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Comment by chillbill | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the spirit of the post, but:

- You don’t need to be doing a PhD to realize that there’s something weird about sharing your intimate life stories online with strangers. Might be a bit crude, but you’d have to be pretty thick not to consider it.

- This part:

> Social media companies, these corporate giants that have so much influence in today’s culture and the way we connect with each other, are the ones normalizing oversharing and benefiting from it

This is not exactly accurate. Social media companies are not the ones normalizing this behavior, bad parents are. They do benefit from it or even encourage it, but ultimately it’s the parent’s responsibility as they are doing it only for themselves.

Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.

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> Social media companies are not the ones normalizing this behavior, bad parents are. They do benefit from it or even encourage it,

Remember, always blame individuals for systemic issues.

Is Facebook encouraging people to post pictures of their kids? If they are then they shouldn't be, but parents should also have the sense not to post them

Yes.

In 2015 Facebook launched a feature (Scrapbooks[0]) specifically designed to encourage parents to upload and organise photos of their kids.

Their help centre still has an article under /help/scrapbooks [1] titled "Manage Photos of Your Child" with the first heading "How do I create a scrapbook for my child on Facebook?"

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2015/03/a-new-way-to-organize-phot...

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/scrapbooks

If Facebook's rules permit the posting of pictures of children then they are encouraging the practice. And governments are also responsible for permitting social media companies to allow such content to be posted publicly and permanently.

Yes, the parents should have the sense not to do this but the victims here are the children who can't stop their parents from invading their privacy. Many of them are now old enough to have their own social media accounts and discover what their parents did to them when they were younger. Presumably they aren't happy about what their parents did and I knew they wouldn't be back in the late 00s when this practice was first starting.

I mean, in a sense, aren't they? Not as specific as "post pictures of your two-year-old having a meltdown Right Now," but the whole thing with Facebook (or any social media) is that it encourages and rewards engagement.

When parents share about their kids online, in almost all cases I can think of, they are doing it for themselves, not for the child’s benefit.

i would disagree with that claim. at least when i share photos of my children the primary benefit is for my parents, my siblings, and very close friends. it is neither for my own nor my kids benefit.

the point of facebook is to stay in touch with your friends and family, and so it encourages to share with them. i am not on facebook myself, so i don't know how easy it is to create private family/friend groups. if it is easy then it should not be a problem to share family pictures in private, but apparently this is not happening and a lot of people are sharing in public instead? do they believe that only the friends that follow them can see them? never mind the privacy issues of facebook itself.

does it make sense to post it online instead of celebrating it privately with my child or face-to-face with friends

most of my friends and family do not live in the same city as i do. so face-to-face is not an option.

instead of chastising parents for using the tools available to them to stay in touch with their family, how about creating and promoting tools that allow sharing in a private and secure manner?

Less public sharing of pictures over the Internet has been possible ever since email with attachments became common.

But it’s definitely less work to make a deal with the social network devil.

Some parents do and others don’t.

Some kids may later resent that. Others won’t.

I could spend time looking for a Facebook ad showing this behavior but instead I’m going to scream at you to stop being so dense and do it yourself.

Ah... So if I let my 3-year-old great-grandson play outside too long on a cold winter day, then it's Mother Nature's fault when he gets hypothermia and frostbite?

Good to know.

So if Coca Cola marshalls tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars, bombarding you with advertising and marketing and subtle messages on all channels all day, messages crafted by smart people who spend their whole lives studying human weaknesses and how to exploit them, messages which normalise drinking sugar water at mealtimes, as a reward, at special occasions, as a treat, at sports events, while driving, with take-out, at home, at work…

All you have to do is chant “personal responsibility” and then there’s no imbalance and no unfairness and it’s all alright and everything’s perfect and it must be the victim’s fault for not being John Galt and immune to advertising like you think you are (but aren’t really because nobody is)

> immune to advertising like you think you are (but aren’t really because nobody is)

No one is fully immune to advertising but some people are definitely more resilient than others.

