California bill would let parents sue social media companies for addicting kids

The problem is there's no "give them laptops and phones in a non-blind way".

It's either "don't give them neither a phone nor a laptop" or needing some safeguards to be in place.

My 7 years daughter can only watch, under my watch, Netflix / Disney / etc. (not that these don't have their own issues / political agenda). The other day I went to pick her at a friend's place: they were watching a video on YouTube, elsa-gate style, where one blonde was making another blonde binge-drink a 2 liters bottle of coke in one go. What the heck? Videos upon videos on YouTube of people ingesting insane amount of sugary drinks and sweets.

And, surely enough, her friend she's already obese.

I don't know who makes these videos. I don't know why they "auto play" to kids in YouTube. I don't know why nothing is done about it. But this is evil in its purest form, messing up kids for life.

It's under a different form but the Elsagate is alive and well:

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

This point is academic at best and hopelessly naïve. Practically speaking parents have significantly less control than you think.

I exercise extreme restriction and thoughtfulness around tech and social media in my home. However, my kids' school hands out mandatory chromebooks (despite my protests). When my children go to a friends house, I have very little control over the content they see or the devices they can get their hands on.

And it only gets harder from there. I have some friends with older children, and there's really no controlling what they access. Sure, you can refuse to give them a smartphone, for instance. That's not going to stop one of their buddies from giving them an old smartphone when their parents get them a new one. It also won't stop them from picking up a cheap prepaid android from the nearest Walmart for $40.

So to your original point, I don't think too many of us are "blindly giving them laptops and expecting someone else to clean up the mess". We're trying to hold back a tsunami of social media trash for the sake of our kids' wellbeing, and we're losing.

"Letting parent sue" is a very American way to go about it, but exploiting kids underdeveloped brain should be illegal.

Yes, yes, yes, we can't have a society without children etc etc etc. I understand it can't all be on the parents. But ffs, how about some of it?

Still, this is so much better than what the EU cooked up: saving the children by forcing websites to ask for your government issued ID to watch a video.

Turns out they were short staffed, and so just gave the kids tons and tons of screen time.

Are you suggesting that the children should be monitored by parents 24/7? No day care? Homeschooling all kids? No babysitters?

On the other hand, they should not be advertising that stuff to kids in kid games

But it requires a radical shift in society and culture. Parents need to spend a LOT more time with their kids. Specially mothers.

Some people will disagree and even downvote - I presume for ideological reasons - but I have the opinion that, for < 5 years-old children, spending time with the mother is more important than the father. So women should have a special safety net to dedicate more to their kids without worrying about their finances and career prospects. Men should also be taught since childhood to provide security to women.

I know, I know, lots of different types of families nowadays. I just don't know how they work, I only know "Mother, Father and children" families... Sorry, limitations of my personal experience.

1. There is an erosion of physical limitations on how much time you can spend on an activity on an "item". A comic book has fixed no. of pages, once you have finished, you need to get another physical comic book. It doesn't automagically keep adding pages as you keep turning.

2. Deliberate algorithm driven strategies to increase "engagement": the content of the comic book is fixed - you either like it or you don't. It doesn't change the content on the fly based on which turn of events you prefer. Offline video games had more "engagement" but it still was limited by the inbuilt branching of possibilities (which still could be a lot depending on the cleverness of the algorithm/engine - that is why people spent hundreds and thousands of hours on them even without them being MMPROGs). With the current set, the entire thing is driven to reel you in right from the get-go and keep you hooked as long as possible. That surely can't be a good thing for your health.

We are basically training ourselves with systems like these to press the lever again and again.

Even HN with the random element of 'will my submission/comment receive votes' works like a skinner box. And we don't even have notifications here.

Not sure if it is a good idea to train young people into these dopamine "shots". I remember how friends of mine spent all their pocket money on these collectible card games. Looking back these were my first encounter with the loot box principle.

The difference between those things and social media is that none of them were "always on, always available" corporate behemoths hiring legions of addiction experts and legions of marketing experts crafting powerful social networks and legions of lobbyists to stifle legislation.

It’s simple. Either users have absolute control over the content that they see, or the social media companies are publishers.

Go to YouTube. Log out. What do you see? It’s not nothing. They’ve decided what to show you.

Tech and social media companies are algorithmically dictating what you see and hiding behind the fact that it’s not “their content.” Why is this considered different from a news site which exclusively hosts opinion pieces from independent journalists?

This is before we even get into editorializing, which is now common on every major social media platform. Not only are social media platforms dictating what you see but also they are editorializing that content before you see. And yet somehow they aren’t publishers, because reasons.

