advertising with a minor in psychology, you don't give a damn about the morality beyond whether or not you leave profit on the table. You simply aren't going to hire influencers who don't play this game how you want it to be played and take advantage of these dark patterns. As a result, the market looks how it is because people who don't play the game aren't landing jobs.

> they are the ones making editorial decisions

...

> they choose harmful words because it makes them more money

OK but who is responsible for the fact that choosing harmful words is more profitable?

The audience of the stuff that content creators create and the platforms distribute collectively decides what is more profitable. It's a positive feedback system and ignoring any of the parts will result in a failed "solution".

> Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days,

Yeah, because they're the Standard Oil and Aramco of this story.

> but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators.

That's like blaming the owners of mom-and-pop filling ("gas") stations for the ills of leaded petrol ("gas").

Putting the blame on influencers makes no sense. Content creators play this game but they didn't create it, companies participating in the market created this environment and ultimately fund these influencers. A content creator is basically a paid actor.

I disagree. The future doesn't have less social media, it has more. We won't look back with contempt, but amusement much as we do today at early cgi and tabloid efforts.

I don't love the idea with the current iteration, but every mass media invention has the exact same trope play out as we're seeing with social media.

1) first adopters and skeptics

2) major use

3) exploitation of those users

4) combo of regulation and individuals becoming more savvy

We're deep in phase three. It might get worse still, but I don't see much worse until you factor in additional game changers (deep fakes seem most obvious, but my money is on something currently unknown)

A new equilibrium will be found, better for some interests and worse for others.

It depends what you mean by "social media". Facebook already feels very dated and Instagram is getting that way.

People will get bored of it all, I know I have. Right now my platform of choice is Discord. It might technically be social media but it's way less toxic as it encourages people to build relationships rather than shouting at each other.

Or acting as faux celebrities. That is what I find to be the worst aspect of social media. I don't really care as much about disinformation and such, but the amplification of ego is what truly makes things toxic whether or not people are right about anything.

I use Facebook for hyper-local news and groups only. I have no other use for it. I use Insta to follow subcultural interests, such as vegan cooks, shapers, small niche bands I like, car modders, and unusual cat reels.

I had something interesting happen to me last week on Insta. It was very late at night and I was about to fall asleep, when a live feed alert informed me that a band I liked was talking live directly with just about anyone about their new album release.

It was amazing to see them that open and welcoming to their fans and to be able to instantly download their album after being told it had just dropped. That kind of instant communication is wild.

That seems highly unlikely. Almost half of social media users are considering leaving the platforms, while around 10% have deleted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other app. We also know that the data shows that the pandemic increased the likelihood of people leaving social media, which would seem odd on the face of it, because you would think it would lead to more adoption due to being at home. What happened is that the pandemic was a catalyst for people finding what was truly meaningful in their personal lives; social media wasn't it.

> Maybe an overwrought comparison

Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful.

Lead causes brain damage and kills people.

What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered.

Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy in general. If society has failed the test, the test has been useful indeed.

That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.

Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered.

So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case.

Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).

I am not at all a proponent of social media. The discourse is broken by petty, idiotic exchanges. The signal-to-noise ration is far too low and the sophisticated advertising techniques have become a form of surveillance that I reject.

But petty, idiotic exchanges have always existed. So have ignorant people, propaganda, gullible people, and fanatics. They can meet in basements, in taverns, in temples, in arenas... The fundamental problem is failing education and social disorder.

It takes great liberty of metaphor to compare social media to a real toxin. I share people's dislike of social media. But I will look back on the past decade and not blame any of the social-media companies for the idiocy of people who should know better through public education.

Lead poisoning does have a clear biological mechanism, establishing it as a toxin in a way that social media does not.

However, the liberty of the metaphor is well justified.

Social media is a plausible (not proven, but plausible) factor in a 57% increase in teen suicide between 2008 and 2018 (noting that rates were stable for the years 2000-2008, and that 2006 was the watershed year for smartphones and social media)[1].