To study your example: we are all exposed to pretty much the same level of advertising from Coca Cola. But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes.

And regardless of if you drink Coke or not, some people will go the extra length to do basic exercise where as other people do zero exercise.

So yes, there is an element of personal responsibility

> "To study your example: we are all exposed to pretty much the same level of advertising from Coca Cola"

Not over time; they are like the Hydraulic Press channel on YouTube which crushes random things in a press, and keeps increasing the pressure until the thing breaks. Big companies will keep pressing on you until you break - they'll be there advertising in the morning when you wake up, at night when you're tired and suffering decision fatigue[1], they'll be in TV shows with product placement so you get memories of seeing 'people like you' drinking Coca Cola in various situations, they'll pay high status people in your area of interest to be associated with their product to influence you by The Halo Effect whether it's a sports star or an investor[2], they'll be on your children's morning cartoons and on the radio station their friends' mom listens to, and in the vending machines at their schools, and on-tap in the bars and restaurants, and branded on all sorts of unrelated merchandise, they'll be beside your commute on billboards, sponsoring your town's stadium and favourite events, donating products to your favourite YouTuber or lobbying your politicians in their interest. And many more than I can think up, and like The Terminator they absolutely will not stop increasing the pressure over time.

And it's effective, world obesity has tripled[3] since 1975.

Mexico has a problem with Coca-Cola, see [4] with quotes like "Coca-Cola “employs strategies to prevent, delay or weaken the regulations that restrict its activities”, the political magazine Proceso alleged last year".

> "But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes."

From [3] "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.

From [4] "while making the [documentary on Coca-Cola promotional techniques] she met people who consumed large amounts of fizzy drinks who were unaware they had type 2 diabetes. “People who were blind or had limbs amputated often have no idea that it was due to their high blood sugar level,” she says." - it's good to know they weren't uneducated, lacking access to good schooling and doctors who can explain or the education to understand the explanations, or lacking alternatives like clean water[5], they're just irresponsible and that makes it fine for them to be ground up by the capitalism mill. "Buffeted by the dual crises of the diabetes epidemic and the chronic water shortage, residents of San Cristóbal have identified what they believe is the singular culprit: the hulking Coca-Cola factory on the edge of town."

"The plant is owned by Femsa, a food and beverage behemoth that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola throughout Mexico [...] Femsa is one of Mexico’s most powerful companies; a former chief executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico, Vicente Fox, was the country’s president from 2000 to 2006." - all you need to be immune to that is Common Sense, it's just Common Sense, just resist the ever-increasing pressure for the rest of your life without ever failing and be sure to never object because it's your fault if you give in.

"In San Juan Chamula, bottled soda anchors religious ceremonies cherished by the city’s indigenous Tzotzil population." - but it's easy to go against your local religion, everyone does it, right?

"Many Tzotzil believe carbonated soda has the power to heal the sick. Mikaela Ruiz, 41, a local resident, recalls how soda helped cure her infant daughter, who was weak from vomiting and diarrhea. The ceremony was performed by her diabetic mother" - Humans definitely aren't subject to any inherent cognitive bias about correlation and causation or anything, everyone is rational - and if they aren't, it's their fault which makes it fine to exploit them.

But those religious people must be dumb why would they think of fizzy drinks as a religious thing? Oh this is why "Local health advocates say aggressive marketing campaigns by Coke and Pepsi that started in the 1960s helped embed sugary soft drinks into local religious practices".

"the Femsa spokesman [...] rejected criticisms that the company’s beverages have had a negative impact on public health. Mexicans, he said, may have a genetic proclivity toward diabetes." - lying, gaslighting. Just be a perfect lie detector, it's common sense, it's just common sense, self-actuate your way out of basic human millenia-old respect for those higher on social hierarchies.

