Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco | Hacker News Reader

Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

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315 pointsnewsomix9xl306 comments

I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite content. Was the intent to _addict_ people? It doesn't have to be, to create a system people have become addicted to. Even if the harm is not intended, does that mean it cannot be regulated? Surely not! Let's ban infinite scroll for a start. The question of whether to punish Meta is quite separate from the question of how to reduce the harms of its products.

I agree. Our policy going forward needs to be as precise as a scalpel.

I think this captures the essence. Many posts on here, however valid or invalid, are arguing intent. While I think punitive measures are definitely warranted, now that we know for certain about the harm caused (and how it was caused), the discussion can shift to prevention via precise policy.

The distinction between punishment and prevention seems important here. Meta's intent might matter when deciding liability or penalties, but if a design pattern is demonstrably harmful, "we only wanted more engagement" isn't much of an argument against regulating it

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

have worked in analytics for a while. Engagement is a very broad category. Not all engagement metrics are toxic. For example, daily active users is healthy for a business to measure and is engagement. Commenting on Hackernews is engagement. Meta also has a wide range of engagement metrics - not all of which are problematic

I've never seen a NAXALT fallacy used for the concept of engagement metrics before.

It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.

For anyone else not understanding the reference: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/NAXALT

Interesting to choose Hacker News as an example. I'm sure they measure every metric that can be measured, but it'd be interesting to see what measures they actually care about doing well on. The stated goal of the site is pretty explicitly not to be as engaging as possible. It's to satisfy intellectual curiosity. They make plenty of design choices for the express purpose of not being addictive. No infinite scroll. No personalized feed. No ability to subcribe to or follow particular users or topics. No visual or audio content. No previews. Automatic editing of clickbait titles to be less clickbaity. Built-in ability to temporarily ban yourself if you're spending too much time here.

It's not the measurement that is toxic. It's what measures you optimize for that can become toxic.

There was a moment in time when Instagram use to show this disclaimer "You're all caught up with the posts". You could still scroll below that and it would show you algorithmic content as it always have if you choose to view it. However I don't see this feature anymore and it's gotten worse with pure infinite slop. I really appreciated that cause every time I opened the app, saw that disclaimer I would instantly close it and go about doing other things. I wish they just kept simple stuff like that around but I guess that doesn't help their metrics.

>There was a moment in time when Instagram use to show this disclaimer "You're all caught up with the posts".

This still exists and I get it every day. It is the floor for my feed. I have to refresh or close the app and reopen to fetch more.

the engagement argument could be applied to every commercial service or product. anything that is sold is getting optimized for appeal/attraction/engagement/adictiveness.

Addicts are your most loyal and exploitable customers.

Things will keep getting worse in the US as long as the current nothing is anti-competitive policies endure.

No, it isn't. Nobody evaluates a drill on how long a worker spends using it. If you can get the same job done faster, you'll go with that. Even in entertainment, not all products optimize for time of use. Nobody intentionally makes the longest possible movies.

Products optimize for engagement specifically when they exist within the attention economy and their monetization model is serving ads and/or harvesting user data. If Porsche and Rolex can sell you cars and watches you almost never use, I'm sure they're fine with that.

Even if it's hard to conclusively prove intent, I think it's easy to see how there must have been at least recklessness in play and perhaps even wilful blindness.

In other words, even if they didn't know that what they were doing was harmful, they should have.

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive?

At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case

> We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing

Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.

If we set the barrier to entry in prediction markets to an equivalent of an age/height check on entry, it would be well north of "yes, I am a mom-and-pop first time investor, I have never been here before, I know nothing except what some spammer told me and claude"

Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing.

(thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")

It’s such a joke. But we also need to find ways to study and measure non-gambling digital platform addiction like 15 years ago. Thanks to algorithmic consumption, we’re nearing a whole generation of adults that have no idea how to navigate their societal agency and 3 trailing generations that had once learned and since forgot.

Those are relatively new and the president's children have financial interests in them, so they won't see any regulation any time soon. But it's certainly possible they will be regulated in the future... if we ever have a less-openly-corrupt government again.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?”

Roughly that.

Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain

> It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.

What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness

Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis

> What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that.

If you as a person engage with a product to a degree where it causes demonstrable, measurable harm to yourself or your life, you are addicted.

If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw? I think what matters is the intent of the design. E.g. if they design the product to make you need more of it (while it has an actively detrimental effect)

> If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw?

If you repeatedly willingly do so despite the harm, then yes.

You have moved the goalpost.

Stop using buzzwords instead of engaging in a discussion. Someone clarifying their position is not necessairly moving goalposts, they might have just not laid out fully their idea in the first place.

