EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I suppose the answer could be that only platforms that do indeed allow spam or worse are impartial, but that is a tricky position to be in.
Is adding advertisements an algorithm?
Is including likes an algorithm?
Is automatically starting the next video after a previous one has finished an algorithm?
Is infinite scroll an algorithm?
Etc
The moment you add other entities to the list (e.g. ads inbetween posts), then it's also subject to the same restrictions.
And then we’ll end up with with another cookie-banner style law which had good intentions but actually missed the point entirely.
The cookie banner law is fine for the most part. Sites that do the malicious-compliance thing of over-prompting the user for permissions are providing a strong signal that they are bad actors. It’s about as much as we can expect without banning them entirely…
I'm not saying there aren't infinite edge cases and second-order effects - but we tolerate those already for many things. I'm not pretending this is simple or even desirable - I'm merely stating it's possible if we want to do it.
My biggest fear is that (like the UK Online safety act) this acts to favour the huge corporations because they are the only ones that can afford a team of lawyers. Any legislation should aim to carve out exceptions to avoid indirectly helping monopolies.
Just look at the malicious compliance that Apple and Google have around the App Store stuff, they’ll find a way to comply with the law and implement different addictive dark patterns.
I’m not saying that I disagree that these companies need to be regulated, I absolutely do. I just think it’s going to be a complicated process, and not “oh just ban everything that’s an algorithm”.
And I have absolutely 0 faith in companies like Meta willfully complying.
There’s no political organization (yes Mamdani actually out-raised cuomo so let that sink in) that isn’t being actively bribed
The US may have this dual incentive structure since it wants to build its tech giants while limiting their control, but the EU doesn't. The arrival of a foreign tech social media giant might make the legislation a bit more palatable to pass.
It will undoubtedly be complex to regulate all dark patterns away. But there are a few obvious, easy wins. It'd be a shame to make perfect the enemy of good.
But here’s the real problem: people don’t care. And I say that as someone who hasn’t used social media since 2014.
My observation of people’s behavior indicates that when all is said and done, people don’t care—they would rather get the endorphins from posting, liking, following, etc.
But the solution is to allow people to control their own algorithm, and to have open source solutions where communities manage their own social network.
It’s not the algorithm that is the problem it is that people don’t have the choice to curate their own content.
We have failed at creating a society with hope for the future.
This is like prohibition talk. It was all the avoid the fact that America in that period was a social hellscape.
Does anyone know where it’s coming from? I can certainly believe that incompetent jurisdictions have a ton of issues with people misapplying the law and using loopholes.
No they’re engineers who think rules have to function as rigidly in every field as they do in programming.
They either can’t or don’t want to accept that the law is a social construct and what it actually means to you is determined by the weight of precedent, as applied by judges and regulatory bodies. Things are vaguely worded in the law all the time. If people want to dispute how the enforcement is done they sue and judge decides how the rule should be applied.
> This is pretty easy to solve. If you present data by algorithm, you are no longer an impartial common carrier and are liable for the content you present.
But this is not in fact easy. It's hard to define what "present data by algorithm" means in a coherent way, and it's hard to extend liability for the content you present to liability for the manner in which you present it. You could make it work, if for some reason you really wanted to, but it's easier to pursue the strategy described in the source article of regulating specific abusive patterns.
Said another way: push vs pull.
The easy benchmark to setup can easily be, that any feed that displays the data in a way other than the following is considered an editorial choice and thus the platform is liable as a publisher:
1. In a chronological order, and only filtered based on user selected options.
2. In any other order explicitly selected by the user.
An exception can be made to allow filtering out content that violates the platforms terms and conditions.
Alternatively there can be no exception, effectively making these platforms unworkable. This is also a choice. We do not need these platforms, including this one.
I think most people over here are oversimplifying this and underestimating the ability of these companies to get what they want.
I mean "Is including likes an algorithm?" You might as well ask if having a dog in the video is an algorithm. Any question about "likes" would be if you're manipulating the video selection based on likes, or is the user given a control to manipulate the video selection based on likes. If it's you it's an algorithm. If it's the user, it's a control. If you lie about the likes, then it's an algorithm. If you're transparent about the likes, then it is a control.
The other ones aren't even worth discussing. You might as well ask if having a blue logo is an algorithm, or if Comic Sans is an algorithm. "It's all so complicated!"
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edit: that being said, the EU does not care about this issue at all, and has had plenty of mandate and plenty of time to have done something about it if it did. They are also going to say "it's all so complicated." Because their problem is the unpopularity of center-left neolib governments that are just barely holding on with extreme minority support through bureaucratic means because they wrote the regulations. They want to keep what's came for British Labour during the recent council elections from coming for them.
So I guarantee that content will somehow become an "algorithm." The goal is to keep people who don't like them from speaking to each other.
The said regulation can then mandate that after calibration and correction the feed pull back by training the algorithm to adjust it in a rapid A/B test.
This is all doable by the companies themselves, but since they wont, the key is to mandate it and publish the aggregate results regularly — like make it part of the quarterly share holder's SEC reporting requirement or something.
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm.
It isn't pretty easy to solve at all.
Its okay if they have some hard problems to solve.
If you search on youtube then it can rank any way it wants, just not use e.g. anything from the viewing history. No "related videos" column. That's what YouTube used to be. But YouTube (unlike TikTok) worked well before it had rabbit holes.
For TikTok the situation is worse. Their whole app just doesn't exist unless you have the custom feeds. This would make YouTube be 2010 youtube, Instagram be 2010 Instagram (great!) but it would effectively be a ban of TikTok's whole functionality (again, great!).
But the thing about regulation is that it doesn’t need to be water tight. You can just target a small handful of large players and it will improve the situation in practice. It doesn’t matter if 998/1000 apps use addictive feeds if the largest two apps don’t and they have 90% of users/views.
If you regulated domestic companies out of existence, global options would pop up in their place. You could try to block them all in app stores but people would go to the web views.
Obviously we need the ability to regulate also global options. Typically if these actors truly become big, then they have a presence in their "target" countries, such as ad sales.
Then all of the people who have trouble with self-control on infinite feeds can enable this mode, and everyone who wants the recommendation algorithm can leave it on.
This is the optimal outcome that actually serves everyone’s personal goals for using these platforms. If we get into a conversation where some are demanding we don’t allow anyone to use a recommendation algorithm because they feel the need to control what other people see, that’s a different conversation. That conversation usually reveals other motives, like when people defend the algorithm sites they view (Hacker News, Reddit, whatever) but targets sites they don’t like TikTok.
I’d love for there to be an option to have them as default. It’s obvious ($$$) why they won’t do that unless forced to by regulators.
IMO they should not only be opt-in, but should actually be required to publicly list the parameters and weights they’re using and allow users to tune those weights.
> IMO they should not only be opt-in, but should actually be required to publicly list the parameters and weights they’re using and allow users to tune those weights.
I wonder how many people here know that many of the popular apps have rolled out finer controls for recommendation algorithms so you can do this. On Instagram you can go in and see the topics your recommendation algorithm picked up and modify them manually if you like.
I think the goalposts will just continue to move, though.
People here know that they have finer controls (which are still not actually that fine and also don’t really make the parameters auditable). The problem is these settings are hidden away in places most people will never look. And also, I stress again, none of this is actually auditable because they treat these as some kind of trade secret special sauce and there’s really no reason society should feel obligated to support or enable this business model.
That actually wasn’t the objection in the article we’re discussing at all.
The objection is that recommendation algorithms show people more content they want to view, which leads vulnerable people (kids in this case) to consume more content.