"Ms. Abadía, the security guard, said she blamed herself for drinking so much soda. Still, with her mother’s health deteriorating, and having watched her father die from complications from diabetes, she can’t help but fear for her own well-being. “I’m worried I’ll end up blind or without a foot or a hand,” she said. “I’m very scared.”" - why doesn't she just stop? Giving up addiction is easy, just take responsi... oh there isn't any drinkable water, right, yes, still that's probably her fault too somehow.

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

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=warren+buffet+coca+cola+&ia...

[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/04/s...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/world/americas/mexico-coc...

Okay I feel bad for those people in Mexico. I don't live in Mexico though. I don't have a stake in what their govt or industry does. It literally just isn't my world and I don't have any stake or power on what goes on there.

Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples.

>oh there isn't any drinkable water

Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?

> "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.

You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting.

> "Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples."

I did not "have to go to Mexico" to get good examples, first thing which came to mind was those articles about Mexico. The link about obesity tripling is from the World health organization.

Let's assume for a moment that you live in the USA - the USA also has a problem with massively increasing obesity levels, see[1] the CDC saying the prevalence of obesity has increased from 30% to 40% in the last twenty years. Before you say "nobody trusts the CDC after COVID", the National Institute of Health says obesity in the USA has tripled since 1960[3] from around 13% to around 42%.

In case you think the political connection is Mexican developing corruption, here's [4] The CocaCola company saying "Coca‑Cola engages in direct advocacy at U.S. federal and state levels of government to share information and perspective on our public policy priorities." and their most recent disclosure Q1 2023 includes specific lobbying issues "Water security, replenishment, restoration." Should "water security for CocaCola company bottling plants" ever come into conflict with "water security for citizens" you can guess which side CocaCola will be lobbying on.

> "Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?"

Drought.gov reports that 90 million people in the USA and 266 million areas of major crops are experiencing drought this week[5]. California, for example, pumps huge amounts of groundwater for growing almonds for export and when the ground collapses into the holes where water used to be, it compacts meaning the ground can hold less water in future, reducing the groundwater storage capacity. An NPR article[6] says "Upmanu Lall, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University and a luminary in his field, has co-authored and led numerous studies that document the rise of contaminated drinking water in the U.S. He and his colleagues assessed a national data set of 17,900 water utilities and other community drinking-water systems, revealing that water-quality violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act more than doubled between 1980 and 2015" - this is general underinvestment in infrastructure causing problems like 150k people in Jackson, Miss. getting undrinkable water - a systemic problem because supplying drinking water isn't as profitable as supplying sugar water, so that's where the economy allocates more funds and more efforts.

In the UK, Thames Water is a supplier in London - by far the biggest and densest city in the country - and since it was privatised it's £14Bn in debt[7] - basically taken £14bn in loans to pay out to shareholders, underinvesting and cost cutting in providing the service people need, a story played out around the UK with £50Bn in debts by private water companies, echoing the systemic problems with clean water supplies in the Mexican story. Getting away from pressure of advertising but still talking about systemic pressures to increase profits and payouts more than to provide best service, pressures which companies have huge resources to crush individuals, which individuals have almost no ability to resist.

So then you've taken "companies are more powerful than individuals and humans have known cognitive weaknesses which companies exploit which is a systemic problem with advertising and manipulation around the world and accross all companies and in the nature of the economies we run" to "examples of CocaCola specifically, affecting a specific community in Mexico, using a lot of different influences at local and state level with many different approaches and methods" to "I have clean water so there isn't a systemic problem at all" which is a non-sequitur - "I don't drink CocaCola" is not evidence that advertising generally doesn't work, or a refutation of the idea that pressure increases over time, or a response to the inhumanity of industries which exploit human weaknesses for profit on a vast scale to the detriment of human dignity, health, society and quality of life.

> "You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting."

39 million cases of '''bad parenting'''. Don't question the system, this is all the explanation anyone should need, case closed.

