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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

Social media giants are like tobacco companies in the 1950/60s.

If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.

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> people would probably be receptive

I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.

Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.

I strongly support regulation of big tech, particularly with regard to privacy regulation, control of information and destruction of competitors/cornering of markets.

But I beg folks, please don't use 'weaponizing' and 'freedom of speech' in the same sentence, because doing so renders this principle/moral into a cynical shell instead of something that is part and parcel of core democratic values (and has had an ancient political history and evolution, with many sacrifices along the way).

> I strongly support regulation of big tech

Everyone says that but what specifically are you looking for? What’s the social media equivalent to no smoking indoors?

I support regulation of big tech to protect individual privacy (i.e. surveillance marketing, long-term storage of sensitive information, re-selling of individual data to third parties), and protect competition.

There's no (in the U.S.) legal precedence to regulate "misinformation" and hate speech, not because these things are good, but because they, unlike smoking, require authorities to create sets of approved and unapproved information, . There is a precedent of governments controlling harmful information and it isn't good - thus the bar should be set way high.

I'm not sure what you mean by "everyone says that." A lot of people say these are private platforms and rebut that one can always create a competitor, for example. Certainly it's a common refrain about techie communities such as this.

What I mean by "everyone says that" is that I often read that big tech should be regulated but I don't know what specific end they are trying to achieve.

Tech (big and small) is regulated today and there are rules on the books which protect at least some of the individual privacy points you highlighted. [1] You, and many others, have stated that you find those rules insufficient and would like new/different rules in place.

Can you provide specific goals that address the issues that you think exist, and that law makers could use to draft new policy?

[1] https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business... and https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business...

>Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.

> it's literally as simple as closing the tab

It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

> I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile

Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

> It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

Literally the approach I used when I quit smoking.

> Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Well, that sounds like something everyone can agree on. Or do you just mean your opinion is bigger than anyone who disagrees?

My point is not everyone can turn it off like that. To assume that everyone can because you did is wrong.

Which is fair, but also don't assume everyone is addicted because you are. Don't assume everyone is trapped by their addictions because you are.

Most of all, don't try to legislate away everyone's freedoms because you have a problem with something.

Please cite your sources that using social media is just as addictive as smoking.

According to some studies, social media is worse:

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/internet/social-media-more-...

An important difference between tobacco companies and big tech is that the latter sells tools to political campaigns.

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

This. The ability to reach people from very specific demographics and behavioral segments is something every politician from all sides want. That's why they will always complain and promise regulations, but will never really do something - it's against their best interests.

Outside of the west, tobacco companies are like tobacco companies in the 50s and 60s.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.

I strongly bet that the government instead wants to control the beast to their own benefit. Imagine the power if you could more precisely shape the public discussion. China has demonstrated this quite well.

Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.

Fantastic analogy with social media to tobacco, both seemed innocent at first, then as more research surfaced with tobacco causing lung cancer and now social media causing depression/anxiety in teens and adults, hopefully now we can actually view social media like the disease it is and come to some solution involving regulation.

There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innovation that was the WWW.

However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

>There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website

You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.

I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested

It shouldn't, but as network effect shows it works. It is easy. It provides some (felt) value for the people using it.

A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.

I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.

I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.

If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.

That may well be true (and FWIW I agree with you) but that just kicks the can down the road. It just raises the question of why this incredibly valuable "Rolodex of real names" should be the owned property of a single private corporation? They are our names and relationships, after all.

I grew up, to a large extent, on various message boards in the 00's, and I remember when many of us got blogs and it was great. But this was the major change with Facebook, and that's really what made it mainstream to put your thoughts and feelings on the internet. Suddenly you were the same self on the internet as off it.

The inability to over customize your page with html/css and blast autoplay music are one of the reasons Facebook won out over MySpace.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

> However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora)

I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.

Social media isn't about making a website - non technical people can already do that with services like squarespace and carrd. The point is to be able to communicate with other people in various ways over the Internet.

Funny. I was literally recording a podcast about this very subject today and yesterday. No, it's not published anywhere at this point.

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