You can’t put a restriction on people under X years without gathering information about everyone’s age. You can’t confirm everyone’s age without some ID check. You can’t do an ID check based on anonymous tokens (too easily shared) so every age check mechanism has some ID revealing step, either to the company or to a 3rd party like a government entity (which will pinky swear they’re not looking at the data).
This is something EU regulation requires them. Earlier this year the Dutch courts ruled as such, all the way up to appeal. It's just a matter of time before other European courts repeat this ruling.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/dutch-court-upholds...
Whatever is latest posted across their followings/subscriptions?
You can (and should) argue that such a simple algorithm doesn’t “count”, but fundamentally the exact wording of the grandparent post never works, legislatively.
Lawyers will lawyer.
The problem always has been "(personalized) opaque algorithms". Time sorted by followers isn't really opaque, nor is "sorted by likes" or whatever. The problem is always pulling in parameters that a users either has no active control over or are so variable they effectively could be random.
users coarse geographic location? Fine
AI detected language of the content? Fine
global popularity of the video clip? fine
user's past behavior: number of videos with similar content they watched? Average number of seconds this particular user usually waits until scrolling further?
The pattern is obvious. Personalized algorithms is what's targeted. Let's keep the discussion intelligent.
Furthermore, bills have been brought to EU parliaments that have erroneously attempted to ban all forms of ranking, which would include even the most basic information retrieval algorithms. So it isn't obvious at all what is meant by 'algorithm'.
I don't consume any content from my friends on something like tiktok where I'm interested in discovering people that have good content under topics I'm interested in. I don't know who those people are and I want to discover new ones that come up not just follow some already popular accounts.
The whole idea here is to make content consumption more deliberate and mindful rather than just opening the app and veging out to an endless feed of slop.
Youtube won't show you anything at all if you have a new account with watch history turned off. It says something like "turn on watch history and watch videos so we can recommend some for you".
For new users? A search bar and a set of (human? AI?) curated seed recommendations that the platform is comfortable with being held liable for.
If they don't know what they want, perhaps a good use case for the newfangled LLM-search we have now would be "What's an interesting or popular topic I haven't searched for before?" to which the AI will respond with a list of newly searchable terms.
"So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them?"
You don't. How about that?
You rely on unambigous, "physical" properties of the videos.
There is a physical property of all the videos: the time of publication.
There is a physical property of all the channels: did you subscribe to it, or not ?
So, you show, in (reverse) chronological order of publication, the list of videos published by the channels you subscribed to.
Now, of course, a brand new user would have no subscription - you show them a search box.
But then, now, your search algorithm has to weight the various channels that match - but your algo can be relatively transparent, relatively auditable, and the same for all users (unless given explicit preferences, and of course national laws, etc, etc...)
I'm sorry, but, I have a "subscriptions" page in youtube or substack, and they're chronological, and they show me what I want to watch. You keep that.
There is a "home" page in both service that is algoritmically built, and they show me crap that the algo want me to watch. You get rid of that.
Do this, and I can consider you a "neutral" actor, and accept that you shift the blame to content producer.
Or, keep the algo feed, but don't take money from advertiser when I watch yet another flat earther video because YOU decided it was trending.
If you want to decide what I watch, and make money from that decision - congrats, you are an editor. You get the earnings, and the responsibility.
Please don't tell me, with a straight face, that the people who build the algo don't "decide" what I watch. If they want to tweak the algo to downgrade the flamewars and outrage and conspiracy theories and violence and abuse, they can. They do not want to, for business reasons. [1]
That's fair, up to a point - we need publications with editors that agree on having "edgy" content. I'm not advocating for blanket censorship.
I did not like social network preventing me from _sharing_ articles about Biden's son laptop (this was actually beyond the law, but somehow they managed to find the resources and programmers to implement _that_, because, at the time, the execs where cozying with a different administration.)
I'm advocating for "accepting your responsibility as an editor".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021...
Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't work.
A better alternative could be "the algorithm must be public and reproducible by the user".
"Sort the posts of the people I follow in chronological order" you're good
"Sort the posts by the output of a blackbox trained on user data" too bad you're a publisher and are responsible for what people post.
Algorithm in this context (and presumably in any proposed legal text) is about personalization and purpose.
No one worries about presenting content based on total popularity, coarse geography. user's browser language, or anything like that, regardless of whether the actual ranking algorithm (in the CS sense) is an algorithm. Yes it's a terrible name for what's being discussed, but let's not lose focus on the purpose because of that.
Rank them by best keyword match from their search query, if match is equal, order them newest posted to oldest posted.
Done.
Like social media 1.0.
I think the EU has fully digested this point, and is focusing on the “addictive design” phrase instead, for good reason. It makes it obvious that the problem is a bit fuzzy and related to the behaviors induced, not some cut-and-dry algorithmic thing.
Hacker News is a site that presents data by algorithm. Under your definition, Hacker News goes away, too.
A more accurate framing would be that they’re going after personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s not obvious that offering a recommendation algorithm would mean that the site is no longer an impartial common carrier.
so be it.
That's the nature of addiction.
But I also see no reason you can’t separate out forums with upvoting from the personalized engagement optimized feed. They are fundamentally different designs. (In other words, Subreddits are safe, the Reddit homepage is regulated unless it changes.)
But I'd agree, that it's personalisation rather than just curation that's the issue.
I think even requiring sites to have a "bring your own algo" version (and where ads are targetted to the algorithm, rather than the person) would cure a lot of ills.
As is, even with something like Spotify where you _are_ paying there's no easy way to "reset" your profile to neutral recommendations
Same thing. There is no Hacker News if Y Combinator becomes liable for user submitted content.
It’s an obvious backdoor play to make sites go away. If a site becomes liable for content posted, you cannot allow users to post content without having the site review and take responsibility for every comment and every post.
The people proposing it haven’t considered how damaging that would be for the ability of individuals to share ideas and their content. When every site with “an algorithm” is liable for content posted, nobody is going to allow you to post something. It’s back to only reading content produced and curated by companies for us. Total own-goal for the individual internet user.
Oh no.
If you have an algorithm whose sole purpose is to “engagement” with your own platform (by intentionally and purposely pushing clickbait, ragebait, and media that keeps reinforcing your clicks) you should no longer get section 230 protections - you are no longer a neutral party. These algorithms exist to create echo chambers and keep you clicking so you can consume more ads.
I would love to hear other ways of solving the problems of social media.
Making sites liable for all user-posted content would do the reverse of this. Every platform that lets people submit content would have to stop doing that, because it’s an impossible liability to manage.
You’d have to host your own site. You wouldn’t be able to share anything about it on a social media site because its user-generated content. No visitors unless you advertise it through paid contracts with companies that can review it and decide to accept the liability.
If web sites and social media can't "scale" to do this, then maybe they should scale down. "Making sites liable for all user-posted content" would not kill social media, but would definitely scope it down to what can be effectively curated.
This is a huge assumption that is offered constantly, and always, without any evidence at all.
But to the larger point, I would actuall agree that sites should "review and take responsibility for every comment and every post." They are the ones amplifying and distributing this content, why should they have zero responsibility for it?
Yes that would dramatically change what gets published online, but I think that would be a good thing.
I don't for a second believe that tiktok (or facebook or any of the others) employs a primitive algorithm that impartially orders results based on a simple and straightforward metric without consideration for their own interests.
Is your contention that whatever future law have some mechanism to decide the complexity of the algorithm? How would you design a law such that the reddit ranking algorithm is primitive, but tiktok's algorithim is "advanced".
