California Proposal to Tax Social Media Gathers Momentum | Hacker News Reader

California Proposal to Tax Social Media Gathers Momentum

newsweek.com

16 pointsWaitWaitWha25 comments

I really hate the idea of sin taxes like this one where we now take something that the law seems to view as bad (social media) and use it to fund "Social Security and mental health support".

So now something good like mental health funding is in part dependent on something bad ...

It strikes me as lazy public policy and perverse incentives.

At least it's not the states officially running/endorsing social media like they do with lotteries. Yet.

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Money for social programs must come from somewhere.

Using tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, gambling (for example) to raise funding for socially beneficial programs seem better than not doing it.

It's not an "enemy of the good" if good public policy is just a matter of a different law or approach.

What would be a good alternative then that would also likely be implemented?

A stable / consistent source of funding not connected to one industry.

Nobody is going to be better off if the funding for their mental health services is cut off because X industry is having a bad time or gets reclassified or something else.

I see this happen with sin taxes and other funding sources with education programs all the time. Programs cut, people fired because their funding is some sin tax or very specific source that dried up. Important services like mental health and etc should be funded consistently.

I don't disagree with you but where's the stable/ consistent source of funding?

It sounds good but where is it? Whom are you taxing or collecting funds from?

It's a problem because once the state gets revenue from a vice, they have an incentive to promote that vice. This is particularly common with gambling, where you have state propaganda (billboards, TV and radio ads, etc) encouraging people to gamble, even portraying gambling as some sort of way to invest your money.

Gambling is also sometimes considered a tax on the poor. But my point is it can be easier to levy a vice tax than raise income taxes for example.

AND with vices people will do them regardless so maybe some social good is better than no good coming from it.

Taxes tend to discourage things, so that kind of makes sense. However, the California Legislative Analysts Office has produced a detailed report showing that this practice of dedicating taxed funds to specific spending has already gone badly wrong with many of these funds being forced into the general fund particularly during budget crunches such as what is going on now. The most reasonable practice is to put all tax revenue into a general fund that is allocated as necessary by representatives. This allows budgets to be balanced without breaking laws while also responding to the priorities of the day which always change.

And I'm sure that all the revenue will go directly to "Social Security and mental health support" in perpetuity...

Wikipedia definesit as; "Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks."

Certainly TikTok and Twitter are the primary targets here, but this could also hit smaller communities like Mastodon and Diaspora.

And even if the laws would apply only to larger communities, wouldn't this inhibit growth of smaller communities? If they grow too big, they'd be forced to abandon volunteering for more organized and salaried moderation.

How good is a tax law if it becomes tricky to define the thing being taxed. Is the "social media" of today really the same Facebook of a decade ago?

This California tax momentum gives additional context for recent Zuck's arguments in the Meta antitrust hearing that Facebook isn't really "social media" anymore: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke...

I would like to read the text of the bill (because I'd like to see their definition of social media) but apparently the CA legislature website is down. When it is back up, it should be here:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Okay, it's back up:

    For purposes of this division:

    (a) “Social media platform” means a public or semipublic internet-based service or application that has users in California and that meets both of the following criteria:
        (1) (A) A substantial function of the service or application is to connect users in order to allow users to interact socially with each other within the service or application.
            (B) A service or application that provides email or direct messaging services shall not be considered to meet this criterion on the basis of that function alone.

        (2) The service or application allows users to do all of the following:
            (A) Construct a public or semipublic profile for purposes of signing into and using the service or application.
            (B) Populate a list of other users with whom an individual shares a social connection within the system.
            (C) Create or post content viewable by other users, including, but not limited to, on message boards, in chat rooms, or through a landing page or main feed that presents the user with content generated by other users.

So it looks like, but for 2B, Hackernews is a social media platform in the state of California. Sites like Github and Letterboxd arguably are.

Every liberal democracy that wants to stay that way needs to just ban personalized engagement-driven "algo" feeds.

What if few of the larger social media blocks all California residents based on, say IP address to not have to comply with the proposal?

For a business, it is way easier to implement a block list than a method to collect and process taxes.

It would create Balkanization between Californians and everyone else.

You're telling me that every cent of that Ad money was duty free? This whole time!?

Tax them, and make sure it doesn't get passed along.

How does this work for social media sites that don't track their users' location?

Why doesn't California actually do something productive with all its economic power? It now has the fourth largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. Why not experiment a little bit by providing public healthcare to California citizens free at the point of delivery/service? Or constructing high-speed rail to connect SoCal to the Bay Area?

Pretty sure it effectively has. Doesn't the state have different regulations have an effect on the rest of the country?

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/09/1121952184/the-impact-of-cali...

> VOGEL: It's such a large market so that anything which California acquires for its own product sold in its state is going to resonate among national and global companies. If you don't want to have to make separate products for California and the rest of the country, you might as well just make them according to California's standards.

Not sure if this was intended as sly humor or not. Between Covered CA and Medi-Cal health care is already relatively cheap or even free to those with the lowest incomes. And contrary to what critics claim, progress is being made with the high speed rail link both in the Central Valley and close to both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I am not talking about those with the lowest incomes. I am talking about a universal approach similar to most other OECD countries.

1. California is trying to construct rail. The project is the most expensive rail that has ever been built and basically no track has been laid. The company that was initially trying to do the build left to go build rail in Africa because it was less dysfunctional.

2. California has dramatic experiments in cheap/free healthcare and is facing a giant budget shortfall due to it. Right now it is asking the Fed to backstop it's healthcare spending but that seems extremely unlikely.

So even California can't run free healthcare it seems, and it has been unable to build any train track due to extreme bureaucratic paralysis.

So, now we tax free speech ... "for the children"?

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