But you still did it. If I sunbathe every day without sun cream, whom do we regulate? Assuming people have no ability to choose.

For sunbathing in particular, do what Australia does:

- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")

- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer

- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds

- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups

And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.

In other words, regulate and educate

It’s not about regulation it’s about intervention. It’s not that you’re not allowed to saw pieces of yourself off with a chainsaw, stranger of a choice as that may be. The idea is people in your life who care about you may want to intervene to stop you, as no matter how pleasurable you might find what you’re doing to be, it’s slowly killing you.

And that’s not even going into the science behind addiction where the whole “but you chose to do this” gets more and more dubious the deeper you go.

I'm not sure about that example. I'm seeing non tech people getting very addicted to their customized chat bots. Companies are very primed to eventually nudge them to enshittify the content of the responses and it could get bad.

You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?

No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether

Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.

In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.

Suppose you have a video service which takes context from previous videos you watched to show you more videos you're interested in. Doesn't sound very addictive, does it? You described it in an innocuous way, but I can absolutely see that being a lead-in to a parasocial "relationship" or even AI psychosis.

> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.

> Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.

Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.

"You can stop smoking at any time"

"You can stop gambling at any time"

As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.

I don't see why.

The problem with your examples is that it's a person lying to themselves. GP is acting as an objective third party and telling the truth about their hypothetical.

There are lots of things you really can stop at any time. I could stop eating peanut butter at any time, if I had a compelling reason.

Because if you want to convince someone away from believing it's an addiction so severe it needs an act of government to address, presenting an argument that all-but-panders to their "people spend so much time on it that it must be an addiction!" priors is counter productive.

What product does not listen to how users use the product to design the first or later version of a product?

Most products don't spy on you?

According to "Build things that last" author, 90% of the businesses evaluated are "customer first", meaning business listen to the customer and improve their produce based on that feedback.

voluntary feedback - things like "I wish the customer service was faster" - is not the same thing as measuring engagement time down to the millisecond and using that data to feed a presentation loop.

Engagement is measuring voluntary feedback. If you aren't engaged you typically either move to the next piece of content or close the app. These are the voluntary mechanisms you as a customer report how good the recommendation is.

No, engagement is not voluntary feedback, because there is no way to use the product without it being measured.

The user chooses themselves what part of a product they engage with. It's like reporting a post would be considered voluntary feedback on the anti spam systems even if it's the case that every report is measured and fed back into the model for predicting reports.

> The user chooses themselves what part of a product they engage with. It's like reporting a post would be considered voluntary feedback on the anti spam systems even if it's the case that every report is measured and fed back into the model for predicting reports.

If the user cannot use e.g. instagram without generating engagement metrics, then it is not a voluntary metric.

User reports - which are generated via a deliberate action from the user - are voluntary.

Open the app. Liking videos. Swiping off of a video early. These are voluntary too.

I think I have made my point about the difference between voluntary and involuntary metrics quite clearly. If you aren’t going to meaningfully engage with it, we have nothing further to discuss.

Same we can end it. I personally see reporting a video and liking the video as being the same. They are 2 different voluntary actions users can take. I personally see these taps and swipes by the user as deliberate actions they are making, but I guess you don't?

I see a distinction between like/dislike buttons, which a user chooses to engage with, and things like instrumenting the time a video plays on screen before the user scrolls past. The scrolling is an interaction, but it does not constitute a voluntary choice to give feedback because you scroll regardless to see more content.

Measuring the amount of linger time on content is an incredibly powerful signal precisely because it is subconscious.

It’s the difference between giving someone a like/dislike button and wiring up a heart monitor to see what causes faster heart rate. One is voluntary - intentional, if that makes it more clear - the other is involuntary - just an artifact of using the app which can be measured but which is unintentional.

I don’t believe we should be measuring lizard brain responses and using them to serve up content. Let people make conscious choices instead.

A hammer doesn’t have a sensor to know how you are doing while you're hammering away, and it doesn't make the strike smoother to keep you hammering longer if you start seeming tired. Almost no products ever monitor you

But I can collect feedback about it compared to other hammers. If you really wanted to you could attach an IMU to the hammer and run a user study collecting such usage data. Then use that usage data to evolve the design for the next generation of the hammer you produce.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.

Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

Unlike big tech, which would never do that.

why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

In fully supportive of prosecuting wrongdoing in the food industry.

But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.

Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?

It seems to me like Meta is being singled out here. It's likely not the start of a movement to change how we live and get rid of/diminish bad influences on our lives - because I don't think we wanna really do that - not for economic reasons and also values - we like our personal freedoms. This is simply targeting one company whose CEO is very disliked so we can all carry on with our lives and feel better about ourselves. I do support restricting social media (not just Meta) in general for people under 18.