Don't look at "How to 'magnetize' a baby [with sugar]"[8], how babies crying has a disproportional effect on adults, how 'getting people hooked early' is a trick to affect the rest of their lives used by cults and religions and others, how the adults are increasingly stressed which causes more bad decision making, by an environment where housing is for rentier profit, where vehicle ownership is mandatory after years of car industry lobbying and marketing rebuilding cities around cars, where manipulative marketing and lies "yes junk food can be part of a healthy diet [coughinmoderation]" abounds, where companies do things like buy up shelf space in supermarkets to put their products front and center, use manipulations such as putting a photo of a baby on product packaging to imply that it's child related or child safe, and increasing contrast and colour to make it look 'friendlier' 'more noticable', and etc. etc.

But no, blaming the parents is the important thing to reassure you; you're on top so there can't be any systemic problems.

btw. if you reply with something as empty as "I don't eat almonds" or "my parents were bad and I turned out fine", you're missing all the points.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[2] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...

[3] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...

[4] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/policies-and-practices/publ...

[5] https://www.drought.gov/current-conditions

[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-growing-drinkin...

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/30/in-charts-h...

[8] https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/how-to-magnetize-a-... - "Dr. Barnard also discusses how industry, aided by government, exploits these natural cravings, pushing us to eat more and more unhealthy foods."

To add to all of that, one of the biggest powers of advertising is normalizing a particular product in everyday life. This is evident in your given examples about local religions.

Coca-cola is an accepted and normalized aspect of daily life. Because of the extremely effective marketing - it is viewed as 'safe' and something everyone should have, so parents buy it for their children - despite the obvious and well-known effects as well as becoming subtly addicted to caffeine that is in them. The kids are being primed to become lifelong caffeine addicts.

Do you drink caffeinated drinks regularly? Have you tried going without them? It's a bitch.

While the world would be better off without Coca-Cola...from my PoV, all their advertising has nothing on an over-active 3-year-old who can melt down into screaming temper tantrums when he doesn't get his way. Vs. the temporary peace & quiet when he is playing in the snow in the back yard, and I'm watching him through the window.

Reminds me of people who blame "oil companies" for forcing a modern standard of living on them.

It is functionally forced. You cannot live in America without a car except in a handful of cities. This was by design. It was a group effort of multiple companies, from the oil companies to the tire manufacturers. They've all lobbied to spend public funding on car-based infrastructure instead of public transportation.

Additionally, they brainwashed a significant portion of the populace to actively ridicule, harass, and even physically attack anyone who tries to live outside that "everyone must have a car, else they're a tree-hugging hippie and should die in a fire" mentality, or anyone who doesn't drink the "climate change is a hoax" kool-aid. Fuck the giant oil corporations right in the eye. Massive corporations (like "big oil" and "social media") manipulate minds on a huge scale, and they've trained both sides to be eternally at each other's throats so that they can fairly safely continue to trash everything in their quest for "infinite profits".

> Additionally, they brainwashed a significant portion of the populace to actively ridicule, harass, and even physically attack anyone

Do you have any sources for that? I'd like to read more on this.

Honestly it's like there's an entire position to the argument that just does not recognize the agency of people.

They weren't people who decided to attack or harass others - THEY WERE BRAINWASHED.

If anything bad happens, it's the 10 billionaires at the top who poisoned them, every other human is a saint would never think to attack or harass anyone on their own accord.

Americans have started buying pickup trucks en masse, and it's a total coincidence that it happens to have become the most profitable sector for car manufacturers and a sector they've turned all their marketing to. It's all the people who free-agencied their way to the same conclusion which just happens to agree with what the car makers want, and it didn't happen in Europe where the laws about emissions and safety don't exclude small pickup trucks, and that's also a total coincidence where millions of people just free-agencied their way to the same conclusion as each other (but different to Americans).