If we're discussing hypothetical laws then my preference is for several. Banning various dark patterns (what the EU is doing here), banning opaque individualization outside the control of the individual in question, and banning motivated editorialization (such a intentionally promoting a particular political position). And yes, a straightforward application of what I wrote there would make the netflix recommendation algorithm as it currently stands illegal. I have no problem with that.
And HN absolutely does promote submissions at the moderators' discretion. The moderators sometimes give old but overlooked submissions a second chance, they also turn the flamewar detector on some stories that they think deserve more attention which effectively promotes them against users's will.
The algorithm considers various other things such the ratio of votes to comments, age of the post etc.
Just compare how different the front page is to /active
> Ycombinator doesn't promote or bury any particular post with their own algorithms
Certain things do get put above the popular stuff if they're fresh enough and your account is deemed to be a taste setter.
> they don't exercise any editorial review or control.
They can decide things like overturning the flagging of a post or burying something even without the flag etc.
If LinkedIn started allowing hardcore pornography, many of their advertisers would leave.
With that in mind, are you certain LinkedIn takes “no responsibility” for the content they distribute? It would seem they have a multimillion-dollar stake in the outcome of their efforts to shape their commercial product.
Why is this assumed to be true?
I didn’t know only companies can have websites.
In a world where the risk-adjusted cost of allowing third-party comments on your platform shoots up, someone has to pay that cost. A personal blog hosted on your server might struggle to find any significant reach without a real advertising budget, because distributing speech/content that promotes your platform would no longer be ~free.
I don't necessarily believe that the major social media platforms would fully evaporate, but I'd expect some or all of these changes across the ecosystem:
* Massively scaled up LLM-based moderation/censorship.
* Replacement of direct user content posting with an LLM-based interface (to chat with an LLM about what you want it to write on your behalf).
* Payment-gated public posting, e.g. monthly or per-post fees to cover liability/insurance and/or LLM inference costs. Possibly higher fees for direct authorship vs LLM pair posting.
* Massive rise in adoption of decentralized architectures, either via current mainstream platforms if legally tolerated or via anonymous dark web platforms otherwise. Maybe Tor becomes as normalized as VPNs, or maybe the Western legal environment shifts hard against general-purpose computing.
I understand where this sentiment is coming from, but I think it's taking a lot of the current status quo for granted. What you guys are proposing isn't necessarily a targeted change that would simply make bad guys stop doing bad things. It's more likely a massive structural change that would dramatically alter the social and economic fabric of the internet as we know it, and not in a way that most of us would like.
Depersonalized algorithms or recommender systems aren't inherently better than personalized ones. HN is an exceptional example of the former but I think at scale people would come up with a different crop of complaints for them.
@Aurornis: "Hacker News is a site that presents data by algorithm. Under your definition, Hacker News goes away, too."
@Aurornis (cont'd): "When every site with “an algorithm” is liable for content posted, nobody is going to allow you to post something. It’s back to only reading content produced and curated by companies for us. Total own-goal for the individual internet user."
@Aurornis (cont'd): "If a site becomes liable for content posted, you cannot allow users to post content without having the site review and take responsibility for every comment and every post."
@tencentshill: "The algorithm is not personalized. It's the same for every user. No issue there..."
Me: "But still an algorithm".
@tencentshill: "Yes it's still an algorithm. Cable TV programming is another example."
Me: "...how do broadcasters select/schedule their programming?"
***
If the "broader statement" that you're referring to is @conception's, then I agree with @Auronis that this would have negative effects on how websites like Hacker News operate. Failing to distinguish personalized recommendation systems from depersonalized ones and proposing regulation that affects them the same is an impartial approach.
The speculated consequence is that platforms (e.g., Hacker News) will not want to assume liability for the content that users share. [0] If this were to happen only a few platforms would exist, at least on the clear/open web. The general online experience would become something like a pastiche of 60s cable television with three or four providers authorized to broadcast media.
With the direction that democracy is trending across the world that would mean state-run or state-approved media. Or all online communities will have to organize and operate like more traditional institutions like this biking community in London is doing: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401988/.
[0]: Some parts of this community already suspect that moderation conveniently buries controversial or subversive submissions. See this one from today! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110927
Cable TV is an example of something that no one is objecting to. The EU is targeting specific practices (particularly addictive UX patterns). Some people (myself included) would also like to see algorithms that provide personalized (on the individual or small cohort level) output banned. HN is clearly not that.
I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about where exactly the line is between a general class and a small cohort. Certainly applying more than a few general classes simultaneously can quickly land you back in near-individual territory.
No one until you it seems.
> Cable TV is an example of something that no one is objecting to.
@tencentshill's reference to cable TV originates from the question of whether Hacker News operates via algorithm and would be subject to the sweeping regulation proposed by @conception. The answer is yes.
If I wanted to be pedantic I'd try to argue that cable TV operates according to its own kind of algorithm. And I almost did, so you got me there at least. But there's enough factors that contribute to television programming that it's debatable how far it is from using one (or a recommender system, rather) and whether under different circumstances the EU's issue with "endless scroll" and "autoplay" would be aimed at TV.
Of course the main difference is that television in Europe is probably regulated different than the internet.
I'm not objecting to the internet being regulated like television. For the record, I don't hold one to the same standard of utility as the other. I'm speculating on what would happen if the internet were to be regulated like television according to the combined scenarios advanced by @conception and @tencentshill. Do you follow?
> I'm speculating on what would happen if the internet were to be regulated like television ...
You've lost me. Previously you were arguing that all platforms with user generated content would disappear. Now you appear to acknowledge that the scenario as described permits platforms that operate analogously to cable TV, which is to say they don't present individualized content.
I'm no longer clear what your current position is nor what you might be attempting to communicate to others or advocate for here.
HN, on the other hand, everyone has the same front page. If I like a post I can favorite it to 'bookmark' it, but HN won't modify my front page based on what I favorite, whereas facebook will.
I think the GP's argument is, when it comes to social media, "one size fits all" might be less addictive than "custom made" :)
It's that true? I thought I had seen it said that there were keyword penalties to discourage things like political posts that could be turned off and on
It isn't. Users who vote and flag more often are more likely to have things from /new surfaced on their main page for example.
It doesn’t have to go away, just switch to chronological sorting.
“Chronological only” might work for something like Twitter where you’re choosing to follow specific individuals to see their posts, it can’t work for curation sites like HN/Reddit.
30 million tiktoks are posted by day. What do you mean your are going to allow "users to filter". This "regulation" will be trivially defeated by TikTok-Videos LLC uploading videos and TikTok-DataScience, providing the most popular filtering algo.
At the end of the day, many children will simply default to using the best algorithm, and all this regulation helps no one.
Just like with GDPR, the tech giants will put their foot on the scale and continue to operate how they fit, and the smaller guys will die under a thousand paper cuts. I'd rather not add more regulation that cements Meta as the sole media platform of the internet.
Does it though? I mean by "algorithm" in this context we mean "personalized algorithm meant to maximize engagement and retention".
Not e.g. "sort by upvotes and decay by time" or even "filter content based on coarse user location".
Does HN show me a different front page than everyone else based on which articles I have read or upvoted? That would make me feel worse about the site because I don't want a personalized HN feed I want to read what everyone else is reading (which is incidentally why I refuse to give up linear TV).
I addressed that in the second half of my comment already.
But yes, HN qualifies as a site that displays by algorithm. If you mean personalized recommendation algorithm then it’s important to call that out. The last thing we want is regulation so broad that it catches every site that ranks things.
"Algorithm" in this context is very clear what it is. It is not what the word means in Computer Science or in general. Just from the context and without any clarification needed "algorithms" in social media means "addictive personalized feeds".