Doesn’t any enforcement action “single out” a wrongdoer? People pulled over for speeding are singled out (there are other speeders), people busted insider trading are singled out (there are other inside traders), etc?

I honestly don’t understand your position… it seems to be “unless you can simultaneously prosecute all wrongdoers in all industries all at once, prosecute nobody”. But that can’t be right?

> Doesn’t any enforcement action “single out” a wrongdoer? People pulled over for speeding are singled out (there are other speeders),

If everyone is speeding and only you are getting a ticket than yes you're being singled out, that's generally not how the law is enforced. They're also using cameras since it's indeed hard to give tickets to 10 cars at once.

I think you believe there's an equal-outcome promise in the law that really just doesn't exist.

Not everyone gets caught. The deterrence is the likelihood of getting caught times the penalty. And yeah, the guy with a bright red, loud-exhaust sports car is more likely to be ticketed than grandma in a minivan, at the same speeds on the same roads. This is life.

But isn't that just product design and Improvement?

I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.

Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.

This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows. I'm a responsible adult. I want those things. I make use of them. They make my life better when I'm trying to listen to some music while I work on something or when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show. I do not want regulations coming along and making all of my products worse due to heavy-handed regulation.

Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.

I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.

Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely? "You might also like this show" is rather different than YouTube's "OMFG SHORTS WATCH THEM NOW" experience. Even if the line is fuzzy, I think many can agree some things are closer than others, and that's enough for some laws (there are plenty of other not-perfectly-testable laws out there as counterexamples).

While this is true in principle, my understanding is that the failure to carefully deliniate ahead of time, was why prohibition in the USA ended up being "all alcohol" rather than "just liquor".

> Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely?

This is what I was talking about in the second half of my comment: Every time I bring up the fact that these proposals would be overbearing, people start brainstorming infinite carve outs and exceptions that would exempt the products they use, but harm the products they don’t want other people using.

If these laws hit the books they’re not going to be neatly shaped to avoid the things you like and only impact the things you don’t.

That seems inevitable for laws that try to address private behavior, yes. It'll waffle around and strike randomly as it gets tested more and more in court to narrow the definition, and that gradually causes a chilling effect around the whole concept. The only real consideration worth having is "will things be better after", not "will my life be unchanged".

Cigarette packages have disgusting photos of carcenogenic lung autopsies to discourage you from smoking them, so Facebook and TikTok etc should have similar disgusting photos and vidoes of what happens to you if you use their product, that you have to watch every day before using it.

Sleep-deprived teenager autopsy: a teenager with enormous purple eye bags, phone surgically fused to their hand, lying face-down on a school desk at 3 AM.

Body-image filter ward: rows of teenage faces grotesquely stretched, pinched, inflated, beautified and looksmaxed until everyone looks like the same embalmed Instagram mannequin.

Doomscroll thumb: a gigantic swollen thumb with the fingerprint worn completely smooth from infinite scrolling. The tendon is labeled "ENGAGEMENT."

Facebook scam victim: an elderly person's wallet dissected on an autopsy table -- completely hollow, with a Facebook ad where the money used to be.

Algorithmic stomach contents: an autopsy tray containing "suggested for you": rage bait, diet videos, conspiracy sludge, influencer ads, and one photo from somebody you actually know.

Predator warning: a cute Instagram DM screen shown as an anglerfish -- friendly profile photo as the glowing lure, enormous teeth hiding behind it.

Facebook Hospital: a free to play educational game where you have to spend virtual currency for cures to the ailments Facebook gave you, like Bloaty Head from reading all the AI generated engagement porn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M

Images on cigarette packages are of real patient and real impact and still smokers ignore it. A fake, stylized hypothetical image will have much lower impact.

Are you saying that fake, stylized hypothetical image will have much lower impact reducing the impact of all the fake, stylized hypothetical images in Facebook?

Maybe they should insert disgusting slices of actual carcinogenic lung tissue into boxes of cigarettes, since images of them aren't impactful enough.

That would be harder for smokers to ignore, and it would make the cigarettes harder to light, worse smelling and tasting.

  > when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show.

Please please somebody explain this to me. I see it often, but fail to understand it.

The television is a tool for watching shows. The show is ostensibly the draw, and the television is the vehicle for watching it, no? So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something? If there is no show that one wants to watch, why the compulsion to sit in front of the television?

I've spent countless nights in front of Netscape Navigator surfing from site to site. I'm fully aware how compelling the device-content system can be. But it's always been the content side, not the device side, that was compelling.

GP is addicted and can’t see it.

2 hours of TV per week is addicted?