I'm not motivated to dig out the numerous resources showing the deleterious influence of social media on teen psychology, but it doesn't take much searching if you are open. There are clear psychological mechanisms, and Facebook especially was clearly and explicitly designed to take advantage of these psychological mechanisms.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr69/NVSR-69-11-508.pdf

> clearly and explicitly designed to take advantage of these psychological mechanisms.

"Explicit manipulation" is a modus operandi of business and politics. At what point it becomes mephistophelian is largely determined by group conventions.

Social media accounts can become for some people an avatar of self-worth. There is even the reputational business model, i.e. linking business profiles. (Let's leave aside for now the question of streaming sex-work and voyeurism.)

But for the vast majority of users (I estimate hundreds of millions of users, on the back of a napkin), social media is not fatal or damaging. People connect, check friends' news and say hello, then disconnect.

> not proven, but plausible

We know that social media has been used in some cases for bullying and cruelty. The evidence has been tried in court. Social media has been a means of communication in these cases, like the anonymous telephone call or the stamped papermail. (The ghoulish Edgar J. Hoover had his vile FBI operation send at least one letter to MLK telling the civil-rights leader to kill himself.)[1]

The worse tendencies of human nature have of course been known to us for some time. Adam Smith wrecked the job prospects of his friend David Hume. On Usenet of yore, there were flame wars: people pursuing a quarrel because someone is wrong on the Internet.[2] Also consider a funny piece by Woody Allen about two stubborn men playing chess by stamped papermail.

Irascibility, stubbornness, cruelty, and schadenfreude joy are failings of character that are usually treated as legal.

Bullying is a problem and is explicitly punishable in some codes of conduct. To cause death is much worse, of course. It is a crime.

Bullying does happen every day, in hallways and buses and roadways and offices, among people of all ages. There are tyrannical bosses, tavern disputes, cruel remarks in sport, and the art and business of gossip. In some cases, we even applaud a great leader despite that fact that he treats people like rubbish. (I think of at least one famous figure in computing and one former elected leader of a large country.)

In short, I would not say in this case that correlation equals causation, but correlation may indicate something disturbing about the collapse of group ethics and social discourse. I find social media deplorable for the tone of people's discourse. I also don't like television or malicious text messages.

By the way, I upvoted your post. Cheers!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

[2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Xkcd

Knowing better does not make you immune to psychology. Social media, more than any other form of communication, is optimized to drive engagement through dopamine - the endless quest for likes, views, and so on. The weaponization of this to spread misinformation is an inevitable consequence of the business model, not an accident. The biggest players in the industry know these feedback loops and their consequences and encourage them still to prop up profits. This has serious consequences to society and to human lives. The executives of social media companies are just as culpable as the executives of oil companies who suppressed research on the effects of tobacco in the 60s/70s and global warming research in the 80s.

Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for

In most popular cases, it is communication of people to finely drawn images of all sorts of ideas which bring money. Social media is not a social media, it’s an advertising/deception media. Face it: people on average are not able to socialize properly on a large scale, because the reality is boring and images of all sorts are escapist’s fun. That’s why cinema/theaters and artists existed since forever. “Social” media is a well-coined term that everyone accepted blindly.

Failing education is certainly a big problem (and I financed a tiny reform school for five years trying to combat the tiniest of slices of it) but you are missing the power of reach. Not even Edward Murrow could dream of the reach of Facebook.

Television in the US has long had an astonishing reach. Even in 2021, there are media companies in the US that operate on a segmented market with notorious control (e.g. Fox).

Would you say that the difference between television (TV) and social media (SM) is that TV can only push the propaganda from a central server, whereas SM provides the push of propaganda as well as mutual reinforcement through sharing comments?

I find it all quite deplorable, I assure you. But I really think the "toxicity" is a precursor to the expression of the "toxic" opinions. They already existed, but were hushed by the shame of direct attribution in regular public discourse.