If you take TikTok to court and go through discovery you’re going to find internal communications of people talking about ways to get people to stay on the app longer, ways to make the content more addictive, ways to maximize ad reach, etc.
Hacker news just tossed a simple upvote downvote system and called it a day.
Plus it has no endless scroll, no graphics at all, limits your comment frequency, has no push notifications, etc.
Obviously YouTube knows that even among people who do this, they still get good engagement out of YouTube shorts, so they keep showing them, but these users have explicitly asked YouTube to not show them.
It would be like a recovering alcoholic whose landlord comes by every week and leaves free samples of booze, because they get paid by the booze company, even though the alcoholic has asked them to stop.
My coder's view of the simplest possible algorithm: "People that I follow, their posts, ordered by most recent first." it's transparent, easy to understand, consistent, and a few lines of code.
Big Social media's "The Algorithm" : a complex, utterly opaque, personally targeted, frequently shifting internal set of rules that they manipulate to maximise engagement and revenue, while hiding this from the users whole attention is being monetised, designed according to business priorities.
Clearly, if you use the second kind of Algorithm then you are no longer an impartial common carrier.
It's been argued to death already, I just have to express shock that I'm still seeing this non-starter constantly here.
ironically, i'm only reading this kind of low brow take because people upvote it, not because it makes any sense.
Compare e.g. Mastodon vs Twitter or Bluesky. The former simply won't show you anything you didn't explicitly subscribe to, and there's no hidden ranking system.
The law is not a computer program. It is up to human interpretation. The law merely needs to define the intent, which is actually fairly easy to explain: you're not a common carrier if you're mediating and promoting and ranking and pushing beyond what the user has subscribed to with their choices.
You can get technical that "sorting" and "filtering" is a form of that, but you'd be applying the lens of a software engineer, not a lawyer.
> "Algorithm" is obviously shorthand for: a recommendations system that shows me things I didn't explicitly opt into.
In that interpretation that is applicable to any form of broadcast, including TV and radio, driven by the user ratings of their previous programs.
In many cases technology laws are myopic in that they only see the most massive websites and forget that there is a whole www outside facebook. Is sorted by likes/upvotes a recommendation? Is the total of likes of your friends a recommendation? Can only data points from the last week be considered? Can there be a falloff by age?
At which point does the weights of the variables start to constitute a "recommendation"?
Worth noting: in the EU, public carriers are not referred to as common carriers.
> For example, by constantly ‘rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode'. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users' self-control.
> Additionally, in its assessment, TikTok disregarded important indicators of compulsive use of the app, such as the time that minors spend on TikTok at night, the frequency with which users open the app, and other potential indicators.
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say these features are a problem. Anyone who has used these apps knows the feeling of “one more video”. Obviously TikTok will claim otherwise with their business model threatened.
Define algorithm.
A lot of adults need this too. The addictive apps are very well designed, while most blockers are either too easy to ignore or too annoying to keep using.
I built a small iOS blocker because I had the same problem. Making it strict enough to actually work without making people hate it is the main challenge.
I remember in my state, it was initially only a citation that couldnt be pulled over on. Then they flipped that and started pulling over for it. Why? Pure fucking money grab.
Me not wearing a seatbelt means I risk getting splattered. Not you, or anyone else.
Are motorcycles without seatbelts or harnesses satire?
All im saying is that an adult should be able to choose to wear a seatbelt or not in their own vehicle. And also, shouldnt get fined for choosing to not wear one.
BTW, i wear one when i drive or am a passenger. And if im driving, i ask everyone to wear one.
Millions of deaths and injuries avoided as a result of seatbelts obligatory in many countries around the world do not share your world view.
https://unece.org/sustainable-development/news/unece-celebra...
And motorcycles are explicitly allowed, and have no restraints or harnesses. Mopeds, same. Scooters, same. Bicycles, same.
Adults *should* have the right to do risky behaviors that increases the risk of bodily injury. But no matter the link you put forth, doesnt explain why fucking schoolbusses that transport years 6-18 dont have seatbelts.
Secondly, seatbelts are not just about you, genius. If you are thrown from a car you could hit something or someone else, endangering others. Thus, seatbelts are not only for your safety, but for others as well.
Please take a few breaths and go outside.
Except who pays for your million-dollar reconstructive surgery and rehab? I don't suppose you will cover that out of pocket to avoid burdening your fellow insurance payers with your reckless behavior?
Physics says otherwise. In a collision you don't decide where you body is yeeted and your skull could end inside the skull of a passenger using his seatbelt. Don't be a moron. https://youtube.com/shorts/n2yLMGA_YSA?si=AlvRgfpb-PJxGCBw
As long as all people are paying for your dumb decisions, it is reasonable to expect the government to reduce the frequency of dumb decisions by adequate means.
Regulation on speech threatens the basis of democracy. The fact that the countries pushing them most successfully (UK, Australia) are also the ones with serious freedom of speech problems compared to their Western peers should also tell you that no, they will not stop at throwing you in jail for memes on twitter.
These giant companies pour millions upon millions of dollars into engineering their services to be as "engaging" (read: addictive) as possible with the specific goal of making users spend more time on them.
Against that, the average person has no chance. The power balance is hugely uneven.
A responsible government which actually cares for its people has a duty to protect them from abuse like that.
The alternative is letting multi-trillion dollar companies make those decisions for you, which they do with the explicit intent to manipulate you AND to push the politics of the currently sitting government of the United States.
Meta has repeatedly censored LGBT content, with no warning or stated policy change, since the government changed. All without the formal legislative process. Good chance the Trump admin didn't even ask for this, Meta just did it pre-emptively to suck up to them.
Opposing some basic restrictions on addictive and exploitative features and the requirement to offer users a standard reverse-chronological-followed feed without "The Algorithm", does not make you an Anti-Government Free Thinker. You're the exact kind of "sheep" Zuckerberg & the Trump administration want you to be.
I think they also said AI companies go offline during exam hours, but I may have got that wrong.
I feel like we’ve completely lost the plot when we’re starting to invite government partial Internet shutdowns as a good idea. This is a totalitarian government play.
Maybe they'll feel differently when they have to upload their ID and face scan (which later gets leaked) just to be able to read a recipe for beer or whatever.
Governments have been working on regulating platforms. Every time they get close, there’s outrage when people realize what it means for them.
Age regulations are the best example. Every time the topic comes up there is a lot of support for government regulation of social media by age.
Then every time there comes an actual attempt at government regulation or even self-regulation by the companies, everyone goes ballistic when they realize what that regulation means.
This topic is awash in ideas that regulation will come in like a scalpel that only touches something that won’t affect anything we like, only hurt some companies in some specific way that doesn’t take anything away from us. This notion doesn’t survive contact with reality.
That’s how we get these short sighted comments inviting the government to come shut down parts of the internet. I bet the person who asked for that assumed it would be perfectly targeted at sites they don’t need or use, leaving their version of the internet untouched. They never imagined the government might scope creep it to start shutting down communications they didn’t like.
Maybe the people of " Age regulations are the best example. Every time the topic comes up there is a lot of support for government regulation of social media by age." and " Then every time there comes an actual attempt at government regulation or even self-regulation by the companies, everyone goes ballistic when they realize what that regulation means." are different?
"This topic is awash in ideas that regulation will come in like a scalpel that only touches something that won’t affect anything we like, only hurt some companies in some specific way that doesn’t take anything away from us. This notion doesn’t survive contact with reality." Depends on the regulation. Also maybe the non intended effects are still worth to introduce the regulation?
There's been criticism about the culture surrounding platforms like Mastodon/Bluesky that anticipated this.
