EU opens child safety probes of Facebook and Instagram, citing addictive design

It's a proven fact that the sugar producers have hidden the real dangers of overconsumption for decades to protect their precious money. Same thing with cigarettes, same with apps that use psychological and/or emotional manipulation to boost their "most important metric".

Here's a metric that might be more important than money to you: the teen suicide rate has increased by 62% since the advent of social media.

So, how much of the social media company's resources get spent increasing their most important metric vs educating parents and kids on the dangers of the technology they're trying to get them addicted to? If they do it responsibly, it's going to negatively impact their most important metric, and so they don't, and instead continue profiting from the negative externalities.

How many children ending their own lives is a 10% bump in your market cap worth? Perhaps that's a ratio that should be shown on an electronic display on the walls in these companies.

More to the point, I don't think it's fair to call parents stupid. Even if parenting weren't hard (which it is) it is not fair to expect everyone to get a Bachelor's in Software Engineering to use the one device that's almost indispensable for daily life. Nor is it fair to expect parents to monitor their children 24/7.

I'd argue this is one of those problems that are so ubiquitous and so difficult to solve that we appoint people to deal with them as a full-time job in order to keep them from spiraling out of control. They usually solve it with regulation, which is exactly what the EU is doing here.

Actually, yes: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/how-taxing...

One attempt to reduce sugar consumption was by taxing it. I don't know how effective it is though, but it was at least attempted.

This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:

a. Isn't true b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)

As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.

If your app is just addictive adtech, it has no moral, political, or even economic right to exist.

Once upon a time apps provided useful services. Many still do.

But the gamification/addiction plague is an absolute horror and needs to be shut down. It's the psychological equivalent of tobacco, alcohol, opioid, sugar, oil, and money addiction.

All of these things are incredibly toxic and cause astounding levels of social and individual harm.

"But money..." is the least credible argument for any of them.

I don't find it totally unlikely to think of a future where sugar is more strongly regulated, since it's linked to real dangers that used to be disregarded, and children are particularly targeted by sugary food.

More importantly, how can parents protect children if the same brain-hacking, attention grabbing mechanisms target them? "Honey, don't be on your mobile constantly, while daddy is busy using his mobile all day long".

> Don't want to play devil's advocate here but it's not the apps'/platforms' fault here, but parents' fault.

I think it's both, with most of the blame with apps/platforms. And parents are as much prey as their children. It's like a "socially acceptable" addiction; maybe we shouldn't make it so acceptable, like smoking isn't anymore?

(Hello, my name is the_af and I'm an addict...)

Wrong. Sugar is very regulated, specifically in regards to foods marketed towards children. Has been for decades.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-11-01/pdf/2016-2...

>> In addition, FNS is correcting the breakfast cereal sugar limit. The final rule provided a sugar limit of no more than 6 grams of sugar per dry ounce (no more than 21 grams sucrose and other sugars per 100 grams of dry cereal). The intent of that limit was to be consistent with the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Woman, Infants, and Children (WIC). However, due to rounding, the breakfast cereal sugar limit in the final rule that appears in 7 CFR 210.10(o)(3)(ii), 210.10(o)(4)(ii), 210.10(p)(2), 220.8(o)(2), 226.20(a)(4)(ii), 226.20(b)(5), and 226.20(c)(1) through 226.20(c)(3) is inconsistent with WIC’s breakfast cereal sugar limit of no more 21.2 grams of sucrose and other sugars per 100 grams of dry cereal. This correction amends the breakfast cereal sugar limit to align with WIC’s breakfast cereal sugar limit and corrects the other errors described above. Note that the Special Milk Program regulations at 7 CFR part 215 were amended in the final rule, but no technical corrections are necessary in this amendment.

https://news.sky.com/story/kelloggs-loses-legal-challenge-ag...

And... It's not working, right? More and more kids and people are obese, sugar is added to many products that shouldn't have it in the USA because it's not regulated, so competitors adding sugar have an advantage over others who want to keep it out of their products.

> I do not work for any big social media platform nor benefit from them, but stop blaming successful social media platforms that have mastered UX optimization, for stupid parents' actions that cause their children to get addicted.

> Educate the parents instead to spend more right time with their children.

You are falling into the trap of thinking individual action will solve systemic issues.

The parents might be educated and want to curtail their children's usage of social media but for a kid in 2024 to be denied access to these platforms by their parents is to be ostracised from their peers who will continue using it. You need a majority of parents from the same social circle to curtail all of their kids usage, how do you approach that? If the most popular kids are using it and shun away the non-users as "weird" or "lame", there's an immense peer pressure to participate in it.

