Nearly 40 states back surgeon general's social media warning labels
theverge.com
theverge.com
Seriously, can we come up with a better solution to these things? Like can browsers notify you about cookies instead in a non-intrusive way? Same with social media nagware.
Just thinking aloud, because websites will become increasingly annoying over time.
Edit to add some more detail. There's a lot of scholarship that more information or transparency can't be bad - and I don't disagree too much - but the cluttering and intrusiveness is too much. Every legal regime (privacy, safety, consumer protection, IP, etc) clambors to be the most important and worthy of being front page news. But this results in a brutal web experience. I miss the old, simple websites we had as kids. Can't we all agree that a privacy policy or terms link is enough? That's what links are for.
But given it's possible to comply with the law by throwing up obnoxious banners, that's what these companies do, and you're basically forced to do, if you compete with them.
Whether you blame 'capitalism' or 'the marketplace' for those things or, you believe 'the government' has the job of understanding this and putting in place laws that make it easier across the board, is kind of up to your political affiliation.
Ultimately those are written by lawyers for lawyers. They're extremely long, verbose, and hard for a layman to parse. And that's on purpose. It's a dark pattern to get people to agree because they lack the time to read and to understand [0][1][2].
Reading isn't the same as understanding, and that's a separate bag of worms which comes up all the time in legal affairs. Take the recent Disney fiasco. I don't think the average person would read the ToS and come to the conclusion that Disney can more or less kill your loved ones with impunity in their parks if you watch Disney Plus. Not that other lawyers agree either, but apparently that's the understanding of Disney's lawyers.
Not that pop ups, modals, and warnings are much better. But I think a clear warning/opt out pop up is far better than a link buried in account settings or policy/ToS.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/readi...
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/it-would-take-17-hours-to-read-th...
[2] case in point, I'm sure better links exist but I'm sort on time and just plugging what I reviewed from the top of Google results.
What people disagree is in whether it's actually enforceable.
That using a Disney plus trial promo several years ago would force arbitrartion in a wrongful death suit stemming from a visit to a physical establishment is well beyond, IMO, a reasonable expectation.
Evidently, I was wrong... But the arbitration clause clearly says it applies to the case. You are expecting things that aren't written there (nor in any other of those "contracts" you sign every day). IMO, you should be correct on that, but the world seems to disagree.
E.g. For physical harm, perhaps I was upright/walking when something scary was on, and in my fright I stumbled/fell/flailed etc and experienced some bodily harm/death. I could totally understand and accept forced arbitration in this instance.
However, I don't expect that to continue for eternity. If I watched Disney plus for a day, canceled my subscription, and went to see Frozen on Ice years later, I wouldn't expect the Disney Plus ToS to have any bearing.
But anyways, back on point, I don't think the average person is legally competent enough to enter into these agreements. Laymen can read and argue what we expect/understand something to mean, but that's very different from what it legally means. This is why I think a ToS/Policy page are not good stand alone solutions.
I'd argue that the ToS/policy page solution can still work, though. We just need higher standards and greater clarity for what those policies are allowed to do, and what they are not allowed to do, and greater clarity on what the bright lines are for companies -- like, there should just be a rule about how contracts work in this Disney case, not a rule about where you need to tell people about the specific thing.
There's a continuum, though: from a dense legal meaningless document, to a hyper-loud intrusive but meaningless pop-up. I'd argue that the lawmakers should try to understand the entire market factors at work here, and propose laws that incentivize companies to produce useful/meaningful documents and policies.
I mean if it's notifying you in a non-intrusive way then it's not really notifying you. That said I absolutely agree with the spirit of your comment. All the EU regulations accomplished was adding an infuriating dialog about cookies that the vast majority of users just click-through anyway, which I suspect will also happen to anyone subjected to surgeon general's warnings about how bad social media is for you. They already click through the T's and C's without reading, I doubt this will be more interesting.
This, IMO, is just another symptom of our individualist-obsessed culture. We'll tell people how terrible a thing is for them to consume, but ultimately, we also permit them to consume it. I don't think that's a wrong idea in and of itself, I'm generally pro-autonomy, but products that explicitly create addiction in their consumers are, IMO, an ethical gray area with regard to this and undermine the notion that they are being engaged with in a healthy way, which is core to the pro-autonomy argument. If you choose to consume alcohol, knowing the health issues it can cause, then I'm absolutely fine with you doing so, and extend that to any other harmful substance or product. If you are addicted to it, on the other hand... well, it's complicated.