> Lead causes brain damage and kills people.

With all the deaths caused by anti-vaxxers, one could argue that social media also causes brain damage and kills people.

Likewise with disinformation’s role in electing officials that don’t take climate change seriously, or who roll back EPA protections.

If anything social media has a capacity for indirect harm that is in some cases greater than the original harm in question.

CO₂ could be candidate. Perhaps the effect will be even at a grander scale than leaded gas.

It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.

Factory farms, polyunsaturated fats, refined grains (white wheat and rice), HFCS, human driven cars, and sitting desks will all be seen as barbaric or grossly unhealthy in the future.

Throughout the last year or so, I've seen multiple people on HN call out polyunsaturated fats, is there a specific reason for that? Google hasn't really turned up anything for me that looked particularly compelling.

Soybean oil is one prominent and very prolific and profitable example. It is everywhere. It was first developed to add to feed to fatten animals (turkeys). You can still buy it in fifty gallon drums at feed mills. Nasty stuff. It breaks down and oxidizes readily under heat (and in the body). Oxidation == free radicals. Hydrogenation (hydrogen injection) makes it thick at room temperature, otherwise it is a thin oil like any other vegetable oil you might be familiar with.

Very fattening, no nutrient value. Unless a restaurant is willing to invest in peanut oil (and they will tell you on the menu if they did because it costs so much more than hydrogenated soybean oil) all fried foods are cooked in burnt up (oxidized and broken down) soybean oil. You have to c he ange the oil in a fryer every day to get a decent food product out of it. Good restaurants might filter it and reuse it for one additional shift/day. In reality it is used until it is smoking heavily and not able to cook food without rendering it deflated and dark brown.

There are massive inertia and industry lobbyists (producers and food mfg) behind it that know how to install fear in politicians. We have know for along time that putting it in your body is a bad idea.

Canola oil, some seeds and (true) nuts, as well as fatty fish also contain lots of polyunsaturated fats. Most of those are generally considered healthy. Would those also become unhealthy for the reasons you've listed?

I think arguing that "polyunsaturated fats will be seen as grossly unhealthy" requires more than an example of (ab)use of a particular oil.

Yes, they're all heavily processed in refineries using noxious chemicals, they have low smoke points, and get rancid easily. They are not a type of oil (omega-6 [1]) that humans have eaten much of until recently. We mainly got our source of them from food rather than pure oil.

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fats are good for you in moderation if extracted cold without processing, uncooked, and stored in opaque containers in a fridge.

In general, getting oils from foods is best, rather than using them in refined form.

The reason PUFAs are pushed so much is probably due to heavy support from the farms and industry that manufacture them.

[1] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(13)...

I don't claim to have any expertise in this matter. I suppose it's quite possible that the common understanding of "PUFA good, SFA bad" is flawed somehow. I'm not sure I agree with your arguments, though.

> they're all heavily processed in refineries using noxious chemicals

While processing might matter, it's hard to tell just from that if it does. Admonishing processing with "noxious chemicals" sound a lot like suggesting that something is healthier because it's natural.

> they have low smoke points, and get rancid easily

I can see these as detriments or even show-stoppers for some uses, but I fail to see how these are important if you don't overheat the oil or let it go rancid. I see these more as issues of incorrect use. In some sense they are of course downsides of the product since some other fats might have better properties in terms of ease of use (harder to overheat), but I don't think it follows that they're unhealthy by themselves. They could be, but that doesn't follow from a low smoke point.

As for omega-6 fatty acids, I've understood there to be some evidence that they're not healthy in large amounts, so there might be some truth to (at least some) polyunsaturated fats not being as healthy as they're made out to be. I still don't really see enough here to get behind the statement that polyunsaturated fats will be seen as grossly unhealthy in the future.

I might be wrong -- again, I have no expertise here -- but I just don't see it in the arguments.

