Meta sued for social media addiction caused by its algorithm

If love, laugh, wow, all positive carry the same as sad and angry why would that mean more controversial?

People love having angry content as viral sire, but that’s human nature and existed much before the angry reaction was added.

Those are not reactions to controversial posts. Those are stong reactions to posts that you want to see and you generally agree with. 'lol' has been used either as it was meant (positive reaction to a joke) or negatively (mocking a sincere post).

(Part of my confusion is that I don’t think the stats imply anything at all.)

More than that, food for which the average servings exceed the daily needs of the average person should have danger warnings. Maybe not that far off from what cigarettes show as health damage caused by them.

Edit: Why is this downvoted? Come on, I want some arguments. The same system has worked for tobacco, and we know food with excess sugar is as bad if not worse. Why shouldn't we do the same thing?

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/08/texas-man-wins-5-5...

You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.

Pointing those out because in my current country (Australia), laws are being gradually introduced to - eventually - eliminate tobacco consumption.

eg plain paper packaging mandate, banning of smoking in more and more places, and potentially soon there will be banning of tobacco sales to people born before a point in time year (2005 maybe?) so they're never allowed to smoke

Plus, if it's "only" 20% of people we lose to these addictions, that's still a major tragedy.

The dig at psychologists was funny, but this is a super serious topic, unfortunately.

Right, and the scary thing from my perspective is that a company like Facebook has actually experimented with manipulating emotion on real users. People don't understand to what extent they're being manipulated, but the manipulators often harvest this data for their own purposes.

Ah, but what is full control? If I miss out on events and face passive ostracization... do I really have full control? We do not live in vacuums and self-control isn't solely concerned with the self, there are myriads of external factors that can have significant impacts.

I have the control to not give my 13 year old a cell phone, but I do not have control over the social consequences that creates for them. Therefore... could I claim to have full control over that situation? no, just a narrow aspect.

> This clearly shows that Facebook-checking is purely a discipline problem.

Maybe... but we know that Facebook attempts to undermine self-discipline. The average user spends an hour a day on Facebook. Are they all conscious of how much time they're wasting? are they conscious of the ways that Facebook attempts to get them to waste more time? are they aware of what it's doing to them psychologically? can one be expected to exercise control when the stakes have been intentionally obscured?

> But this isn't that. You can't survive without food. Facebook is entirely optional. You don't want to be addicted? Don't use Facebook.

Is this not true of drugs as well? I don't need caffeine to survive, but if I stop tomorrow I'm going to have some serious headaches.

I don't need Facebook to survive, but not having it may harm me socially, and I might even feel a psychological absence. Do I have full control at that point?

Sorry if this is too abstract or philosophical... but I don't think it's a binary situation at all. Reality is much more complicated. It's hard to say that anyone living in society has full control over anything, especially when they're deceived.

I'm sure many obese people would prefer not to die young, yet they do. Should I only blame them for the lack of self-control? Is it not fair game to scrutinize the powerful societal mechanisms that undermine their self-control?

Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.

There isn't "one solution". And bans generally are not a solution.

But we need to fight with the same weapons they're fighting, for example, let's take sugar and unhealthy foods.

They're presenting their food as fun and glamorous, let's blow that up, like we did for tobacco.

No more mass advertising for it, anywhere. Horrible labels showing disfigured obese people that are suffering because of their addiction to junk food.

The food is cheap because they use crap ingrediens? Let's tax food based on universal standards agreed upon not by the industry, but by healthcare specialists. The more you're off the mark from healthy food, the more you get taxed (excises, same as for alcohol and tobacco).

Heck, I'd earmark those excises as funding for subsidies meant for producers of healthy, bio foods.

These junk food companies are making their stuff cool, so let's prevent that and they're making it cheap by passing their externalities to us (diminished long term health) so let's make their food more expensive and let's make the healthy stuff cheaper.

Ah, more than that, quotas of healthy food in every place serving or offering food. Get rid of food deserts. Poor people with low mobility should have access to healthy food at decent prices.

Yes, this is all very complicates. Yes, it's very political.

But doing nothing achieves nothing. Worse than that, doing nothing actively degrades the situation since these actors are actively harming people in very subtle ways.

Until we are generally intelligent enough to understand this, the gun rights issue, and any other related ones like the parent here, will be played out as a surreal dance of contrasting political interests.

Personal responsibility is just one variable in this equation and a weak one at that.

What do all developed countries have in common? A large, well run (in comparison to developing countries) government and an active civil society that operates at scale, through various collective actions (voting, protests, etc).

Personal responsibility is maybe #5 on this list and is the number one thing being peddled by companies whose business interests are under attack.

Look up Ralph Nader and auto companies. Whistleblowers in tobacco companies and tobacco companies. Etc, etc.

We have obesity rates reaching 50% in many countries. Morbid (morbid comes from the Latin word for death...) obesity in the US is 7% and growing.

Pray tell, how are you going to solve this epidemic through personal responsibility?