Sometimes the desire isn't to watch some specific show. It is to have the experience of sitting on the couch and watching something good on tv. This is why people channel surf, or scroll through netflix's collection. You want to have the experience of watching something. The goal is to be stimulated, to cure your momentary boredom.

I have the same experience with youtube, reddit and HN. I don't really know what I expect to see when I open the HN front page. If I knew, I'd navigate to that site directly. But I know I'll see something on HN. Maybe something that catches my eye.

Netflix is just the same. "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."

  > "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."

Thank you, this is a sentiment I can understand.

> So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something?

Because I have kids, an active life, and a lot of physical hobbies and activities.

And some times it’s 10PM, too early for bed, too tired from a busy day, and I’m looking to relax and enjoy a show with my wife for an hour.

I said two hours per week because that’s about how much it ends up being. The fact that this is attracting criticism and even a sister comment calling me “addicted” is bizarre. What even is the goal here? Shaming people for relaxing and enjoying things? Feeling a smug sense of superiority over others for their consumption choices during down time?

Is it lost on you that these criticisms are coming in the comments section of a social news site where people waste a lot of time?

No need to get defensive, not only did I not criticise you - I even commented that the phenomenon is common. I asked for someone to explain something I don't understand, and people explained. I'm a wiser person today.

The primary activity is sitting and holding my partner. I can and do happily do that without secondary entertainment, but it doesn't take any concentration so why not add a show in to the mix.

I knit. Sometimes I just want to be watching something, while doing that. The goal isn't to watch a specific show, but to have something to watch, while I let my hands do the work.

There's a big difference between a completely optional "recommendations" area and a loop. If the recommended stuff happens automatically without you having to look for it, then it's a loop.

Yep - some emotional core of my being (not rational) hates ML recommendations.

I'm a happy paid user of Spotify and just ignore the recommendations (I'm not looking at a screen), and I use YouTube heavily with a browser plugin that hides recommendations (which kills the end of video loop). I get recommendations from people, and use the products for curation, bookmarking and subscriptions. They're good.

Whereas Instagram and TikTok are vacuous and useless to me - I can't make myself use them. I think my brain knows what's wrong with them, and makes a kind of disgust reaction very quickly.

I agree, there's a very low level, emotional difference between them. I'm not sure I could encode it in law, but it is different.

So Spotify is a loop (it automatically plays the next recommended song)

True. I feel like "primary attention" should be a part of it too.

Yes, anyone who has been looking for Spotify alternatives can readily tell how poor the music recommendation algorithms of competitors. I feel like the only comparative one is weirdly, youtube, since they simply have more data points and context to attach recommendations to.

And that ability to recommend what you want is the harm being decided.

At it's peak, I found Pandora's recomendation algo vastly superior to Spotify

I've come to realise that the only truly good recommendation engines for music are written in wetware; there's a lot to be said for DJ sets and independent radio.

> > “Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?”

> This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows.

Spotify recommending music and Netflix recommending shows that are similar to what? To previously recommended music/shows. This is exactly the problem.

> I'm a responsible adult. I want those things.

This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.

> This is exactly the problem.

What problem, exactly?

Helping me find new music to enjoy?

I’m beginning to think some people have forgotten what we’re supposed to be angry about and now we’re just angry at all things tech.

Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful. It improves my life. I lose nothing to it. I gain new exposure to music.

It’s fine. Let people enjoy things.

> This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.

I assure you I am neither addicted nor am I gambling when I listen to new music on Spotify.

What are we even doing here? Is this some puritanical push against all things that people might enjoy?

Yes. It's like the prohibitionists. They couldn't see any problem that couldn't be solved by banning alcohol.

The poster is implying the reinforcement at play is the problematic thing at issue, and they are assigning the word "gambling" to represent it, or so it looks like to me. I think you aren't parsing their meaning correctly because what they seem to be aiming for is extinguishing the automatic reinforcement.

You're claiming it's making your life better, ostensibly by a relative report of the hedonic response a newly introduced piece of music auto delivered to you by the recommendation algorithm invokes. The problem they hint at though is the passive nature involved. You aren't finding that new piece, it's getting pushed. That pushing incentivizes optimizing for continued engagement, an act children, intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals, as well as those in the throes of cognitive decline/impairment, are not at all well equipped to self-regulate against when pitted against paid behavioral psychologists designing maximally engagement encouraging interfaces.

The incentive, and the existence of predatible populations is the problem I take away from it. I can agree you should be free to opt-in mind, but I can also see the wisdom in a by default interface wherein engagement hacking is forbidden being the norm, and that norm coming with a minimally controversial algorithm boiling down to "chronological feed of known/subscribed to sources", followed by a link of some sort to open an interface to the recommendations.