That sounds ridiculous until you realise that they already do it. They decide what to show in your timeline by looking over every post and matching what they think you'll engage with most. They know exactly when you're being a dick, what posts to show you to encourage or discourage that behavior, who to show your posts to, and so on. Adding a box to say "this post looks pretty bad, maybe take a break now" wouldn't be difficult. They don't want to do it because negative shitposts make them money.

Either you do not filter the content and shift responsibility to actual content creators (I have no idea how it would be possible to implement that without ditching the very concept of "feed") or you select the content and take on full legal responsibility for what you selected.

The general direction has been to let corporate roam free, and use lawsuits as the regulator for when their behavior bumps into externalities.

Of course, as a safeguard corporations will make these lawsuits look as ridiculous and frivolous as possible, argue that people are trigger happy with lawsuits, and from time to time fabricate stories to sway the opinion in the right direction.

An example of a book about this: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo364551...

About nice heart-warming stories of frivolous lawsuits: https://web.archive.org/web/20210124041909/https://www.latim...

Very different.

To call yourself a "government", at some point you need to take a stand that contains actual values.

One can understand why California would not like to go directly against BigTech as we are in Europe. And any fixed laws will quickly go out of date in a fast world. So more fundamental principles must be addressed. Positive and enabling policies are always better.

We’ve been trying to teach people how to be healthy, physically fit, to avoid substance abuse, and to spend money wisely but it seems that those lessons just don’t stick for most of the population. At some point intervention is needed beyond just teaching people the right way to live.

But I’m also weary of this because regulations can often be poorly thought-out, heavy handed, or unintentionally crafted to make the problem even worse.

It also opens up that parents can sue for other addictions such as soft drinks, candy and even alcohol and cigarettes.

A much saner way would be that parents educate their children and take responsibility.

Easy way to shift the blame if one has ever taken part in designing these products.

Hell I remember years ago on HN when that book about getting people hooked/addicted to an app was a popular book to discuss, making the analogy more true.

You’re right, maybe people are the problem. Just like how the Sacklers pushes their wares and hooked the masses so did SV

Same applies to drugs, smoking, gambling, drinking etc. but we recognise those things as potentially harmful and take steps to restrict them, regulate them, and make them as safe as we can (with varying degrees of success and failure obviously). Social media gets kids even earlier than most of the things I’ve listed above and the best we seem to have done is self-reporting your age to make sure you’re over 13. It’s embarrassing and I have no doubt that in 50 years we’ll be looking back at some of the people that worked on these platforms the same way we look at people who worked in the tobacco industry.

You're asking for the human race to grow up and be more mature. Fat chance of that.

Thomas Edison remarked that the drink helped him awake longer. Oh indeed, Mr. Edison. The point is that it was so normalized that nobody would have really appreciated the consequences of it, especially when everybody was using it. The same seems to be true now a days with social media. People are hopelessly addicted, most people claim it makes them feel worse - yet they keep using it, and so on.

We're just entering into a new era of the world with the introduction of new addictive and harmful activities with the novel catch that the harm is not immediately obvious, as compared with something like gambling.

The only reasonable response I can see here is that what I'm saying could also have been applied to any new technological toy, such as television or even radio in times past. But again the big difference is harm. Many if not most people might have said they should probably waste less time watching television, yet few would have claimed it was genuinely personally damaging to themselves - yet nonetheless being unable to stop. Let alone the consequences on society that are far more specific and real than the ambiguous concerns that undoubtedly followed previous technologies.

Put more succinctly, there is a difference between television and social media in the same way that there is a difference between caffeine and cocaine. At some point the consequences of an enjoyable recreation outweigh the benefits of that recreation.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

I don't think they need to go that far. The algorithms could be optimized for long-term personal growth. Always pushing you to expand your boundaries in healthy ways. That kind of growth is usually mildly uncomfortable but rewarding. You'll only want so much of it per day. They'd be replacing endless cheap carbs with exercise.

Laws like the one proposed in the article are a way to push social media companies to start enforcing those rules better.

Ok, one example: implement such features as the "noprocrast" feature HN has. Normally companies don't have an incentive to do that, since they want you addicted even when you don't want to be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677390

> If the government wants to regulate fine, the government should do it. Not via civil lawsuits.

The advantage of lawsuits vs. regulation is that the lawsuits can better adapt to changing technology and various things that can't be anticipated ahead of time, and is less likely to have loopholes and be gameable.

Creative features such as "noprocrast" can't really be regulated, but they can give protection to a company in a civil suit. I'm sure there are a lot of other features that could be developed as well that will help reduce addiction and reduce the tendency for "enragement to equal engagement".

Remember, the lawsuit happens after harm has allegedly been caused, and a judge or jury can use common sense to decide if the company has acted irresponsibly.

Neither is perfect, but there are certainly advantages of doing it this way.

