Because they worked really hard to become indispensable and get people "hooked".
You could make the same arguments about cigarettes, oxycontin or gambling.
You could make the same arguments about cigarettes, oxycontin or gambling.
And on the most fundamental level, drugs and gambling providers are not platforms for speech, they are not very comparable. Restrictions to drugs and gambling barely overlap with any free speech issues that social media censorship advocates seem so eager to step over. And no, I'm not just talking about the USA's First Amendment that affects the government, I'm talking about the cultural principle of free speech that we figured out was a good thing at some point in The Enlightenment.
The allegations are that Facebook knows that there are people addicted to their products and who have mental issues due to what the platform decides to show them but they refuse to do anything about it because it's good for their real customers.
I wrote more about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28763413
We don't ask profit-driven porn studios/websites to regulate what porn they produce/show because some people get "addicted" to porn in the sense that they won't live without it. We don't ask Pizza Hut to regulate who they sell and advertise pizza to because they know some people won't live without unhealthy pizza. We don't even ask alcohol stores to avoid selling to alcoholics. Any recreational or enjoyable activity will have people who won't live without it even if it makes them feel bad or has some other costs. In a free society, people still choose for themselves and are responsible for the results of their own choices.
If you have strong evidence that Facebook is uniquely addictive and harmful, present it. Otherwise, stop trying to control my ability to engage in ad-driven social media. I don't care what you think is good or bad speech or whether companies profit from it.
2. There's something called the FDA (https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-domino...) that regulates what can be put in food and how it needs to be packaged.
3. There's plenty of laws limiting what alcohol can be sold and when (https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_alcohol_laws_of_th...)
Listen to the opening of the testimony today, they're focused on kids. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IhWeVHxdXg)
2. The FDA doesn't regulate unhealthy foods that people gorge themselves on. It regulates drugs with strong scientific evidence of extreme addictiveness and harm. Do you have any evidence you'd like to present that would make Facebook even slightly comparable to the kind of stuff the FDA restricts? McDonalds and Pizza Hut are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable obese people.
3. None of those alcohol laws prevent an alcohol store from selling or being near an alcoholic or anyone who is addicted to alcohol. Alcohol retailers and makers are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable alcoholics.
I'd be interested in a response to my actual point that we don't ask corporations to be responsible for all potentially negative outcomes. Society has always restricted certain extreme harms, your problem is that you have no strong evidence that Facebook and social media rises to that level at all.
As someone who blocks Facebook's IP ranges and uses an ad blocker to remove any algorithmic recommendations on other websites I also think it would be great to:
1. Have a law forcing companies to have a way to opt out of algorithmic / personalized recommendations
2. Make any form of 3rd party tracking and user profiling opt in only and force companies that track you to have a way to see what is collected and to disable/delete it at any time. Companies like facebook shouldn't be allowed to track me across the web without my permission.
Also I wouldn't be against holding them liable for promoting "harmful" content. As in forcing them to moderate the reach of content that calls for harming someone once it gets enough engagement (ex: 100K views). An example of that would be letting Alex Jones post Sandy Hook conspiracies but only showing them to people if they go to his profile and not displaying them in the feed for other users.
So where's the strong evidence? Is 15% of teens reporting bad feelings the big headliner? Surveys showing weak correlations with depression? What evidence do you have to even mention Facebook in the same breath as other strictly controlled products? You keep pointing to whistleblower allegations and hearings like that's evidence of anything except perhaps Congress' apparently infinite appetite for political grandstanding and an ex-employee's apparently infinite appetite for authoritarian regulation. Nicotine didn't become a controlled substance because 15% of teen smokers reported feeling bad about themselves or tended to be more depressed on average. The bar should be even higher when you consider that Facebook is a platform for speech which has more protections for good reason.
> I believe some form of expanded COPPA laws for children under 16 wouldn't hurt.
Yes it would hurt, it would hurt business and it would hurt the choice of children under 16. COPPA is already extremely onerous and in practice amounts to a ban for most services. What's your industry, I wonder? I'm sure there are plenty of laws I can think of that "wouldn't hurt". Unsurprisingly, "wouldn't hurt" is not the standard by which a free society legislates.
As you mentioned, their customers are advertisers, "users" are there to serve them.
EDIT: before you make the same argument as you made in your reply to another comment, I don't use any Facebook related products and deleted my facebook account over 10 years ago.
I'd also suggest you look into some writing on the attention economy and whales in gaming. All ad supported media is in a race to the bottom to compete for your time. There's a reason why news look like reality shows now.
https://restofworld.org/2021/homegrown-facebook-for-the-far-...
Everyone has their pet issue with Facebook. For some, it's lack of openness. For others, Facebook is too open. Everyone seems to have an opinion about which lines Facebook is and isn't allowed to cross, and for every group it's a slightly different set of lines, for a slightly different set of reasons.
My point is that nobody is correct -- Facebook isn't the cultural monolith it is because of its actions, but because of the actions of our global culture. If you want to be angry at someone, look in the (societal) mirror.
I have a consumer app and met with some of the early investors in the top social media companies. They all only cared about DAU/MAU, time in app and user growth. All of them recommended books like Hooked (https://medium.com/startup-grind/nir-eyal-why-you-are-addict...), to help us design something that's more addictive, or anything from BJ Fogg (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/10...), who had founders of Instagram and Snapchat as his students. A few of them even tried to get us to hire the new hot thing, Dopamine Labs (https://www.builtinla.com/2018/01/11/dopamine-labs-boost-use...), who promised to have "AI" to get users addicted with custom notifications.
I used to think that behavioral psychology was bullshit (my GF studied psychology too), but being exposed to it in the industry there's no denying that some of it works. There's a reason why all headlines are clickbait now and all thumbnails on youtube and netflix are of weird facial expressions (https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...). It turns out even the color of your app icon can make an impact on how noticeable it is, leading to more downloads and usage (https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/tips-fo...)
Yes it absolutely does. They get value by showing ads. If you're staring at facebook for 4 hours a day, that's a lot more ads than if you log in for 2 minutes and then log back out.
The cigarette comparison is being used a lot, so it's more like if Philip Morris was paid for every drag someone takes. Getting folks hooked, smoking a pack a day or more, is going to generate more revenue than not getting folks hooked. If cigarettes weren't addictive, would P.M. make billions of dollars every year?
Philip Morris doesn't make money every drag someone takes, that's exactly my point. It's different.
Also, cigarettes are bad for you in any quantity. Social media is not obviously bad for you in any quantity, it's the knock on effects of being constantly aware of what your peer group is achieving and how you react to that which creates problems (among other indirect issues ultimately caused by your decisions related to social media, not the social media itself).
I see. You're right that it was an imperfect comparison.
Philip Morris makes _more_ money by addicting its users. Facebook makes _more_ money by addicting its users.
I think social media being bad for you is a nebulous concept. I would argue that, since I stopped using Facebook and Reddit (and only use HN on work-breaks), I've been able to maintain my environment and thereby my well-being on an order that I was not previously able to.
Eating a peanut M&M isn't _bad_ for me, but if they were addicting, it would be a lot harder to consume a non-harmful number of them.
Stab wounds aren't inherently lethal, but enough of them will be.