Facebook/Insta/Shorts are absolutely not that non-engagement farming interface. Hell my grandmother toward the end was about driven mad by it, and it was all I could do to just try to remind her that just because the machine had it on offer doesn't mean she had to partake, but her community centric character made that a bit of an ordeal for her.

There is absolutely a pathological pattern to the way tech companies hunt for eyeballs to monetize, and it is a damn shame it's taken this long to start getting traction to even talk about it.

> Helping me find new music to enjoy?

Is it helping you find new music or is it feeding the same thing it has been feeding you in a reinforcement loop? Are you really searching or are you mindlessly taking what's on offer?

> Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful.

In both Netflix and Spotify any real discovery is quite well hidden, nearly all of the feeds you can get are algorithmically generated for you to consume what is beneficial to them. You get an interface pretending to offer you a choice and an algorithm behind, designed and fine-tuned by behavioral psychologists to get you coming back for more. An apparently it is doing it's job so well that you keep defending it.

Ok then at the very least allow for a toggle to turn those algorithmic “recommendations” on and off

> I want those things. I make use of them.

Can you opt out of those features? If not, how do you know you want those things or if you are just being manipulated into using them?

> Can you opt out of those features?

Kind of, by using a different software.

How can you use a different version of Facebook to talk with the people that are on Facebook?

How can you use a different version of Netflix to watch shows that are only available on Netflix?

How can you use a different version of YouTube to watch videos that are only available on YouTube?

I think a better take is:

> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.

If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.

This - one hundred times this.

No matter what the “algorithm” is, at some point it’s a choice of what to put in front of the user - a publishing choice.

Unless the rules are solely determined by myself and deterministic (no selection or choice on the platform end) then they are publishers.

And liable.

That's not at all how Section 230 works. There's a popular myth that it distinguishes between "publishers" (who make editorial decisions about what content is shown and how it is shown) and "platforms" that just host it with minimal interference, but that is in fact just a myth.

However, I don't really see how Section 230 is even relevant here. What Section 230 protects them from is for being liable for what is in the individual user posts posted to Facebook. It essentially just makes it so that if you have a beef with what someone posts on Facebook and want to sue you sue the poster rather than Facebook.

What is being alleged is that Facebook's decisions in how to arrange and present and show or not show that user content has harmed people. Those are things that are not in scope for 230.

Yet it remains relevant that "being liable for one's editorial decisions" is a good idea, and that differentiating between platforms which do and which do not exercise autonomy over how information gets prioritized and sorted may very well be relevant to this discussion.

Mix this with "...of User-Generated Multimedia Content", and you might get closer. This excludes music platforms, for example (although, Band Camp and Soundcloud might have some issues with that, admittedly).

It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.

> It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general?

Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.

> does it have to be answered in general?

100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.

You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.

But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive

Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up.

If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.

I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s

Look at video games and you'll see the surface area of "addictive design" is basically infinite. People have gotten addicted to a huge variety of games, with not all that much in common.

You can still regulate the addictive features that are in common though. Paid Lootboxes for example. Isn't there some jurisdiction that already regulates those?

This, with a decent regulatory agency, wouldn't be that difficult to manage. We really could just say "infinite scrolling" and then add more things to the list as needed. We do it with firearms, medicines, drugs, vehicle parts, and about a million other things.

NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof.

So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."

It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.

The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices.

And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.

But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.

My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.

That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be

It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling.

In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.

Having "underlying risk" to something just means you invested in it before. So for you it's not a gambling as long as you... have gambled before in the other direction?

Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.

It's all gambling. You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up. The stock market is exactly the same - middle class gambling.

> You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up.

Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.

Not really. The question is are you working for your money or are you hoping the money will provide free rent for you. If the latter, you're gambling. The only reason it's relatively risk free is because the system has been thoroughly stitched up in favour of the rent seekers.

I'm confused by the ideas you're combining here. Do you think all forms of rent-seeking are gambling or just ones that involve money in a direct way?

The only risk in a bank deposit is up at the "societal collapse" level. Are you really so extreme as to say that's gambling, and if so isn't having money at all a form of gambling?

The point is largely around expectation. Sure, the base case of putting money in a bank is very safe, but the interest on that is not. Factor in inflation and its pretty easy to get negative returns on bank deposits.

If you fiddle with "investments" with the intent of making money without doing anything else, that's gambling.

Sticking money in the bank with the hope that it's still there next time you come back to it is not really gambling. You're just doing the default thing.

> Factor in inflation and its pretty easy to get negative returns on bank deposits.

But that applies to having money at all. That can't be enough to call it gambling.

