A South Carolina lawmaker is suing Instagram after his son died by suicide
cnn.com
cnn.com
There is a middle ground. If you are just a platform or software, then I don't think you should be liable. I don't think Discourse should be liable for every forum they host. But, when you are in the position of someone like Meta that exist to generate "engagement" to push ads onto people then I think that should change a bit.
I have no specific comment on the actual situation here, but I feel this expectation is also ridiculous, so the analogy doesn't work for me. People shouldn't be responsible for anything that happens on their plot of land if they have no actual hand in it.
But they have an actual hand in it.
Discord is subletting rooms out to moderators and doesn't really have any hand in the content on any particular discord. Meta, however, is pushing their algorithm on everyone on the platform and their employees, in one way or another, handle what content is seen and what content is policed and taken down.
Meta shouldn't be liable for this. The sexual exploitation scammers should be.
Meta and other platforms of a certain MAU threshold should implement standardized protections and work with law enforcement to stop this type of activity.
This is the correct response:
> Since then, Guffey has been outspoken about his son’s death and sponsored legislation last year that makes sexual extortion an aggravated felony punishable by years in prison if the victim is a minor or vulnerable adult or if the victim suffers bodily injury or death directly related to the crime.
While we need to have strong protections for free speech, anyone who knowingly coerces or bullies someone in a sexually exploitative way or in a way that they know could lead to suicide should be held accountable to an extent. If there is money or blackmail involved, then the penalties should increase dramatically.
I recall the many cases of the Kiwi Forums website bullying folks into committing suicide. They know what they're doing is wrong. While it might not be blackmail, this is a form of free speech that can kill people and we need to have a frank discussion about it. Even if we don't legislate it, we need to create social awareness and a safety net for folks. Suicide resulting from this is a wanton and needless tragedy.
> Between October 2021 and March 2023, federal officials received more than 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion of minors, which led to at least 20 suicides, the FBI said last week.
Parents also need to educate their children about this and let them know they're safe, loved, and that there is no shame in living life.
Extortion is already a felony. This is a national security threat, not a mere crime.
> Of course not. They're on the platform using it, viewing ads, aren't they?
> I mean, it's a shame that some people die, because they won't be able to view ads, and the negative press might impact other people's opinion of the platform leading to potentially reduced ad view, but, heeeeeyyyyyy it's easy enough to prevent certain platform-hostile opinions from being surfaced too much on the platform, you know? "Vagueries of the Algorithm" and all!
(insert a large rolleyes here)
I'm sure we'll get the Standard Tech Appopollylolly: "We are so, so sorry that you caught us enabling this bad behavior, and we will try to do the work to ensure you don't catch us doing it next time."
> The lawsuit, filed in South Carolina state court last week, accuses Meta’s social media platforms of causing a range of problems in children, including depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and eating disorders. It alleges that Meta uses algorithms to aggressively target adolescents and does not do enough to keep them safe from harm.
Of course it doesn't. Depressed, low self esteem, and anxious? That's their dream user - likely to be online a lot, and easily influenced by Meta's actual customers, those paying to influence the thinking of others. The more people like that Meta can produce out of formerly well adjusted individuals, the more money they make. Their incentives are entirely opposite that of larger society. Healthy, well adjusted, offline individuals are mostly worthless to Meta, because they're likely to be on the platform far less often. You just need enough that the platform looks like it's well adjusted people on it.
I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It's long past time for the social media companies to face the consequences of what they've created for their own short sighted profit numbers.
But for some reason social media is different? I don't see why it would be. Are the people on HN pushing for social media bans also pushing for unionization, banning pharmaceutical commercials, and preventing fast food stores in highschools? Because if they aren't it seems really hypocritical.
As gp correctly put it, they are brokers for human mindshare.
On the topic of social media, I think that there is a widespread belief that we could have tools that give us the social benefits of social media without including all of the toxic manipulative tracking and algorithmic feeds. Unfortunately the market has become dominated by a few maximally greedy companies, which sucks but doesn't have a clear solution.