People love to ask the big government daddy to step on them and when it actually happens they start wondering why would any sane person want that.
Putting China aside, and regardless about one's opinion on the aformentionned measure, I think you need first to learn the concept about totalitarian governement and representative democracy before trying to use those words because you clearly don't know what these are.
There is potential harm in us doing regulation but there is also benefits thinking it's this binary option of free VS slavery is imo. Harmful.
And what are these imagined ills you are curing?
They are bad for everyone and if you’re willing to regulate them, make them illegal to be used on anyone.
It just says the platform who use such methods, often target kids.
It's because humans are motivated primarily by fear, not logic.
The exact same moral panic was made about fuckin printed books. This is all hysteria, just like the TV is evil phase everyone went through. Proof of this is that nobody can even agree what social media is, let alone point to what's actually harmful about it
And we have even worse examples: it's depressing to see how many people "don't believe" in the principle of vaccination. One may be tempted to say "people don't have the time to become experts in every topic", but when you look at the energy people put into sharing their beliefs around those topics... clearly they would have the time to read a bit.
Most adults also lack the maturity and judgement, but allowing adults to make bad decisions is usually less dangerous than giving someone else the power to decide which decisions are too bad to permit.
And use "localized" social media for the rest?
How would this work exactly? How do you speak to people offline?
Signal and discord is more localized
Social media is simply share x thing with either the world or a group of people or an individual.
The issue is when that is manipulated into you need to spend more time on them artificially.
Get rid of the very site you're on then?
> issue is when that is manipulated into you need to spend more time on them artificially
Yeah, like how hn has an algorithm that ranks stories to maximise engagement... obviously this is not bad but somehow tiktok is bad
When hn pushes 99% content other than tech then yes. It'll literally be the same.
Oh you mean like Google search or maybe Wikipedia? Are we still talking about social media here because "exposed to seemingly endless directions even though you just wanted to watch tech." could happen on any website...
HN having pages instead of a feed or endless list is one of the things I really like about it.
The other thing I really love about HN is that titles are all supposed to be boring and to the point. The guidelines[1] for titles are excellent and I wish more of the web and honestly legacy media too would behave that way. Things that are of no interest to me are not trying to waste my time and attention.
Perhaps there can be an EU maintained browser extension that allows netizens to provide alternate, honest titles and thumbnails for all kinds of content. Probably still incredibly hard to implement throughout apps etc., but a man can dream.
The actual point is that they are designed to be addictive. "endless scrolling" is just an implementation detail. If you "ban endless scrolling", they'll still be using every other trick to make it addictive.
Smoking has definite physiological effects. Molecules bind to receptors or neurons and initiate cascades/responses.
I don't see this with user interface in a browser at all. IF you wish to reason for that, why are regular ads allowed? They piss me off. Why do I have to see them? They cause my brain an addiction to want to buy crappy products. So why is there no ban here?
Let's face it - the EU is on a path of "Minority Report" here.
> I think the EU and other jurisdictions should really look beyond just limiting this stuff to kids
Yeah they try to restrict what we can do. We oldschool people call this fascism. See the EU trying to destroy VPN. And this is a meta-strategy we see here - many lobbyists are activated and try to "sync" laws that never made any sense to as many countries as possible. I see where corruption happens. And I don't buy the "we protect kids" fake lie for a moment.
Come on, this is an absurd statement. Governments regulate what people can do, yes. It’s part of their role. It’s why I can’t sell tainted meat on the street. It’s a good thing.
Of course there is a line you can cross where the control becomes excessive but “the government sets rules around what people can do, that’s fascism!” is absurd.
Fascism isn't government making laws, fascism is "we're the superior race, kill anyone who disagrees".
I wouldn't call this move fascism, even if can be considered a bit heavy handed.
This is an odd thing to do, because :
- information is real, it exists in the universe.
- the harm of social media is real, as measured by many of the same measures as the harm of smoking
Why not do something about ads? No, that's a good thought, we should do that too.
I think a decent conceptualization here is "psychic damage", as in a video game. These things deal a lot of it.
I don't think it's an odd thing to be opposed to that line of thinking.
I expect tabloid journalists and grandstanding politicians to do this, it really scares me when HN users that should know better do it.
You know what, why don't you go buy a carton of cigarettes and some heroin, and go use that for a few months. Since it's the same thing as looking at a news feed you shouldn't have to worry about addiction because you've already done that and not gotten addicted to it, so you should be fine, right?
No, you aren't. You are trivializing what Depression actually is by making flippant comments like that. You're also letting everyone know that you are utterly ignorant to what Depression actually is.
Do better.
If everything addictive is treated as morally and medically equivalent to hard opioid abuse or crippling nicotine addiction, then the language we use to talk about actual addiction stops meaning anything. There are people whose entire lives, bodies, families, and futures have been destroyed by heroin. Cigarettes killed my grandfather, I had to sit there and watch him die as a machine sucked black liquid out of his lungs.
Comparing that reality to doomscrolling on your couch cheapens the severity of one problem while oversimplifying the other. Internet overuse can certainly damage mental health. But pretending that checking TikTok is the same category of damage as opioid dependency is not awareness, it's insanity, and it's actively dangerous. It's also mostly happening because lawyers figured out this might be a way to sucker people into going around Section 230.
If people stop breathing the fumes of the vibes of this idea and start to process how any of this would actually work, they will eventually discover that they are proposing an internet police state where police with guns tell people what they can and can't do on internet forums. If you don't think that will slippery slope into something you don't want, please read more history. Government is fundamentally a dangerous monopoly on force and it needs to be treated with deep caution. People that want government regulated social media (remind me, who is the current US president?) so they can "own the Zuck" are playing an incredibly dangerous game, and I really hope they come to their senses soon, because the irreparable damage this idea will create will far outlive Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
Where did I do that?
I stopped reading your comment after that since you accused me of saying stuff I never said, so whatever you wrote is unworthy of my attention.
To everyone else reading this: go back to when you were a teenager, and ask yourself how cool you would be with your government saying you can't look at web sites and forums because they're "too addictive", or you can't listen to Nine Inch Nails because it's "for adults only", or Geocities has to be shut down or you need to be carded to use it because it has "adult content" (it had a lot of adult content, including a robust LGBT community when it was very much not safe to host that content). How would you have felt about that?
That's why I make the cigarette comparison. They know it's bad, but it's profitable for people to be addicted to it. I think it's bad for adults for a different reason, I've seen adults in my own life get influenced by things they see online (conspiracy theories, pseudo-science around health and nutrition, political radicalization). And this happens because it's profitable for people to be hooked on these topics with false or misleading information, not because it's true. That's not to say this never happened before recommendation algorithms, but it's a difference in magnitude. I think that's the reason we are seeing such a dramatic rise in political polarization- because it's profitable.
It's just so tedious to see this "information cannot harm anyone" theory in a context where a huge fraction of the people spend their entire day jobs tying to make phishing less effective.
The effects of social media usage are surely reversible by stopping using it and then some retraining of the brain.
The effects of years of smoking are not so reversible in terms of what it does to your body.
But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
Is there any reason to believe that "social media existing" is a worse and more enduring harm than tens of millions of people dying in the Second World War, the trauma of the survivors, the vast destruction of infrastructure,or the start of the risk of nuclear war?
Yet the post war baby boom seems to have led a remarkably fortunate life, overall.
This is a reasonable, but optimistic take. The effects of social media on developing brains will need to be studied to be sure the effects are reversible. Furthermore, how extensive is the damage and how long does it take to reverse? Are older people less likely to recover?