> expectation, intent

I understand your argument here, but I disagree. Shifting to the bank that offers the best rate is good management, not gambling. Understanding how interest works and being motivated by interest to do bog-standard money storage doesn't turn that storage into gambling.

> without doing anything else

I don't understand how this connects at all. Maybe it reflects badly on you if you want to turn money into free income, but that doesn't make it any more or less of a gamble. It's a totally different axis.

>But that applies to having money at all. That can't be enough to call it gambling.

It is, because there's no choice not to gamble. You have to make choices, and none of those choices are risk-free. The options are on a scale between low-risk negative-return and high-risk high-return. But the risk is never zero - not even in FDIC insured accounts - and there's an element of randomness involved in the outcomes.

That's the point. There's no option to say "I have this store of value, and if I don't do anything with it it will retain its value forever."

It won't. So you're forced into risk assessment and randomness, not just with money but with assets in general.

This is the foundation of the economy. All non-trivial transactions are based on risk/reward estimates, and some parts of the economy can force risk and hazard on others.

It's not just a casino you can never leave, it's a casino where the management use various tricks to siphon money from your assets into their pockets without giving you any agency over what happens.

Government-backed bonds are the intended zero-risk option. You know exactly how much you will get and it is designed to track inflation (sorta).

If you don't believe in that, precious metals are another way to go. I don't personally subscribe to that theory but that's the idea.

I think your parent's point is even larger than that. To be alive is to engage with risk. There are no stores of value that withstand all decay.

If everything is gambling then we lost track of what we were doing and need a new word for what we're trying to regulate. The answer is not to give up because it's a spectrum, it's to mark off thresholds.

All you are saying is "there is unavoidable risk in the world". Yes, there is.

Gambling is creating risks that don't need to be created, for their own sake. Some people like risk all by itself - gamblers.

There's a difference between unavoidable risk and imposed financial risk, much of which is caused by the financial industry itself.

Being killed by a meteorite is a statistical issue. Having your house stolen by a bank during a manufactured recession is a crime, and should be avoidable.

Yes, that was actually happening after 2008. For example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna40777392

Fair point re seeking the best return given the same risk profile.

Allow me to refine my point: It's gambling when you seek to increase your risk profile in the hope of gaining higher returns, without actually doing anything else other than "invest" the money.

> It's gambling when you seek to increase your risk profile in the hope of gaining higher returns

I generally agree, but I don't think it's a binary. If an insured bank is 10% gambling then an index fund is 20% and roulette is 100%. And the snow derivative sounds like it's probably above 80%.

> without actually doing anything else other than "invest" the money.

I don't see why this changes whether it's gambling. Investing in a restaurant and starting your own restaurant are both very risky bets.

> If you fiddle with "investments" with the intent of making money without doing anything else, that's gambling.

There are lot of value investors which sit at home do stock picking occasionally. They don't work for their money. I don't think they are gambling.

The only investors that fits your non gambling definition seems to be the active investors who take part in the companies. But most investors don't

Why don't you think they are gambling?

Because investing conservatively is not gambling. Your definition of gambling is weirdly associated of how money is made, instead of risk making. Nobody uses this word in this way. Gambling is about of risk. It's not about how you are making the money

For example, it's also possible to be actively taking part in the money making activity while taking unnecessary risk. A person can run his own company but recklessly making bets on the loan or spending decisions. So this is the other side of the story where they are gambling and they are actively working with their money.

That's the point. Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher risk to get a (hopefully) higher return. Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.

> That's the point. Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher risk to get a (hopefully) higher return.

It's about risk adjusted returns, not higher returns. If you are not considering the risk assessment you are objectively wrong. Take my previous example, how is actively working with you money by taking higher risk less gambling, than passively investing for example an all weather portfolio which is designed to preserve the capital? An all weather portfolio is firstly proposed by Ray Dalio to be as conservative as possible to hedge against all kind of risks while hopefully get some gain.

> Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.

That's objectively wrong. For example lots of etf is designed to reduce risk by diversifying the investment. Just take your own just put money in the bank example. Suppose you do not live in stable country US/EU, and your country is having high inflation. How is just putting money in the bank with your country's depreciating currency less risky than let's say you invest in a global portfolio or an all weather portfolio? In this case, by not managing your risk profile, you are taking more risk.

I am only giving out 1 example to show that `Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher` is objectively wrong. It's actually the opposite if you look into how portfolio managing works. Majority of the funds managed for the Sovereign state or the rich are about hedging against the risks, it's the opposite of gambling.

Because they aren't creating risk. They already have risk - any time you have capital, you have risk it disappears.

You don't have risk that the lakers win tonight. You don't have to bet on the game.