I'm old enough that I remember when it was commonplace to figure out what on earth your car was even mad about that you had to take it to a mechanic and pay for the privilege. That's one aspect I will absolutely give has improved both to new cars' infotainment systems that can give much more detailed information about what's wrong, and to the wide-spread adoption of DTC decoding devices/apps.
I tend to agree regarding the current state of things, but most nagging pop-ups are not compliant with regulations, and are bound to get slammed sooner or later. I think they will last a couple of years before being seriously challenged and be gone (possible replaced by something worse, though).
This has spawned some services you pay for which handle the dialogs for you.
I’ve noticed some of these providers, they have a consistent layout and are localised, even on small sites purely designed for American audiences. If these services are good, then a lot of smaller website will be good as well without them needing to invest too much time or money in this.
You could have websites emit headers in responses that will offer the appropriate regulatory compliance warnings, which the user agent can surface in an appropriate way such as in an address bar icon or a dedicated button, and allow the user to ignore them entirely, upon request.
Although not directly related to this particular article, this would also be a way in which porn bans can be easily enforced (e.g. Virginia) instead of requiring intrusive user verification - the website software might emit a "X-Regulatory-Info: porn" header, which parental control software can then look for; and any websites not emitting that header would be considered illegal.
What I'm proposing is if we're going to legislate the web, make it smarter and intuitive. Unfortunately the people writing these laws rarely get feedback from people who actually build websites or care about end-users.
They absolutely can, and they absolutely can be our user agents for maintaining cookie whitelists, blacklists, with a consistent UI for being notified a site uses cookies and if we want to allow them.
But they don't do that.
It would have been 1000x more user-friendly and convenient for our user agents to behave like actual agents, filtering cookies for us, instead of 1000 different flavors of invasive cookie banners and "necessary cookie" notices.
But the EU lawmakers didn't want that, or perhaps they just didn't understand the problem enough.
I agree that it's not sufficient, disagree that it's consequential. Consequential means it has consequences, I don't see what those are.
Situations like this remind me of that old sketch by The State, where there's a penitentiary with a big, wide-open gate, and all the prisoners are politely asked to please not escape, as a favor to the warden. Our Surgeon General is asking people to voluntarily not abuse social media, when that's the exact thing people are doing already, want to keep doing, and in fact in many cases define their lives around doing. Also, there's absolutely no proposed way to stop them from doing it, or even incentivize them not to do it. Not sufficient indeed.
It’s missing enough of the things that characterize social media that it’s unambiguously not in that category.
[edit] however, separately: yes, it should :-)
you can network, dm, and users who post frequently are often recognized here.
you can doom-scroll as much as anywhere else whether it be in the feed or in the comments (so long as you don't have a bias towards different mediums like video).
and also while it might not meet your criteria for social media algorithmically or otherwise, an algorithm is not necessary for someone to engage with the internet in unhealthy ways. the surface area for emotional damage is just different. and that doesn't imply HN is some special place where the only users engaging here are "emotionally well" in both their engagement/usage, and in their personal.
and speaking as someone intimately familiar with relevant behaviors and presentations, the algorithm exerts influence and exploits, but it is ultimately not the RCA -- it's just like a drug dependency for someone with maladaptive coping mechanisms -- the drug isn't "the problem", it's a symptom, and the "drug dealer" is taking advantage of it.
side-thought:
it always makes me wonder if people manufacturing and distributing what i see as a "need" for social media, while employing HOOKED marketing dopamine strategies to establish said need in its users, ever ask themselves: is this a net-good? should i be doing more with my life? is this harmful?
imagine being a demonstrably great mind and seemingly great person, but working somewhere like FB or IG or TikTok and applying every ounce of your intelligence to maximize user engagement.
Personally, IMHO, if we want more people to have fulfilling careers that are a net-gain for society, we need to foster an economy that finds that valuable and will pay for it as such, instead of seemingly, almost intentionally, placing personal fulfillment/net-good for society on the polar opposite end of what pays well.
HN is unambiguously social and unambiguously media.
I get how people arrive at that kind of place—“social” and “media” cover so very much, singly and together, so, what’s not social media?—but if we define it that way, it’s uselessly broad because it doesn’t exclude enough. Also, it includes tons of sites that pre-date (or are similar to sites that pre-date) the term “social media”, and aren’t the kind of thing the term was coined to refer to, like HN. Why even have the term?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/starting-today-i...
You'll rarely read uplifting stuff about 1A on HN; this crowd does not like to upvote those stories. The AB 587 law had 400-comment threads excitedly cheering it on, and total silence when the courts overturned it. You'd get the wrong impression if you got all of your tech news from HN.