I mean, do you have any evidence that the brain is irreversibly damaged by social media? I have not seen any, but I have seen evidence that there is permanent cell damage from smoking.
While you can somewhat mitigate the negative health effects of smoking by stopping and then making healthy decisions like doing sports and paying attention to what you eat, depression isn't something you can just stop having.
There is also a healthy side to social media, but not really a healthy side to smoking.
Social media helps me make and keep in touch with friends. I have not found any negatives personally. My feeds are pretty much just posts from friends. I have removed everything else by now.
Sure the brain grows and changes but just pointing to 'neuroplasticity' -- a concept none of us really understand and saying 'it's all good' -- isn't that insightful because it's too one dimensional. At the end of the day we can say that this must have some permanent effect on the brain because people remember their time on social media, right? Yes, it's a mixed bag with some positives from social media but at the end of the day there's an opportunity cost for the time that they spent on social media in the form of times shared with loved ones, the formation of positive relationships in the real world, and perhaps career opportunities.
With that said the bigger issue to keep in mind is that the people who push this kind of technology on society do so knowing that it has negative consequences for individual users and society as a whole and yet they push it anyways for personal profit. And more than just pushing it they actively lobby the government to change laws or prevent regulations from being enacted that would stop them from doing so.
This is odious behaviour and it should be stopped and the people involved should face personal consequences for damaging society so casually.
Cite sources or delete your comment.
Self-promotion is the anti-hyperscaler. I'd far prefer 100,000 hustlers to the hyperscalers forcing device attestation, 92% URL-bar-to-ad-funnel monopoly, "oops no more adblocker for you anymore", hardware we don't own, no direct app downloads, dumping on healthy markets with outside business unit profit to kill them off, continue growing like cancer, etc. etc.
Also, while on the point of this, I'm hoping fast on-device AI agents finally kill off advertising. I'm hoping my agent will stand between me and (advertising, toxicity, the algorithm, etc.) and literally rip the suit and pants right off Meta, Google, et al.
I want to put a de-Google/de-Meta agent on every device.
You want my eyeballs, you pay me.
How'd that work out with browsers?
Funding matters and working for the people pays less than working for businesses.
If we want a user -agent future, then we'd better figure out a financial model to incentivize that at scale. (Graphene or Mozilla subscription service?)
Makes me curious, why should organic discovery not be a thing? How should it work?
I get that we don't want to look at promotional messages but do customers want to pay for advertising? I think many would be surprised how expensive it is to buy one customer. Some sectors more absurd than others.
I see lots of ads for things I know cost a tiny fraction of what is asked.
The idea everything is spam seems much to convenient for big business to be a coincidence.
I think we should go back to having a link to our website with each post. That actually makes it worth spending some time helping people.
If you've reading this and you have a personal project please proactively share it in the comments when it's relevant and on topic. I try to upvote and be supportive when I can to make sure they feel welcomed.
IMO this comment (also before the link was removed) fit that bill perfectly and I'd encourage the author to share the link anyway.
A lot of what makes these products feel “good” in the moment is exactly what regulators may end up targeting: no stopping points, instant continuation, algorithmic relevance, autoplay, low-friction notifications. If you remove or weaken those things, many users will probably experience the result as worse UX, even if the policy goal is reasonable.
So the hard part is not just “ban addictive design”. It is deciding which kinds of friction are legitimate product safety, and which ones become the digital equivalent of cookie banners: technically protective, but broadly annoying, ignored, and eventually hostile to normal use.
Starting with kids makes sense politically and morally. But if the regulatory logic is “this is bad for everyone, not jus minors”, then adult UX probably will get pulled into it too.
If we step back and look at this rationally though, can anybody point me to any peer reviewed studies (the actual studies, not clickbait articles written based off the studies) showing that social media is anywhere near as physically harmful or addictive as cigarettes?
I'm totally open to the idea that engagement algorithms are inflaming social division. I'm less convinced that the children are the ones being harmed however. I think its the adults who grew up in a media mono-culture where the default was trust are the ones more susceptible to negative outcomes.
When things change, the young are the ones more likely to adapt.
I also think you need to review what you consider the barrier to entry for harm. If you imply that there needs to be chemical or physical evidence - congrats you just threw out most harassment cases.
In modern developed economies we don't have a problem with the barriers to harm being too low. We've got the opposite problem, where we've become deathly afraid of trivial imagined harm, resulting in us basically never doing anything and regulating new things out of existence (just look at the housing issue in cities in pretty much every developed country for example).
No harm is trivial. And imagined harm is not harm - it's lying (and should be dealt with appropriately).
As a society setting laws on what level of harm should be justified without action - is obviously up for debate. But denying genuine suffering never should be. And what's genuine is up to the individual. You can't go around telling people they aren't suffering in a just society.
First thing that comes to mind, not exactly what you're asking for but still pretty clearly "physical harm": Facebook enabled the Rohingya genocide with their algorithm fueling the hatred's spread. They knew it's happening and ignored it. Yes, genocidal hatred can be spread via other means just as well (like radio in Germany, Rwanda), but that doesn't absolve Facebook from the blame, like you wouldn't be absolved if you started a radio station to spread hateful propaganda encouraging violence.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2022/09/29/rohingya...
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/research/centers/milton-wolf-semin...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/01/united-states...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...
On that note, not that I think regulation is the entire solution in the first place (see ATProto for an example of something independent of government that gives me hope for the Internet), but I feel that where a lot of the "protect kids" Internet bills fail is that many of them treat that as a separate, special concern in a lot of areas where they could cover it anyway by just trying harder to protect users.
In the US, where I'm writing this, it's sort of like how our age discrimination laws are written just to protect elders, but didn't do anything to protect them from the lower floor that came from letting businesses keep spreading stereotypes about who the minimum wage is for or otherwise pushing hustle culture onto 20somethings.
The use of the Internet to astroturf political discourse is an example of this -- you can't fully protect kids from school shootings with an Internet safety bill if you're not also going after bot farms that exist to benefit the "thoughts and prayers" crowd. But you're also never going to see that in an Internet safety bill for kids, because that (and for that matter a lot of our discourse about addictive mechanics in general) explicitly leaves out voters.
(clarifying edit: I'm not saying there aren't valid concerns around this topic. I am saying that when we say things like "experimenting on users' mental health without their knowledge is bad," the baseline should be that you don't have to add anything to the sentence for it to be taken seriously.)
Cigarettes don't collect and sell data.
And then pushed hard for legislation to make it someone else’s problem (like when the tobacco industry astroturfed for laws to make it illegal to sell under-18 cigarettes, after their own research showed it wouldn’t make much of a difference on youth smoking rates and would also improve their image as a “rebellious” thing to do). Sound familiar with Meta’s big push to have your OS declare how old you are?
Cigarettes had the bonus of the infamous second hand smoke where it affected those not actively using the cigarette. It was the non-smokers that took action where we first started to see non-smoking sections in public places before eventually going completely non-smoking. There's really no equivalent for people using their devices in zombie mode in public places that affect those not using it to the equivalent public annoyance.
It reminds me of how I have never been tempted to use a cigarette or any nicotine product and view them as nasty, while me being a little kid telling an addicted adult "you know, those are bad for you" was met with a shrug or I can quit any time, as their social circle and support system was based on using it
Makes me think my generation is cooked when it comes to social media use
Social networks in general should be banned for underage people, that's the thing. And the social network itself should be liable for verifying the age its users, like a nightclub is liable for people who enter it. No bullshit operating system age verification, that's, trust me, totally intended to protect kids and not to spy on you.
The difference compared to a book is that a book is not personalized for each individual reader, so the example is not a good one IMHO.