Agreed. It seems a number of these bills are advancing through state legislatures. It started with the Texas abortion ban putting bounties on people who aid another in getting an abortion. SCOTUS had the opportunity to stop this practice dead in its tracks, but they decided to let it persist as the case waits to be heard by the court. Meanwhile, this gives everyone else latitude to pass their own "bounty" laws on any number of issues.

Based on my knowledge a lot of companies are hiring behavior specialist to actively increase user retention and engagement. Those are borderline addictive elements. I believe it’s more about getting caught and having to prove it wasn’t made to cause addiction or proper measures were made.

I don’t think one can catch all with precise list here and common law system helps with deciding that. Such regulation most likely wouldn’t work in civil law system without thick clarification tomes.

> The games had violent content, but they didn't make me violent.

I think these games came in the lines of the war movies a lot of us grew up with, and they took the war/army propaganda aspects and ran with it. The “make people violent” bits were I think partly wish-making on the army side (needs a flattering image) and fear mongering on the puritanism side (needs something to blame)

To your point, “A” started happening, people are now reacting to the desensitization of violence on screen, in books and anywhere really, games or not. I think “A” is also already happening for mobile games that have gambling structures and attention traps.

“B” is the part that takes more time I think. On the violence example, society partly benefited from having people desensitized from violence and I’m not sure we’re seeing significant progress on that part. The same way mobile game companies and social networks are a huge engine of our economies, and having any decent regulation on that will take way more time I think than the cultural shift on “A”.

Just looking at Apple making most of its revenue from in-app purchases, yet enjoying an incredibly high social position is telling I think.

I think it took <<centuries>> to properly legislate them.

Hopefully for software we figure this stuff out in at most a few more decades.

I disagree, this is diverting the social responsibility back to the mailmen. This won't solve any of the underlying issues that cause these problems.

It's just the modern form of bathroom walls. The issues won't change, just the medium. I guess for the highly anti-coporaate who just want to see trillionaires stuck to it, it's exhilarating. But the things about many of these "think of the children" bills is that children are rarely the subject of the bill.

IMO this is peak sweeping under the rug of the psychological and sociological problems the modern youth face. But that's hard to solve. pointing fingers is easy.

Facebook et al are not doing anything traditional media hasn’t been doing since its inception. Spreading fake news? The original name for it was “Yellow Journalism”[1]. Making teenage girls insecure about themselves? Just look at magazines like Cosmopolitan from just a few years ago. Highlighting divisive, polarizing stories to drive engagement? Cable news doesn’t do anything else. Let’s not forget all the crazy racist, and seriously impactful shit local news has done over the years.

Social media and the internet stole a lot of eyeballs from traditional media outlets. They’ve successfully responded by convincing everyone that Facebook and the rest of big tech is some crazy super villain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

And modern social media really is different in that it's deliberately designed to be addictive and basically prey on insecurities. (or just outright create new ones) They don't do much if anything in terms of not straight up enhancing bullying etc either.

Another difference is, unlike our parents, who simply didn't know much about the internet, and as a result had lots of unfounded fears, our generation are digital natives and very familiar with all the problems. We're just used to and desensitized to them.

With adults, that's one thing, but with minors, it's pretty inexcusable imo. It's not unreasonable to want to protect your children and adolescents from harm, whether from smoking or from social media.

I mean, kinda. That's pretty much the whole purpose of their current algorithmically-ranked feed - maximize engagement (which is most-maximized by addiction).

I would argue it is similar to alcohol or tabacco this way. Shouting think of the children because some kids/teenagers get drunk at some point is way overkill. However once the tabacco/alcohol industry started directly marketing to them it was quite a different matter.

The Wild West era of Internet freedom was much more tame than that.

Sure, you had trolls and other nasties, but not only were those trolls for the most part doing their mischief for personal entertainment, their impact was relatively localized - their trolling didn't scale.

Now compare this to an industrial-scale trolling & spamming operation where billions are poured into research, development and infrastructure.

You're comparing a small-scale spammer using their email client to spam manually against an industrial-scale automated spamming operation. The first one can be dealt with locally, the second one might require some out-of-band intervention.

Also, back in the day, you didn't need to go into IRC or the dark corners on the Internet to participate in society day to day. Nowadays, you have to be in the social media cesspool to even be able to lookup some business' opening hours or contact them.

> Does anyone here really think there is an “addictiveness” feature in the Facebook algorithm that can be toggled on and off like this article suggests?

Yes - just give the user a chronological feed with no extra bullshit inserted into it and let the user choose what they want to see based on their follows, instead of the engagement-maximizing algorithm choosing for them.

Unless the users of HN collectively wrote the bill I'm failing to see where the hypocrisy is lol

That's the difference. It was Wild West, now it's a capitalist monster with questionable intentions.

If this is destruction, it's the most creative of destruction.