I will keep blaming "successful" social media companies for creating ways to manipulate people into using their products, even when those products are causing harm.

Wouldn't you blame the tobacco companies for creating products (and advertisement campaigns) that are harmful to people? Or would you also ask for people to be educated instead of actions taken by governments to forbid advertisement of tobacco products, heavy taxation to create deterrents for usage, etc.?

Their metrics are driven by advertising goals. Maybe limit the number of ads that can be shown to a user in every 24h period? If Facebook were only allowed to show ads for the first 30 minutes of any user’s session per day, a lot of the incentives for addictive design are reduced.

But we (in the UK) do tax it, which is arguably a form of regulation: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/soft-drinks-industry-levy... https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/sugar-ta...

The parents are educated, they elected representatives and those representatives are pushing for this. Democratically elected officials aren't some otherworldly force, you argue that the people should act, this is the people acting.

Big tech bypassed those rules claiming the internet has so much choice unlike in the past were Broadcasters were few. But it never mattered that the internet has more choice cause Total Available Attention of the consumer is still the same. And if a significant amount of that Attention bandwidth is dominated by Advertising/Influence Ops its very easy to manipulate people. Not just kids.

The parents can be mistaken.

If enforcing the good habits of good parenting is not a problem, then 'apps' wouldn't have a problem with it. But they do. Because they're doing the equivalent of promoting cigarettes as a health elixr, something many on HN are complicit in through 'educational' branding of gamified (addictive) social media and even NFTs.

Most are not, but at a certain age kids will have enormous social pressure from their peers to do that, and will relentlessly ask for that.

And sometimes you tell them "fine, just finish your homework before" or something like that.

> Sugar is addictive. Do we ban sugar, or regulate its consumption? No! Instead we educate parents to limit their childrens' sugar intake.

This is also incorrect, there are plenty of places where sugar is regulated/limited/outright banned.

I wish things worked like that with cocaine

Addictive is whatever that creates a dependence that doesn't allow you to function correctly and productively, because it produces a natural reward.

In this case, design patterns that promote and provoke addictions, like gamification, attention grabbing, etc. that kids don't have tools to be aware of, need to be regulated. In fact, sugar content regulation in foodstuff have shown to be very effective at reducing obesity on kids. It's not a "ban", it's a regulation.

Why not have the parents of the CEOs teach them that it's bad to make addictive products that have nefarious consequences to people and society?

I can't believe you chose sugar as an example. As a healthy lifestyle minority I would love to see some regation on cane sugar and syrups. One idea would be to tax it by volume and make it as expensive as premium honey or maple syrup. Of course, if something like this happened I think people would be mind blown at the effect of food prices as they'd immediately realize just how much of this bullshit is in everything.

We ban cocaine and other super addictive drugs. Education is needed but it's not sufficient.

Overworked parents

Or

Billionaires employing the top minds of the world using every trick in the book to make you consume as much and as long brain washing content

I suspect there are patterns in social media that contribute to addictive design (visible up/down votes, for instance.)

This has been debated to death for centuries already: of course it's a clear net positive, in the same sense that prohibiting alcohol, cannabis, regulating video games, legislating sex, putting ankle monitors on fat people to monitor their activity levels—all these things are "obvious" social improvements: in practice, not at all. These isn't a novel debate. It's a revisited, misguided paternalism to imagine you can fix people's (admittedly defective!) lives, make them healthier and better people, through coercive political agencies supervising and guiding them. (A less charitable comment would substitute "authoritarian" for "paternalistic").

There's two experiments running in parallel right now. If you want to live a free human in a free society, live in the West; if you want to try the alternative of a benevolent father-government, go to the Middle Kingdom—go somewhere where you can assume that lifestyle, where government shuts off your addictive video games, puts social credit scores on your alcohol purchases, sends social police to re-harmonize your life when it's un-harmonized. Where (of course) TikTok has been banned for a long time already, and all dis-harmonious, time-wasting social media is already helpfully filtered out of your life by a nationwide internet filter.

Please don't turn the West into the East: speaking for myself, I would like the option of living in a free society, somewhere. Unfiltered internet access is a core part of that.

* Opt-in to "engagement algorithms". By default, people should only be seeing things that they're explicitly following and in some sort of neutral way (e.g. sorted by date).

* "Engagement algorithms" need to be transparent. It should be clear why I'm seeing what I'm seeing. This implies accountability of the platforms themselves. If the Facebook algorithm ends up promoting genocidal violence, they shouldn't be able to hide behind "it was the algorithm".

It may well be that Tiktok and the like turn out to have worse second-order effects than DDT, smoking, CFCs, leaded gasoline and other things we've banned or heavily restricted.