That fact it's the default thing isn't the issue. Putting money in the bank is not gambling because you have the underlying risk no matter what. Just holding cash has risks. Any time you try to take some value today and turn it into value tomorrow, you have risks.

Gambling is creating risks for their own sake.

> Not really. The question is are you working for your money or are you hoping the money will provide free rent for you. If the latter, you're gambling.

So putting money in my savings account is gambling, but investing in businesses is not.

I suspect I misunderstand your point completely.

They're saying that investing is your neighbor's business is gambling but starting your own business with the money isn't.

But if it's the same risk I don't see why.

> If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale

Isn't that a bet that your government won't devalue your currency fast enough?

Inflation is a risk. A real, underlying, unavoidable risk. People with that risk aren't gambling.

You are conflating risk with gambling. You can go through life without gambling, you can't go through life without risk.

> The stock market is exactly the same - middle class gambling.

Our entire society is based on being forced to gamble. If you don't invest your money in some capacity then inflation will eat you alive.

Why should having money ever give you a return on that? I ask that question in the context of moral philosophy, not a capitalist society. Surely there are better ways to determine how an individual should live that doesn't typically amount to emerging from a lucky orifice?

@hgomersall: emerging from a lucky orifice is in fact the main thing in life if you think about it. After all, we are collectively a computer made of monkeys, and the function it is computing is natural selection. Kin selection is one aspect of it. Everything else - including money and innovation - is window dressing.

Sure, so should we, as society, reward it further by also providing more free money?

Well, society is welcome to try to stop them.

These appeals usually go like this: we should stop providing more free money to the people who are strong enough to go and take it. Individually we are weaker, so let's stop this collectively. But someone needs to lead the collective. And just like that - you have created another strongman who will just take what he can. In other words: Communism.

Buying small pieces of businesses isn't gambling. The fact the price moves around a lot isn't the point of it, it's just a result of people buying/selling. In gambling, the risk itself is the point.

No - it means you are exposed to - electricity / gas / oil prices. Or Wheat maybe?

Everyone is exposed to those so by that definition nobody would ever be gambling. I was trying to be charitable so assumed the bar was higher in the what-if.

You aren't exposed to football game outcomes, nor dice rolls or cards flipping. I, in california, am not exposed to electricity prices in the northeast. My exposure to wheat prices is extremely small - if I go and bet a lot on wheat going down, I'm gambling.

If you are creating risk that didn't exist, you are gambling.

If you are an oil company entering the futures market to reduce your risk on oil prices, you aren't gambling. If I enter the market and short oil for fun, I'm gambling.

The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doesn't make your house purchase a gamble.

Reducing risk is a form of gambling. You're just betting on the "please don't" rather than the "please do".

The point is always the same, you want to end up better off than others that didn't buy what you bought.

If the oil futures purchase turns out to have been worthwhile because price went up due either to production going down or demand up, that doesn’t somehow create new oil. You just get to buy it cheaper than others. You coulda yoloed on spy puts and used that money to buy the more expensive oil at market prices and it's all the same. But you call one gambling and another not gambling, idk, it's all similar to me.

No, it isn't. That's just not the definition that is used by people who gamble and are in financial markets. Words have definitions. No one uses the word "gambling" when they buy insurance on their house. They payoff is contingent, but it's not creating risk for it's own sake.

When I invest I don't really care if I end up better off than others. I'm just hoping to catch some slice of the ongoing economic growth so my at-rest wealth doesn't become devalued by inflation.

Words have meaning, my sentence didn't stop where you stopped reading. The key words you're missing come right after when you stopped quoting.

I'm sure what I bought does better than some others. I'm also sure some others have done better than me. Statistically speaking this has to be true of almost everyone. Probabilistically speaking I'm likely somewhere near the middle of the bell.

The "for fun" part is really important here. Addictive behavior comes from a hijacked dopamine system, into which you slowly get lured in. This makes it applicable to social media, drugs and if you squint, even to broad obsessions.

This doesnt help the gambling distinction though. What activities can take over your neurological reward mechanism? Pretty much everything, like neurotically washing your hands. So you have to factor in societal scale and amount of (potential) harm and this is where the vague debate begins. A key point is a dealer/platform, profiting from your behavior, to exclude neurotics.

A striking observation i made was, that gambling machines have deliberate delays between action (eg pull the lever) and reaction/reward for the brain to create tension and to break it with a dopamine spike. This deliberate design is how the machine exploits your brain and makes you an addict. A similar system is the endless social media feed (or even worse brainrot short videos). You scroll, you see new stuff, you identify content maybe emotionally. Its the same fast stimulus-reward cycle. Meassured in 1-2 seconds, same as gambling machines.

How would Poker fit into that definition?