Addictive would be then something that (for a substantial portion of population) has a tendency to cause addiction.
What makes you say that? It's well known that the addictive patterns in these apps trigger dopamine the same way drugs do. In a sense, dopamine is the "chemical substance" central to the addiction. Heroine and algorithms are just different ways to get it.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-pot...
This is a lame reduction of brain chemistry that has been used to push agendas. Dopamine is not equivalent do addiction.
> posts a lame reduction of the argument
Stop trying to say “dopamine” when you really mean to refer to a behavioral problem.
It wasn't though? They said
> the addictive patterns in these apps trigger dopamine the same way drugs do
(emphasis mine)
What about porn, sex, and gambling addiction, which are all un-boosted dopamine addictions?
Recently I stopped scrolling reddit/being logged in and watching YouTube videos. Since it's just endless... and it's crazy. It feels unsettling, I'm bored/antsy since I'm not doing something. So I've been trying to use this time to not multi task eg. I used to have a YouTube video playing and then scroll reddit at the same time. Now it's like, listen to music/work on a computer or watch something only. Also starting to make me seek real socialization too like go to a coffee shop or something even though unfortunatley I live in the suburbs so I'd have to drive to a coffee shop.
The only stuff I look at too is this site or some entrepreneurial specific site for motivation.
The one I look at though is wip.chat which is pretty much just a shared to-do list among builders, I'm not part of it, not gonna pay $20/mo or whatever lol, but good to see it.
I used to listen to digital nomad podcasts too as that was interesting to me like needing to make money/living day by day. Also similar not sure real or shilling, lot of Vietnam videos lately eg. "live here for $400/mo" kind of thing.
Was briefly watching starter story on YouTube but also not sure if real or shilling. It's funny I have the $10K/mo right now but it's because I have a job lmao... it sucks having a job, I'm not free.
Tbh, i have a procrastination problem and HN is as good as an excuse as any other social network.
[0]: Obviously not your mother. :)
(Just to clarify my point: it's not *all* bad of course, but a lot of precious time is wasted)
I assume longer than 20sec and the content becomes harmless again?
I get that there are some people who have anomalous abilities to self control, and i understand that they might have a hard time empathizing with those of us that dont have that level of control. However to chalk up the solution as be a better person, when in reality corporations are spending billions on research and design of addictive products is just short sighted.
We saw the same thing with smoking. Plenty of people said "meh, why cant the smoker just quit, I did". Which missed the point. The tabacco companies knew if they could get kids smoking at a young age it was less likely they'd ever quit.
Its naive to assume that the social media companies are not doing the exact same thing.
Yes there is room for individual accountability, but also we need to be realistic about the amount of energy that is being spent subverting people's attention and self control.
I don't gamble and in theory don't care if others do. But prediction markets are affecting sports and possibly governance as well in obviously negative ways.
For this specific issue - the more functionally illiterate, zero-attention-span humans we create, the worse all of our lives will become.
You could argue the opposite, it's social media that's creating a society of adults wearing mental diapers. This article is excellent: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
And this is worth a skim: https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/internet-baby-boomers-m...
Otherwise your point completely stands of course!
And also it's one thing that the App Store doesn't allow YouTube Service Policy violators, but then it's a big issue that they don't allow sideloaded apps. It's only this locking down of our devices so they must go through the App Store that is indirectly enabling YouTube to have a shitty addictive UX IMO. If people had more control, YouTube would have to worry about not being too crappy or else other apps might take market share. Now that they have us all locked in thanks to App Store, they can extract much more attention/money from us than otherwise.
AFAICT, there are no up front blockers to uploading an app that uses YouTube.
Which makes it also a matter of also parents and grandparents setting bad examples.
It also makes no real sense to me.
Nothing against US mega-corporations paying fins, mind you, but I equally do not trust the EU bureaucrats either. There has to be a limit to both what politicians can do, what corporations can do and what bureaucrats can do, while retaining a democratic base system at all times. If you go against addictive design, then why not against ALL ads? I don't want to see any ads. Ublock origin made me change my mind here - I literally see no reason as to why I would ever want to burden my brain cells with irrelevant content.
This is a bit different to website layout though. I equally fail to see why the EU should meta-regulate what is permissive in regards to design and what is not. Why would I have to accept any random EU bureaucrat here? If a user interface sucks, I'd rather expect ublock origin to kill it off. This could also be community maintained. No need for the EU to waste taxpayers money. After the EU wants to sniff for age data and then also declared its holy war against VPNs, I do not trust anything coming from Brussels. Even less so with Ms. Leyen in charge - can't the anti-corruption offices in Germany get rid of such lobbyists?
Don’t get me wrong, if I had my way TikTok wouldn’t exist for anyone, adults included. It’s just so strange to me that so many parents hand their 7 year olds unrestricted access to TikTok and expect someone else to keep their kid safe.
I agree with you, but only in theory. Because that's where we are now and it does not seem to work that well.
Maybe through more education? But then again I think reducing addictive tactics like endless scrolling could be part of a 2 prong attack.
With alcohol we have education on what happens, but we also have laws that regulate it.
I read a post about someone saying his wife worked for a snack company. They used MRI scans to see how much salt (or sugar) they should have in the snacks to maximize the response in the brain. Sounds disturbing right.
Well engagement engines are the same thing. It's artificial intelligence optimized to get people to react and stay addicted. Basically AI doing harm. It's not what is best for the individual in terms of health. It's what generates most money to the owner of the platform.
It should not be allowed to build a business around something that exploits humans brains. Basically biohacking our brains for profit.
In contrast, in Western Europe, my son is now in the sixth grade, more than half his class doesn’t have phones, phones are absolutely forbidden on school grounds and at school activities, and they are now doing a class trip where they were told that there’s a pay phone at the hotel, in case they want to call the parents - our son promptly informed us that he’ll rather buy a pack of Pokémon cards than call us and 3 days is not so much anyway.
And it is not only at school, he travels for tournaments with his team every other week and mobile phones are absolutely forbidden on the team bus. Children read, play games (including chess on a magnetic board), sing and change stories for hours at a time
Personally, I think some parents are afraid of their children growing to resent them for infringing upon their "freedom" in ways that keeping them away from the dangers that social media and other technologies present.
And since they're addictive, kids will find a way to get them even if their parents don't allow it. That's why it's most effective to require ID when you're buying cigarettes than it is to shame people for not being perfectly vigilant parents.
BTW, I'm not saying age verification is the solution here. IMO, we should instead ban addictive social media completely. Eg, target specific design patterns/features, require companies to disclose how their algorithms work to regulators, etc.
The web was already getting bad with ads and popups, but the EU's sloppy legislation loopholes somehow encouraged all websites to show cookie popups (and never remember my selection), so the experience is even worse.
Like adults spending their hours scrolling through infinite feed is somehow beneficial to the society?
You could consider unlimited scroll a dark pattern and block that, just like you'd want to block making it near impossible to cancel a service. That's testable and clear.
But "addictiveness" is just too wide a net and unenforceable (or rather, selectively enforceable).
And then the idea that the EU claims their own age verification app is the most private and most secure app in the world, yet it's already been hacked is laughable[1].
I'm very exhausted at out-of-touch and technologically illiterate politicians declaring mission accomplished on these things.
I understand that the free venture capital backed market has failed humanity in many respects. If we want solutions to the _human_ problems technology causes then yes, we need some regulations. But once again, this is just sloppy, lazy, bad law. Not based on evidence, not based on any standards, and not clear at all.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-brussels-launched-age-che...
