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Comment by thegrim000 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population.

Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".

Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?

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Because people don't think the government should always prioritize protection over freedom, nor do people think the government should always prioritize freedom over protection.

It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.

People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.

Playing the devils advocate: Isn't social media much more a "bomb" than circular saws?

There's clearly not agreement on that; hence this article from Jon Haidt.

For teenagers it is.

This is a silly comparison. The table saw was not designed to be addictive, turn its users into a highly lucrative commodity, or push algorithmically driven agendas. Social media was. The dangers being compared here are very different.

You mean to say, with a saw the intent is for it to be a useful tool and the danger is an unintended side effect, while for social media the danger is the intent and it being a useful tool is an unintended side effect.

That seems to reinforce GP's argument, though?

The reason I am against government intervention is the fact that governments seem to not be competent enough to solve problems like this and they would use content controls for their own purposes. It is vastly different and more complex than regulating saws. The comparison falls short by a huge margin and a false conclusion that any federal legislation would be desirable just because it is the case for saws.

Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.

Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.

Irrespective of where people fall on this particular issue, I find it odd how the people who are so distrustful of government would allow things that are overtly dangerous, as long as it prevents government from...governing.

It's like we have this generation of people who believe government overreach is a) inevitably the outcome in every scenario; b) present in every situation; c) always the worst possible thing that could happen. As in, literally worse than mass sickness and death.

Not only that, but they assume that corporations, free of government regulation, will simply act in everyone’s best interest, with responsibility and accountability.

At least in theory, my government representatives are accountable to me. To whom is Facebook accountable?

Exactly. People who want to disempower democratic government are just disempowering themselves. But, they seem to think the power held by the government would simply evaporate.

They don't realize it's really a question of who will rule over them, and whether there's any chance it will be themselves.

Sure, our democracy has been crippled, but the solution is to fix it, not dismantle it.

And ironically the people who are crippling it (Citizens United, lobbying, regulatory capture, etc) are the same who would rule over us if it were completely abolished. That is, essentially, their project.

They feel that the government is a singular hivemind whereas FB/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/etc offers the illusion of choice. (And how wonderful it is to feel some control! You can pick the content you want, who to follow, vote on content, comment, post! The friendly algorithm is just recommending things, it's helping!)

The government is never a passive actor. So non-intervention is also active policy. You can only choose what the policy is. The active policy for the last 15 years has been to consolidate a social media oligopoly with very few restrictions. Users are being tracked, advertisement laws are being skirted and are less restrictive than in other mediums, data is being sold, dark patterns are used to keep people from making their own choices. The algorithms are actively promoting bad content because the social media companies are not held liable for their part in promoting false content.

Depending on where you live it is not true that there are no restrictions on false advertising and accountability for commercial content.

That said, a government can be passive and not regulate a field and non-intervention stays non-intervention, be it conscious or not. But that is besides the point. A government that tries to regulate all aspects of life is usually connected to totalitarianism, an that isn't only a libertarian position.

It was about table saws, not circular saws. There’s a big difference between the two. Table saw accidents often result in losing fingers and it’s not that difficult to mess up while using one.

There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.

Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).

Isn't SawStop patent encumbered? AFAIK the three point seat belt design's patent was made open by Volvo at the time, so the patent didn't hold back adoption.

Yes - in fact the whole company was started by a patent attorney.

SawStop says they'll release one patent (which is about to expire anyway) but they've got a huge portfolio of other ones, and companies like Grizzly say that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology.

Bosch released a saw with similar tech, except unlike SawStop it didn't use overpriced consumables every time it triggered. SawStop sued the product off of the market.

The company founder also serves as an expert witness when people shove their hands into moving saw blades, then sue the saw makers - testifying that the makers should be held liable because they haven't licensed his invention.

Of course, I'm sure for SawStop getting all their competitors banned will be a highly profitable decision; it's no surprise they're lobbying for it.

Sawstop did sue Bosch, but then changed their mind and gave them a free license immediately after the case was won. It was boschs decision not to release their product in the US for whatever reason.

The CEO committed to releasing the one remaining patent to the public domain earlier this year.

SawStop has publicly pledged to dedicate their patents to the public if this becomes mandated.

I think this could be aptly summarized as "you can't accidentally slip and become depressed" using social media. You can absolutely slip and lose one or several fingers or your entire hand using a table saw.

The more pertinent comparison would be alcohol IMO: none of the people who want "something" done about social media seem to have a problem with the widespread, massive use of alcohol within society and the incredible amounts of continuous and ongoing damage it does.

>I think this could be aptly summarized as "you can't accidentally slip and become depressed" using social media

I think the point is exactly that you can.

No you can't. You can, through usage over a long period of time, and by ignoring a lot of good advice, create problems for yourself just like anything else.

If a table saw could only remove your hand after years of dedicated usage, then sawstop wouldn't be the obviously good idea it is.