So what are some tools we have available to remove the profit motive from this situation?
Aren't sugar taxes what led to the use of high fructose corn syrup, which is arguably worse than sugar?
Sugar taxes are consumption taxes that apply to all forms of sugar, including corn syrup.
Correct! They are completely different things. Cheap unhealthy burgers != social media platforms. Just because you can draw an analogy between two things does not make them the same, and so having different opinions about them does not make one a hypocrite.
But the better point to make, as the sibling comments have, is that saying "HN thinks X" is entirely meaningless because HN is not one person.
As to how they're different, I don't see it. This was a chance for proponents to describe how it's different, but nobody has; they've just said it is. All I see is a group of people begging the government to take away a freedom, instead of allowing parents a choice in how they raise their children.
However, I actually do draw a distinction between "things you have to go seek out," and "things that come to you in your home/pocket/etc."
I don't particularly care for gambling, and I'm the sort that goes to Vegas for conferences and doesn't even gamble a penny. But I honestly don't have a huge problem with Vegas existing. I recognize some people enjoy gambling, and... fine, whatever.
I do have a very serious problem with "casino apps" on phones/tablets/etc, and the "loot box" mechanics of games that bring that sort of thing into your pocket - without any of the regulation of Vegas. There are some quite strict limits on "how much you can screw over your customers," and casinos have to abide by them. There are no such limits on slot machine apps, and while you can go to Vegas and come away richer (it wouldn't work if nobody did), there's literally no way to achieve that with app-based gambling machines. You 100% lose all your money.
But to assert that nobody cares about fast food in a thread about social media is still... weird.
At that scale you would need an AI. Once the AI sees something possibly bad, either you have a real person check it (people would complain about privacy, the mental health of those employees having to see awful things) or you have the AI ban (people would complain about lost accounts)
No matter what instagram does they lose. So I think doing nothing is the right thing. Maybe the parent should have done some parenting.
From his website - yep called it.
"Brandon Guffey is an unapologetic conservative who shares our passion for faith, family, freedom and life."
He is clearly deflecting the blame here.
I wish there was a special prison for these types of people. Jesus Christ.
Yet again, Humans are the problem.
points to one of the major issues around this. Why are these even possible? Instagram is a social network for real people. Implement a strong form of ID verification. Charge people a dollar for a sign up. Sure there'll still be edge cases of people using stolen creds but it cuts down what, 99.9% of scam? The kid in the article was extorted for 25$. Drive the cost of this crap up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirro...
Amanda Todd https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd
Tyler Clementi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi
If Instagram were liable for anon bad actors illegal behavior then Instagram would clean up their act with a quickness. There is no incentive to fix anything on these platforms with the current rules.
I think the only way out of this is a full ID verification system online, which worries me a lot for a bunch of reasons. Not sure how you de-anonymize for safety without invading privacy (the eternal tradeoff).
You could anonymously read and broadcast but anything private should require personal responsibility. I don't see how this would effect ad-revenue or anything either. I imagine it would only bother bullies, trolls and scammers.
So? What value have these platforms provided that justifies their existence?
I'm not sure they should be fully liable but being fully immune is ridiculous. I don't know what the answer is but the current incentives are not working.
There is no step 2. The worst parts of social media and ad clearinghouses (Jesus, all the scams Google promotes and makes money off of) are destroyed, anything remotely defensible survives. Personalized "algo" feeds and "algo" suggestions? Untenable. Customized ads served from a system no human monitors or checks to make sure they're not serving blatant scams at a massive scale? Gone. Both the incentives and ability to try to connect strangers with one another in ways they didn't directly ask for? Greatly diminished.
Ad-supported media survives (for better or worse). People can still communicate just fine. People can still publish without trouble.
100% true.
Very sad to hear and I hope he wins. But these companies are very powerful so I doubt things will change. A blatant is what Apple did in the EU after they lost their court case.
I don't know what the solution is here. However, every time I think on it, I keep coming back to parent and personal responsibility, which sounds like victim blaming. I kinda hate myself for that, but for every technical solution I can think of, I instantly think of a simple way to circumvent it. So then I wonder how to make the message stick: DON'T SEND NUDES TO ANYONE ON THE INTERNET. EVER!