If you don't provide better alternative, the "kids" (and please, stop using "kids" as excuse because everybody can see through it now) will just stick on these platforms because, believe or not, these platforms are much MUCH safer than the alternatives.
How about, let's see the real problem here: 24% of EU children at poverty risk or social exclusion (2024), see https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d.... That's not just a statistic about children, it's also about their parents.
Do you know that if you go outside, then there's this huge risk of having to PAY for stuff you don't actually need to live? Like transportation to go to place that don't bring you wealth, like drink that you drink even you're not that thirsty, like movie tickets just so it will not be too awkward after all the dialogue options are exhausted? Does these politicians just somehow forgot all of these costs money, in this economy that they helped to create?
And that is not to mention the REAL risk, such as drugs the bad ones, rude or crazy drivers, unpleasant adults who's only life purpose is to earn enough money to keep them going a little bit longer, just to name a few.
..... ORRRR, you can just stay in your conformable home, sit on your soft and warm sofa/couch, and swipe your life away on TikTok or Instagram for free, safely.
You see the problem here?
I'm really sick and tired of these politicians putting up this act pretending to "love children", when in the reality what they do is putting up easy patches to hide the real problem, which is poverty and inequality, that's the real problem.
STEM or verifiable educational content only. Have a review team and an AI that moderates content. No politics, no stupid dances, no monetization of content, no slop, and only credentialed people can post on certain topics (ie a delivery driver shouldn't make posts on theoretical mathematics).
The CCP may be many bad things, but they don't fuck around when it comes to education and making sure their youth aren't wasting their youth on stupid dance videos.
Perhaps there is nothing like Section 230 in any legitimate industry
I'm posting from the EU.
-In the USA, the government buys the data legally from the parties who are allowed to collect it and there are no political discussions.
One of these is obviously better than the other.
> "In the US, the government is using illegal methods to violate rights granted by the constitution."
Agreed one is obviously better than the other. The EU treats privacy as a privilege granted by the government while the US treats it as a fundamental right.
I'm not a fan of the US gov but I also don't agree with the candy colored view of the EU as an institution that does no wrong and when it does its a "well intended but misguided".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/righto...
There is no express constitutional right to generalized "privacy" in the USA and even if there were, the constitution only binds the government, which is allowed to buy data on American citizens collected by 3rd parties.
Not gonna lie, didnt expect on HN to forget this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
I have a hard time understanding this.
We have plenty of adults with terrible social media addiction that is destroying their lives, and nothing being done about it.
They have to restore interop with noscript/basic html web engines (past/present/and future).
Then, they have to be carefull with their file formats, for instance you never give "carte blanche" to such a disgusting format like PDF, you are very careful at defining a, as simple a possible, subset of it (with some internal software for validation).
I'm very happy they're taking a stance. I've seen too many messed up kids and there's no doubt the addictive design plays a big role in the problem.
And some people see tech companies as worship worthy and trying to restrict them is kind of a blasphemy.
The sentiment precedes all that and mostly stems from the EU being in some ways originally lib left dominated and still being seen as facilitating non-eu migration
Regular right wing people (aka not one of the many parties potentially receiving donations) don't tend to love giant webtech companies. Especially since they feel like they're often used as a tool against them and aren't a local thing that draws nationalists either.
A focus on privacy also isn't a very left-right defined thing tho i have noticed that the most far reaching expressions of it come a bit more from the further ends of that spectrum. (you'll see some very left leaning people at fosdems privacy focused/related stands for example)
That’s a bit outdated since musk bought twitter
Look at age verification: it's very easy and very safe to say "nobody sane would think that it is a good idea to force people to show their ID to every website they want to access, it will obviously leak the IDs, that is very bad!". While it is not wrong, it is manipulative: that is not the only way to implement age verification. In fact, there is technology that exists that would allow age verification in a privacy-preserving manner: some service that already have access to your ID can give you a token that proves your age, and you can then use this token to access a website. The service cannot know where you use the token, the website cannot know your ID, and they cannot collude.
So the constructive debate around age verification is this: assuming we implement it properly (i.e. in a privacy-preserving manner), is that something that we want or not? Does it solve a problem, or at least does it help?
But we cannot ever elevate the debate to that level, because nobody can't be arsed to get informed about it.
For instance, there is a large consensus against ChatControl, agreeing on the fact that it's impossible to let the good guys decrypt arbitrary data without opening it to the bad guys. As a result, I don't think it's still a debate: the EU won't ask to weaken the encryption. Now an alternative to that is stuff like scanning the messages on the device (which technically does not break the encryption) and report them when it makes sense. There is a problem with that, too: in order to detect "illegal" content, someone has to decide what is illegal. And because it evolves, probably it's a list that can be updated remotely. And whoever controls that list has some surveillance power we may not want to give anyone (I know I don't).
It seems to me that this second issue took more time to get traction, but now engineers generally understand it. So if a politician asks, they can say "you can technically do that, but you are building a dangerous surveillance apparatus". It doesn't mean that the politicians won't want it, but at least they should understand the technical stance on it.
So for ChatControl, engineers seem to understand the problem, and the consequence of that is that ChatControl hasn't passed. At least not yet, and now I think those in favour have to convince enough people that building those surveillance tools is a good idea.
For age verification it's a lot different, IMO. There is a website dedicated to it: https://ageverification.dev/, explaining how they want it to be privacy preserving, which is technically possible. But still, there doesn't seem to be a large consensus about this (see the comments on HN). Many, many engineers keep saying "it is not technically possible", which is wrong. Maybe it is not desirable, which is a different debate. But it is technically possible.
What does that mean? Well for age verification, from what I see the "engineers community" is not credible at all. I can't get anything from it "as a community" other than "people yell many things, many of them being factually wrong". Many will say "not only it's not technically possible, but ON TOP OF THAT it is not desirable", but why would I listen to their second point when I can verify that the first one is already wrong?
It's always the same problem: not every opinion is worth the same. The opinion of an expert is worth more in their domain of expertise. So you can't just run a poll on HN and go with its result, right? In the case of age verification, for instance, it seems like the EU has been talking to actual experts, because https://ageverification.dev/ seems pretty good.
I feel like many engineers yell against it because they don't like the idea of age verification, not because it's technically bad. Which is a fair stance to have. But the honest way to defend it is by actually talking about why they think privacy-preserving age verification is a bad thing. Claiming that it is not technically possible is either uninformed (and therefore not credible) or manipulative, IMHO.
EU online service must interop with web sites and not be _ONLY_ web apps which are hard dependent on the massive and ultra complex web engines of the whatng cartel (this word fits their behavior).
The EU online services which cannot be provided via a web site (noscript/basic HTML), which are very few to none, should use well defined, as simple as possible, stable in time, open and published protocols/file formats. That can be 'subset' of broadly available protocols/file formats. The benchmark is writing real-life code to handle such protocols/file formats should be reasonable for a very small team of devs or a solo average dev.
I wonder where all the money to deal with web apps is actually going, you know where web sites were carefully broken...
BTW, with noscript/basic HTML, no infinite scroll anyway. One Rock Two Birds. Ironically.
It took me like five years to realize it was really not good idea for a small B2B business to spend a part of the limited resources in that. I needed several experiences to understand that in many cases good customer relationship and reliable system is much more important. But it wasn’t until recently that I started thinking like “wait, if it tricks the users into doing something they’re unwilling to do, isn’t it unethical?”
It makes me wonder how little we think about the ethics and the consequences of our investment. It’s not like we understand it’s unethical but do it anyway for profit. We simply don’t care how unethical it can be, not even slightly, until the evidence of the harmful effects are not negligible after years and decades.