Hence why the comparison to alcohol is much more apt, and yet, mysteriously - absent in the discussion.

These read like distinctions without differences.

Damage from social media use is gradual and insidious. Additionally, it's designed to be addictive, slowly pulling users in. There is no threshold that announces itself when users are addicted or have begun to "ignore a lot of good advice".

There's also no absence of discussion around the dangers of alcohol or drugs. And, there are actual laws regulating or outright banning their use.

But, even if it was absent from the discussion, that would not absolve social media. Is every world issue rendered illegitimate if we don't also mention the dangers of alcohol with equal fervor? It seems a random, meaningless requirement.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

I think every issue is due consideration in the context of "do I personally not care about the thing I want to regulate about everyone else?"

Alcohol is a useful yardstick, because it was banned (to considerable disaster), almost everyone likes it, the misusers tend to not realise it till considerably later, and we've got studies which look dire on the cost to society of it in fiscal terms.

If what you're calling for would seem ridiculous if it were applied to alcohol, then maybe it's just going be ineffective or you just don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak: after all, both serve a considerably important social cohesion function as well.

Which to loop it back around is why trying to compare social media regulation to something like mandating sawstop is especially disingenuous.

So, if there's not an easy solution, we should de-emphasize the problem?

That’s not what I meant. It’s hard to compare these two problems because one is effectively solved (table saw) and one is not (social media).

People need mental healthcare too. Done. Solved. Treat it like any addiction.

Of course the trick is that social media access doesn't require folks to pay an upfront cost, so it's harder to slap the cost of this additional service on the transaction. But of course as financial regulation makes banks do KYC and file SARs (suspicious activity report) social media regulations could do something similar. (Hurray more surveillance saves the day!)

I see. Just seems a bit circular, as the original question implies creating solutions.

Also, seems like an odd gating criteria for whether or not people support the idea of regulating social media (i.e. per the specific thrust of the original question).

Regulating a physical product being sold within the country, like a circular saw, is obviously materially different from enforcing age restrictions or other regulations to a website probably owned by a multinational company.

Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.

Well, circular saws can maim and rip off human body parts within a fraction of a second, and children can't use them ?

While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children.

Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.

How does not having social media restrict free speech? Do you think free speech didn't exist before social media?

Arguably, the presence of social media homogenizes the speech we're allowed to have.

good point.

a lot of ppl got reeled into the narrative that social media can democratize (free) publication of conversations and ideas, thou it is dominated by monetary incentives that mandate propaganda/advertising and in turn moderation and censorship.

How does banning an individual from printing books restrict free speech? Do you think free speech didn't exist before the printing press?

Not really the same, because the article is not calling for banning any source of social media. How would you even classify social media? We are taking about ad infested hellholes with no incentives other than maximizing revenue, regardless of the content pushed.

The proper analogy would be banning books with certain content, which we already do. You can't distribute a book calling for a specific person to be killed or doxxing them. Doing this on social media in Ethiopia is encouraged, as it drives engagement and has lead to actual deaths of people I know. They have a policy not to moderate this content despite having the resources. Just like they have a policy to make the apps as addictive as possible.

More importantly, Facebook is not a "printed book", it is the printing press. It owns the internet. It's not remotely comparable. And that's why it is a threat to free speech

How is access to a wholly privately owned walled garden in any way relate to printing books? Private networks are by definition not public domain and thus are totally irrelevant to any discussion of free speech.

I would agree if it weren't for the complete transition to privately owned communication platforms. The answer to your question is actually quite simple: because communication via privately owned walled gardens is humanity's primary means of mass communication, just as it used to be printed media.

It would be as if printing presses were so complicated and expensive that the barrier to entry was so high as to price out everyone but a few select publishers. I wouldn't try to over-extend that metaphor though.

That folks have opted to interact (or been manipulated into it if we're really honest) with modes of communication that are outside of 1st amendment protections doesn't change either the spirit or the letter of the law. That would be like saying that if folks suddenly decided to communicate over transcontinental distances via morse code utilizing geophones and large explosions as the transmission mechanism so now the first amendment demands semtex should be broadly accessible to the public.

I guess if it's only specific individuals/groups that can't print books, it's restricting free speech, if nobody can, it's not.

It restricts free speech in the most direct, literal sense - by... restricting your ability to freely speak.

The historical existence is simply irrelevant. Just like existence of pre-TV/newspaper speech is not a relevant factor in determining whether banning all TV/newspapers in 1950 restricts free speech

Making publication easy on social media has certainly had an impact on public speech, but private platforms do not offer free speech by design.

Naomi Klein went into this in No Logo with shopping malls replacing public spaces where you also don’t have a right to free speech and can be evicted arbitrarily at the owners discretion.

You’ll find virtually all of social media platforms have moderation, usage policies and user banning practices that go well beyond allowing the fully legally protected free speech you are afforded in a public space (in many countries).

