EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

Some weren’t on social networks at all, and thus missed out on some of the socialising. But also saved themselves from many cringey trends, FOMO, etc.

While some others were on social media 24/7 and basically acted like early influencers.

I am so glad cameras on phones didn't exist when I was at school. I probably would have been expelled a dozen times over.

My point, rather than a parent ignoring their kids and me being upset about it, is more of a "out of all things, you're gonna _watch reels_ at the beach?! Save that for home!". The very instant people get bored, there's an unlimited content machine to tickle our brains, when in reality we should learn that being bored is OK.

Still, while the point of raising kids being difficult is something I agree with you on, I also gotta say that I absolutely disagree about kids having tablets at restaurants, they probably shouldn't have them at all. But that's a whole different discussion, so I won't dive deeper here. All I can say is, you're right that I can't assume what the context was in that situation, and I shouldn't judge so harshly.

It'd be hilarious to see the EU demand interop on features like Events, Groups, Marketplace.

Let me fix that for you. Everyone keeps choosing it because it is addictive.

That's something I didn't need to learn today!

When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.

Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)

It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.

Didn't tiktok get hit with this earlier in the year? Has tiktok removed these features for European users?

NA beer now exists. Beer and wine places can’t sell liquor. Alcohol sales aren’t 24/7 in many places.

Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.

And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.

Germany is one such example.

Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".

If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.

I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,

I'm definitely going to start calling it that when discussing it from now on.

The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.

And compulsive behaviour is definitely something that medication can help with.

It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.

The academic literature funded by what grants from what stakeholders? Like the social media research from Harvard Kennedy now? The research that came after its social media research lead was fired and a $500mm Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant occurred somehow in parallel [0] [1]?

That recent research?

Or the research that was occurring on social media before that? Surely you're not arguing in that bad of faith, despite where I could speculate your RSUs might have came from. But this seems an extremely naive take if not made in bad faith.

[0] https://www.thecrimson[.]com/article/2023/2/2/donovan-forced... [1] https://www.npr[.]org/2023/12/04/1217086770/disinformation-r...

The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.

But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.

But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.

People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.

Literally every ad you see is a business deciding ‘instead of showing you what you came here to see, here’s something else, which I am showing you only to benefit my business.’

I’m not sure what limiting principle you can apply to limit the ability of businesses to show users other things the user might be interested in that wouldn’t also basically ban advertising too.

(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)

No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.

There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.

I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.

Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?

If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.

Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.

Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.

Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.

> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?

Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.

So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.

As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.

There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.

And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.

UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.

That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.