Minors by definition do not have any responsibility, nor do they have any perspective to consequences, they are immortal in their own minds
The only answer is to make parents and guardians responsible, start with fines, end up with prison if there is something so dire to what you are trying to stop and it is destroying lives.
Probably not but I've seen not-a-pack-a-day smokers stop smoking also because of the warning labels. It's a constant nudge and if you are not that deep into the addiction it makes some people wonder if it's worth keeping the habit after seeing the throat cancer image for the 500th time.
It's a nudge for the ones that might pick up on it, it's never going to be perfect (and not even designed for that) but at a societal level if that label made some thousands of people consider quitting smoking it's already done its job.
Combine it with other nudges such as increasing taxes on cigarettes to absurd levels, education campaigns in schools, forbidding advertisement, so on and so forth, and changes happen.
The label is just one part of a whole strategy, only judging it in a vacuum is the wrong approach.
But at least it's just a label and not the use of violent force like with states and their poltiical campaigns using pornography as justification/incitement of fears.
Edit: @VyseofArcadia Thank you! Words are hard.
...to you. Everyone is a Libertarian except when it comes to other people's preferences.
I feel the same about tobacco, alcohol, and other industries targeting vulnerable humans. Have to defend the human from systems built to extract while harming in the process.
Voting for someone who intends to exceed the bounds of the constitution is not democracy. That's just a hired bully.
> others seek the same harm reduction
You're free to reduce your own harm. You are not free to prescriptively dictate an acceptable level of harm to others.
> targeting vulnerable humans.
All those other things you mentioned need well marketed and broadly advertised lies to function. Why do you suppose social media does not need the same?
Aside from that wouldn't your goal to make humans less vulnerable? Or are we perennially going to bully everyone else over the imagined needs of this class while constantly ignoring the rest of their plight?
"We don't care that you're vulnerable. We care that we can use you as an excuse to get what we want."
> If something changes the pathways in our brains and damages our health — and if it does so to Americans on a vast scale — it should be regulated as a threat to public health.
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/03/regulatin...
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me...
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-it-possible-to-become-...
It’s still democracy even when you aren't happy with the outcome. You got the vote. That’s the democracy part, not the winning.
And are there any politicians who are making a career out of that advocacy?
> I think you are confused with regards to current state
I think you are confused about the context of the conversation vs. what you wish the conversation was.
> The discussion is adding additional items to that regulatory list.
And the items on that list and the proposed additions are _significantly_ different. In particular, most of those do not enjoy constitutional protections, and the proposed does.
> It’s still democracy even when you aren't happy with the outcome
The constitution would disagree with you.
> You got the vote
I'd rather have the rights that are guaranteed to me, and I would like to know that neither you nor your strongman politicians can take any of those away from me, regardless of how many slips of paper you manage to collect.
It is democracy; democracy is mob rule. That's why the US is a republic, not a pure democracy.
As the constitution does not grant freedom from regulation to corporations, regulating corporations is well within the powers granted to states by the 10th amendment of the constitution.
> You're free to reduce your own harm. You are not free to prescriptively dictate an acceptable level of harm to others.
Again, if a society (city, county, state, etc) votes to do so, they are in fact free to do so. If a society agrees that a person is causing harm to others, then that person is fined, locked up, or (in some states) executed in an attempt to both cease the harm and punish them for causing the harm.
If a person such as yourself doesn't like the above, there isn't anything keeping you in that society except the benefits you gain from being a part of the society.
Elected officials proposing new legislation is pretty firmly within the bounds of the constitution. Is there something specific you object to?
FYI you probably mean "hollowing it out". "Hallowing" is to sanctify or make holy, which is pretty much the opposite of what Musk did to Twitter.
Isn't it, though? It seems to me, particularly due to the fact that people now overwhelmingly get their news from social media, that we've merely shifted which self-interested media corporations do the filtering.
Though it is true that people with prior abuse are more likely to be in this industry, it does seem to be pretty common. But I think it's a coping mechanism too. Everyone I know is happy to do the work anyway. The environment seems also really chill, they shoot at these luxury villas and afterwards hang out in the pool etc.
Of course N=1 but the whole stigma of it being a cesspool of abuse seems more politically/religiously motivated.
What is true is that very often the people who complain loudly about porn don’t actually give a fuck about the women and would want them in the kitchen anyway. It’s like nationalists pretending to care about the welfare of migrants when arguing that they should be kept somewhere else. It’s pure hypocrisy.
Yeah or the vanilla film industry. With characters like Weinstein and the others..