If all spaces that attract the majority of people are private and have homogenous terms of use, then free speech ends in all ways except on this technicality.

Edit: removed unnecessarily inflammatory phrasing.

It (practically) doesn't matter what the moderation policies are, a legal ban on social networks will still be a restriction on free speech

This is a telling argument. Newspapers and television broadcasts, while geared towards broad public consumption, were never wholly democratized platforms and that didn't run afoul of the first amendment. It stands to reason that management of content on social media platforms or outright banning the same wouldn't either.

The restriction that this freedom is supposed to save you from is that of prosecution. Nobody is promising everyone a megaphone.

And this whole conversation is about laws mandating something and the resulting prosecution with comparisons to safety standards in saws, not your made up megaphone

What access to tools or avenues for speech should fall under the first amendment then?

Which of Haidt's 4 suggestions restricts free speech? Is free speech (for adolescents) more important than the well-being of those same adolescents? Has American jurisprudence aligned on the notion that adolescents have an inviolable right to free speech?

I wonder how many would be for seatbelt laws if the addition of seatbelts say doubled the price of car.

I think this confuses cause and effect.

Seatbelts are brought up so often precisely because they are an intervention with a huge benefit-to-cost ratio. Seatbelt laws were made long after the fact - seat belts for cars started to appear in the 1950s, with the common three-point variant in 1955; the first seatbelt law appeared in 1970 (in Australia). The US started introducing seatbelt laws for cars in the 1980s (though as far as I know, some organizations/insurers required them earlier for employees driving for business).

    > if the addition of seatbelts say doubled the price of car

Here is the problem: They didn't. So what is your point?

Yeah funny as a one-legged rabbit hopping in neat little circles. If I were still on social media I wouldn't want to take a long look at the quality of my interactions or the costs associated with them either.

hes actually trying to say, "that's stupid". HN and reddit would be so much easier if negative posting were allowed.

your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.

Because it is the parents responsibility to set boundaries for their children. It can be complicated at times, granted. But that doesn't make it less of their job. Heck, I got my first CD player with 14. Yes, I felt left out at school, but... guess what, I didn't die. Children need to learn that there are rules, and someone else dictates them. Throwing tantrums is a typical reaction that needs to be weeded out as a part of growing up.

Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.

You can say it should be on the parents here and reason why, but for a lot of things it is not just on the parents (children are not allowed to vote, drive a car, buy guns, go to bar and drink alcohol, gamble, ... - it is a long list).

Such bans are not clear and are contentious, and often leave room for parental discretion.

In most countries whether children drink alcohol at home is up to their parents. In some countries an adult can buy teenagers a drink (in the UK they increased the required age from 14 to 16 - and I think its a bad thing).

There are people who think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.

Kids cannot buy guns, but can use them. I did a bit of rife shooting at school.

Is it really contentious if 10 year old children cannot on their own buy liquor or guns, for example? I would not have put that high on the list of contentious issues.

There is a difference in being granted unsupervised abilities vs supervised ones.

As is pointed out in the article, a huge factor is the collective action trap. An individual set of parents can do very little to deal with mental health if they are the only ones.

No, they can do quite a lot, it's just VERY hard, for both the parents and the kids.

But if properly done, it can work. I was/have been the kid in this scenario, and now I'm being the parent and bracing for it.

Social pressure might be a tidal wave, you can either give up, or you can try to stand against it.

I totally doubt this is true. Its a nice excuse though.

Tell us you don't have kids without telling us you don't have kids. Short of totally unplugging your children from broader society via homeschooling, joining a commune, or similar extremes, children are exposed to whatever other children's parents permit through nothing more complicated than their interactions with other kids. An example from pre-digital times would be that one kid who's dad kept a stash of nudie mags unsecured which invariably lead to hushed giggling in the back of the bus.

I was that kid (I mean one with boundaries set, with parents that acted against all of this, just to be clear) and now a father, with my second kid on her way. Still very young, so I can't claim to have much experience. But I am getting ready to stand against all of this, and I do intend to delay their exposure to social networks, mass information, etc. as much as possible.

At least until their character is formed and they have developed essential human traits like being able to read a book, being able to be patient, being able to communicate in person, and to hand-write. You know, that sort of ancient wisdom.

Edit for clarification.

Brace yourself for the day your kid comes home armed will rickrolls and starts muttering "deez nuts" under their breath. It's coming way WAY sooner than you think. ;)

As we make parenting harder and harder in lots of creative and sadistic ways, more and more people are taking your advice. That’s got its own problems, it turns out.

> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/

I never saw myself as capable of withstanding the stress of parenting and so I never even really thought about having kids. I thought I was a far outlier, but, given trends in fertility, I think I may have just been early in realizing this.

I was one of the last people in my class to get a phone, which taught me that not having the cool new thing was not nearly as bad as I had thought.

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