You know how jaywalkers are at fault when hit by a car? Who do you think spread that idea around America? "Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s"[1]. And that isn't the case in other countries. People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term

> People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.

Yes, except all of the people who don’t.

Let’s do a little experiment. Pick any 1 position or belief that I don’t hold and you brainwash me into it. Of course, you won’t be able to. Why not?

Edit: by the way are you even from the US? Or are you just speculating about what it’s like over here? Because the way you speak about jaywalking is completely alien to anyone actually living over here. Everyone jaywalks all the time; No one ever actually gets in trouble. And when cars hit people, it’s definitely the people driving that get in trouble

Mother Nature isn't systematically trying to get your great-grandson to play dangerously.

Facebook is specifically looking for what gets the most from their users, so if you insist on a nature reference then ophiocordyceps unilateralis would be… still wrong, but closer.

And also in this analogy the cordyceps zombie apocalypse already happened, but again, yes I do know it's a very weak analogy.

The turning of the seasons and the weather are as immutable and absolute as social media, so this is a perfect analogy for the situation at hand.

Social media is not absolute or immutable but it is systemic. Got it.

trying to foist all the responsibility onto victims is central boomer tenant so i doubt you are going to make much progress with "making sense" and "being reasonable"

Sounds like you see the parents as the victims. Vs. I see the kids as the victims.

I don't put any responsibility on the kids.

(BTW - "families are responsible for their little kids" was a pretty normal belief long before the first boomer was born.)

> Ah... So if I let my 3-year-old great-grandson play outside too long on a cold winter day, then it's Mother Nature's fault when he gets hypothermia and frostbite?

Well... yes?

I'm struggling to come up with any definition of "fault" that wouldn't agree with your statement there.

It doesn't matter to us when nature is at fault for something, because we can't punish it. But where does the idea come from that when you get hypothermia, that might not be the fault of the weather?

Who is Facebook in this analogy?

Mother Nature and Social Media are not the same category.

There are no systems without the individuals that make it and propagate it. In this case it’s the parents who want to show strangers their children’s private moments.

I understand the concept of individual responsibility but you cannot absolve the individuals who profit from dangerous systems of their responsibility either.

I’m not absolving anyone, but it’s misguided and counter-productive to place prime responsibility on them. No one forced any parent to tout their kids on social media (or regular media) for klout and profit opportunities.

If you stop social media companies, shitty parents would find another way to sell their kids for promotion. Parents should learn that their behavior is wrong and stop doing it.

Additionally, even if you can’t stop social media companies, my kid still isn’t on Facebook because we don’t use Facebook or post her there. The power is in the parents’ hands.

The loophole is if some other parent takes a picture at a party or something that includes our kid and posts it. We try to mitigate this by telling The Facebook Moms in very clear terms that if they post pictures including our kid, then we won’t be doing anything with them anymore.

Are you against "protective" regulation in general or is it more about this specific case?

Eh. Broadcasting your children to strangers isn’t how most people use social media.

Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand, and use it responsibly. Many people in the wider world don't. They often see it as a way to share memories with other people or to save their memories, because free photo storage is a thing of the past and most people don't have more than 256 GB of hard drive space on their phone (their only computing device).

> Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand

Marketing for your personal brand? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t even imagine what “my personal brand” would be let alone how/why I would market it. Get me out of this narcissism dystopia!

This isn't really what I'm getting at and I don't really agree with the characterization. Saving memories and sharing with people you know is totally fine. That's very different from, e.g., monetizing your kids through short-form video.

Yeah, most people don't monetize their kids, but "likes" != monetization. You're thinking about a small minority of people who have the most serious version of this problem, but it is a lot more widespread than just people who monetize their kids.

> or to save their memories, because free photo storage is a thing of the past

Using a social network as a journal doesn't imply needing to post anything publicly. There are plenty of private Instagram accounts that people just use to save photos.