> even body image issues from touched up photos,

Body image issues from advertising was an issue that existed way before the advent of Instagram, though - even before the first line of Photoshop was coded. Ultra-thin, half starved and sometimes drugged models were the norm for way, way too many years.

My bet is advertisement. We know it is detrimental to informed decision, to market efficiency and to mental health. This is just an opinion that can't be relayed on any outlet that depends on advertisement (90% of them maybe?)

Advertisement is great if all claims are required to be 100% true and provable.

Then it is called journalism. It already exists and it is usually considered unethical to fund it when you are one of the object of their scrutiny.

> The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused

Wow it didn't take long for evidence of that to surface:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

I disagree. The "disinformation" is exaggerated. Many conspiracy theories turn out to be true after time. The problem is, there is a vocal group of people, who take the government/big corporation official stance as gospel, and anyone who even dares to question the status quo is branded as a harmful influence.

> Many conspiracy theories turn out to be true after time.

I would be interested to know what evidence you have for this. Of course, given the billions of ideas in the world there are necessarily a few conspiracy theories that were later shown to be true. But it has always been my impression that the percentage of conspiracy theories that later turn out to be true is vanishingly small... perhaps one in a million or less?

Do you know of any evidence of the prevalence of ideas seen as conspiracy theories at first but later shown to be true?

So you think the Earth will be proven to be flat and the vaccines will be proven to have nanobots and 5G modems in the future?

I think that Covid will have been proven to come out of Chinese virus lab. Which doesn't sound as a crazy conspiracy theory right now, but for a time during 2020, was suppressed just as the conspiracy theories you've listed.

Have you considered a possibility that may be, the outright idiotic conspiracy theories that you're talking about don't actually have that much supporters, and could be used as scrape-goats to excuse the censorship and information control which would actually be targeted at much less insane stuff?

I believe COVID came out of a Chinese virus lab, but I also think that the leak of the virus was done out of incompetence, not malice.

That's reasonable. Also, I _think_ that it came from a lab, but it's still 80-90%, not 100% for me. And then there are some theories that I don't agree with, as I think that their probability is 5-20%, but it's important that those theories, too, aren't silenced, as they're completely different from 0% "Earth is flat" BS.

Edit: Actually, strike that: I think that none theories should be silenced, including flat Earth. Exactly because of what I described in this thread.

What's your view on video violence and internet porn?

>Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.

I'd go the exact opposite way and say that in this age of free information the self serving lies of the old centers of power were found wanting and ignored. Blaming fakenews for things going wrong is the dying gasp of a failed system trying to stay relevant like the catholic church was after the printing press.

Before I get dogpiled on because of the current pandemic, we should remember the food pyramid, the following fat epidemic and the 200k deaths a year we have been getting every year for the last 30 years: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957

The past wasn't great, experts got things wrong and a whole lot of people died.

I think there are always people around, more than we care to admit, who will do things they know are bad to make a buck and to wield power (and frankly, most of us, sadly, have a price; look at the widespread participation of people in tech in the aforementioned industries and companies even though they and we all know the bad stuff they're doing). So I wouldn't treat this as some exception. I think people are extremely good at quietly repressing knowledge they're rather not have interfere with their desires.

> this era of vaccine denialism

Not central to your point, but this isn't really that widespread. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. The whole "antivax" scare is largely fiction and has been whipped by journalists afraid of people asking questions. Now, where the covid vaccine is concerned, that's different. People who aren't skeptical of vaccines qua vaccines are skeptical about this particular vaccine or whatever you want to call it because of the obscene level of politicization around it masquerading as "science". So I wouldn't conflate the two.

On the contrary, I think it's dangerous to ignore the very close link. Yes, they've switched talking points from mercury to spike proteins but it's the same playbook. The meme just got more viral when it hitched a ride on politics.

I think telling people who are only skeptical of this one new thing that they are anti-vax is just driving people to become anti-vax rather than change their mind about the Covid vaccines.

I have a data point of one in my father, who followed exactly this path.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com