Today's dark forest hellscape Internet is not a safe place for young people, and it's getting worse with AI automation of scams and fraud. I wouldn't even post pics of kids online anywhere public since these can be mined to create fake AI blackmail material.
Edit: it's fraud all the way down, too. A lot of these boiler rooms use borderline or actual slave labor. The person doing the scam may not be getting anything for it at all, or might even be captive. So it's fraud perpetuated by fraud victims. At the top is usually organized crime.
This has a different victim demographic but is broadly similar and was a good read (at least as far as I remember)
The core problem as I see it is that platforms like Instagram connect every person on the internet to every other person on the internet. Turns out that some of these people are a tad unscrupulous. Limiting this, especially for children and teens, seems like a good first step. Last week Instagram announced you can only send DMs to under-19s if they're following you, which is an okay-ish first step (and the absolute minimum they could do).
But it's also not only about these types of extortions, for example from [1]:
> “Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/07/meta-face...
[0] "Childhood 2.0" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He3IJJhFy-I
It'd be interesting to see the differences int his sort of crime in more open cultures.
"Standing up to bullies is the kind of thing that gets young people expelled from school. Something about those zero tolerance policies."
So it's not really the standing up part but the policy that gets them expelled.
I think this is false. You can stand up to a bully without physical fighting or retaliation.
Hopefully we can move past restrictive religious ways of looking at the world and actually prevent things like what happened in the article.
That said, Christians, in general, would agree with you that law by its very nature has no power to bring about good in people. That's pretty much one of the core tenets. In the end, laws serve only like the double yellow line in the middle of American highways. It's a guide that helps us share the road without hurting others.
The guard rails of commitment, love and genuine care for others brings about an environment where relationships can flourish. They provide stability and care that children need to thrive emotionally. They keep us from swerving into relational "oncoming traffic" when we get frustrated or angry, instead encouraging us to stay in the lane and figure out how to work together.
I’m not from a puritan environment at all but when I was a teenager I had low self esteem. I believe I could have been an easy victim back then.
For example, we often educate children to set boundaries and tell adults about unwanted sexual advances. That doesn't mean that children who failed to set boundaries and tell adults deserve to be molested. .
Many discussions here about freedom of speech and the value of anonymity to this; the freedom to express ideas without worrying it may explode in our faces later.
I think right-leaning people use "cancel culture" to describe the same category of concerns. At lest, I hope that's what they mean by the term.
Business and governments say similar things, saying that if every meeting is recorded, people will be less willing to speak up.
A society where we don't care about people having had dumb opinions in the past would help more… but that creates a game theoretic risk, we need some kind of reputation system to avoid the iterated prisoners' dilemma degenerating into the ordinary prisoners' dilemma.
I don't have any complete answers. But at the same time, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, we can certainly make things better.
Also Taylor Swift will probably save us all if she takes on AI nudes and she can help teens by leading by example. That will help to change the dialog shame and stigma.
We also need to help kids with self-acceptance and reduce shame. But yes, instagram and social media need to do more, that has been clear for awhile.
I think if you want to reduce the shame of people in situations, the absolute best thing to do is to make extortion a crime that law enforcement has the ability to prosecute forcefully. If that's the case, people who are in this situation know that the law and the resources of the law are on their side.
I think this law -> culture change has already been shown to work in similar situations. For instance, when women know that law enforcement will help them investigate sexual harassment/assault it makes it means they have less shame about dressing/socializing how they want.
There is always going to be ways to hurt or threaten to hurt people.
Your comment reminds me of the first time I received the phishing scam where the email claims that your computer was hacked and that the hacker has a video of you pleasuring yourself that they will allegedly send to all of your contacts if you don't pay them money.
After immediately recognizing that it was a phish, my second thought was "I value that money way more than I value my dignity ... so even if this were legit ... sorry grandma!"