You're still sharing it with the one person who can do the most damage: Mark Zuckerberg.

>256 GB of hard drive space on their phone

This is really pedantic, but nobody has hard drive space on their phone. :P

Most people aren't even aware how far their "broadcast" (posts) travel, or whose hands their data ends up in these days.

I know this is meant as sarcasm, but I actually agree.

How do systemic issues come to exist if not for the actions of individuals?

"Systemic" is a term made up to abdicate responsibility and/or create a bogeyman. It's more comfortable to blame "them" then yourself, either for why you can't succeed or for a societal problem.

Most of those individuals have a rather weak will, they are slaves of desires. At the same time a few individuals with a strong will and predatory mindset know how to push the weak crowd into a loop of addiction. Coca Cola is essentially a drug dealer, they even used an actual hard drug in the past to hook up customers; now they have to resort to milder chemicals to cause addiction. Fashion industry is another example: they use the desire to feel better than others or like others, and skillfully use that to manufacture a loop of addiction.

I was reading recently the story of Christopher Robin, and how using his childhood stories in Winnie the Pooh haunted to him for the rest of his life and made him a subject of bullying.

I can only imagine what it will be like for these kids once they're older with their whole story plastered all over Instagram.

It’s more that his parents were completely emotionally absent & preferred to (as he put it) “step on [his] infant shoulders” than have any substantial relationship.

The bullying definitely was real but his parents mental neglect probably contributed at least as much—if not more—to his trauma.

I don’t disagree, but I feel the need to share a small bit of anecdata for perspective:

My kids often say, “this is so cool! Can you get a photo and share it with our friends online?”

Of course, anyone can take that last sentence, render it in their own context without the availability of any details to conclude that I’m a terrible parent. But that’s kind of my point: parenting is partly about making informed, nuanced decisions. You never have the information necessary to make an informed, nuanced criticism.

It’s the responsibility of the parent to work on gathering their data. Not knowing any better is not the responsibility of the child, but the parent. I would accept this probably in the early days of social media, but there is mounting evidence now that parents who monetize their kids are doing it intentionally and willingly. It’s child abuse in my book.

> bad parents are

They may be "normalizing" it, but they're definitely being "enabled" by the social media companies who create the actual "benefit" that drives the behavior in the first place.

It makes me think of the California Child Actor's Bill[0], and how it sets up "Coogan Trusts." The law requires the _employer_ to set aside money into a trust completely bypassing the parents. It seems to recognize that any amount of money injected into a parent and child relationship creates unique strains that do need to be considered directly.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Child_Actor%27s_Bil...

They literally got psychologists working to find out via A B testing what is the most addictive! Of course it's their fault. It's incredible how many people on this site try to feel not responsible for all the damage the Facebook, Instagrams and TikToks of this world are doing, even though they are the ones writing the code.

You are mistaken placing responsibility to involved parties.

> Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.

Enabling bad behaviour because it makes you money is quite literally exploitative and therefore reprehensible. But really, it is no different than what bad parents do: refusing to stop and consider they are not actively contributing to a better world.

> Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.

Parents make unwise choices in disclosing information about their children on social media. Certainly. One can debate whether it is for "Likes" as a measure of social capital or something else. But the social media companies and their symbiotic ecosystem have been anything but forthright about how they use the digital trail of such disclosures. The cohort of readers here understands it well; the wider world not so much. The dramatic asymmetry of information (what I know about their usage practices vs what they know about me and my children) virtually guarantees that I can't make a fully informed choice about what I disclose or whether I choose to do it at all.

Both are to be blamed but parents have 80% of the blame here.

I'm curious how you came up with that number.

> Bad parents are not the victim, they are part of the problem

It’s not an either/or situation. I would argue they are both.

When a few individuals out of a large group are doing it, then it makes sense to blame the individuals. When millions of people are doing it because a giant force is pushing them all in the same direction, that is more or less the definition of a systemic problem.

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