It's unfortunate that it took this happening to a congresscritter, in their privilege of perfect law enforcement preference, otherwise blind to how LEOs aren't doing their job, to do something. Unfortunately, they're not asking LEOs to do their job, but rather suing the communication medium, even though the same scam could be run through a different communication medium.
I agree that we ask LEOs to enforce the law, and doing so is a lot of work. There is, though, quite a large discrepancy between what we ask them to do, and what they do, so it remains to be seen if they are doing a lot of work, and it remains to be seen if they work they do do, is the work we want them to do, versus the work they want to do (for example, what sort of speed limit enforcement operations do they run? How much do they prosecute simple drug possession?)
I believe opening themselves up freely and willingly to non-LEO oversight and control would do a lot to answer those questions.
And even if they are in the US, it's not that hard to be reasonable untrackable with minimal skills. People make mistakes, and maybe every now and then you might catch one person. Whoop-die-doo. It's just not effective or reasonable to track down every single case in depth.
I just don't think they're doing the best they could be doing, is all, but that goes back to my suggestion about them being receptive to civilian oversight and control: we can run the numbers and determine objectively whether they're doing as good as we'd like them to be doing.
The best thing that can be done is changing the system so these types of scams/extortions are much harder to pull off in the first place.
The problem is that we've already made it illegal, but I don't see law enforcement doing as much enforcing as I'd like them to be doing. I didn't give them permission to throw their hands in the air and cross their arms in frustration and give up yet, and I don't think that any marginal effort would be wasted.
I don't think they're at their capacity either, so from my perspective, the difference is between 0 benefit and >0 benefit for the same annual expenditure on salary. If they needed more capacity after actually exhausting their existing capacity, they could reduce work in things we don't want them to work on.
They could convince folks otherwise, but it would require what I mentioned before: being receptive to non-LEO oversight and control. Then, we would have more accurate information for our judgement of whether they're doing as much as we'd like them to be doing, and what we'd like them to be doing.
I know this would be extremely embarrassing but it is far from life destroying (or at least it should be). Within a year life would've moved on and no one would even care. We all need to better come to terms with this reality and neutralize its impact and the shame of it.
Choosing suicide is if you have a terminal illness and have a lethal injection administered.
If they want to socialize, go outside. The internet is not a toy it's a different dimension of life. The problem with here is it's still a pretty wild west and we don't have enough guards to prevent crime. You wouldn't let your kid walk around Philly's Kensington Ave without you and you sure as hell wouldn't let them walk around talking to everyone there... so why do we let them on platforms that are filled with the same or worse? Sure IG can be harmless but it's also a quick search away from whatever content they can (or can't) imagine.
That is an interesting piece of data. Up until now, based on other media reporting, I was under the impression that things like that were disproportionally affecting girls.
Yes. Access to and knowledge of firearms dramatically increases the lethality of suicide attempts.
But in this case, the kid was scammed for nudes and then blackmailed with them. Without easy access to guns, he could have survived the suicide attempt, but there's no guarantee.
The root cause has more to do with childhood, internet access, and maybe even parent-child relationships.
Guns, drugs, knifes, rope, exhaust, whatever. These always become the focus when a kid kills themselves. How about the circumstances that led to it? Suicide is still a problem is low gun ownership countries.
So yes access to guns is a problem.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi
Teenagers don't need a gun to kill themselves. This is not the issue at hands here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Okay, so you train your classifier on extortion. Then you train it to detect sexual content. Then you train it to detect potential piracy. Then you train it to detect wrongthink. Then you don't have a free society anymore.
Casual piracy, e.g. link sharing in DMs, would be a tipping point if I had to guess.
There are many other cases in which we allow limited intrusions into individual freedom in order to protect society. For instance, here in the UK, a police officer can enter my house without a warrant if they believe that it is necessary to facilitate an arrest for an indictable offence -- and that has been the case since at least 1984. If your way of thinking was accurate, police should now be routinely entering my house and beating confessions out of me.
Truth and lie are written the same.
ML is useful because it can continue functioning with ambiguous data. Even so, it can't remove it or resolve it.