Gambling.

That definition sounds plausible but breaks down in practice. Every Chicagoan has snowfall-related risk. And conversely, a lot of those guys legally traded where they were not exposed to risk. They were just gambling.

It doesn't break down. If you are creating risk for it's own sake, it's gambling. If you are doing something to hedge risk, it's not gambling.

If your position is unrelated to a risk or wildly above the magnitude, you are creating risk for it's own sake. Gambling.

The legality of it has zero to do with anything. You can gamble legally and illegally. You can gamble in markets which are made for hedging.

I do think it breaks down in practice for the goal of deciding which given trade/bet is gambling.

I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even.

That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well.

I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers.

So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.

One side of a trade can be a gamble and the other a hedge. A single transaction doesn't need to be classified as a gamble or hedge - it can be both.

As for the market maker themselves - they are definitely not gambling. They are trying to make money while reducing risk to the extent possible. You don't walk into the risk management committee and get an excited response because you increased risk all else equal, right?

You started out saying it was simple, but now you have a definition where you need to somehow slice trades down the middle, so I think you're starting to see my point.

Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/

It's certainly not well defined today; memecoins, prediction markets, sports betting, and more are all toeing the line of gambling.

Toeing the line? There is no underlying risk to any of that except the bet itself. Of course it is gambling.

Not in the eyes of law (in many or most jurisdictions that regulate gambling).

At some point it's going to catch up. Legislation is a very hard process.

Sports betting is centuries if not thousands of years old.

> toeing the line I'm not sure that phrase means what you intended to say here. From Wikipedia, [1]: "Toe the line" is an idiomatic expression meaning either to conform to a rule or standard, or to stand in formation along a line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

It's possible I misinterpreted your statement though, and if so: apologies.

Guess I learned something new today. I've always thought "toe the line" means something closer to "staying as close as you can to the line without crossing it", if that makes sense.

Agreed, that's what I thought it meant when I used the phrase :)

It's probably common enough to be an accepted meaning nowadays, like what's happened with "beg the question". I think the original meaning also lends itself very well to people believing the phrase is "tow the line" since that makes some sense with conforming to a rule. Who knows, idioms are a moving target.

Prediction markets are 100% gambling. It's just synonym acrobatics.

I say this as someone who had a lot of fun GAMBLING during the World Cup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOptJl8Xkx0

Not 100%

In certain cases you can use information asymmetry to your advantage. You know something they don't. A good example is any market dependent on public opinion surveys (eg political polling). That data can be hard to find. If you can find it faster than everybody else then you win more often. There is still some chance involved but it's more like poker than blackjack (not a great analogy but you get my drift).

People did this in sports gambling since forever. Professional gamblers would cultivate a source (like a coach) to get inside information to get a leg up. That said - you are still placing a bet based on the best information you have. It's gambling, or else, what other word is for it? Investing?

Skill-based game/wager?

Gambling is playing games with negative EV

See also "binary options", which are such a bad deal for retail investors that the UK FCA explicitly tells you they're a scam.

> What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling?

Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.

But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:

Roulette - generally gambling

Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible

Poker - not gambling

Stock market investing - not gambling

> Stock market investing - not gambling

That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...

It's a common refrain, but I don't agree that it's correct. You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk:

If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false;

With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged portfolio of derivatives your risk might be substantially lower.

And in any case, so what? If you place a small bet on every number of a roulette table your risk is essentially zero: you'll simply make a guaranteed fixed loss of 5.26% on every spin. On the other hand, if you invest in the Vanguard Total Stock Market index tracker, you might hope to make around 8 to 10% per year, but in some years (e.g. 2008) you might make a big loss (37%), so the risk is significant. Yet I think most people would agree that the former is gambling while the latter is not.

The important factor isn't how much risk you take on, it's whether a sufficiently skilled person can achieve a positive mathematical expectation over a series of similar bets.

> You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk

Indeed, but I'm not alone in making this decision, it's a common thing in the finance world, known there as "accredited investor" [1].

Generally, the distinction between gambling and investing (a fine line that especially Kalshi and Polymarket are attempting to walk, by the way) often is "can the investor / gambler influence the outcome of the investment by knowledge". Say, a stock like GME... the initial analysis by DFV clearly was investment, based on very thorough research. The Army of the Apes however that m00ned the stonk? That was pure degenerate gambling, with the point not being profits but hedgefunds closing down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

I think a more effective definition involves socially productive activity. If support the creation of value to others in hopes of getting paid back over time through getting a fraction of the value created, that's investing. If I put money into something volatile in hope that I get more money out, that's gambling.

Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.

The examples don't hold in most jurisdictions (except for the stock market and if short sells are allowed).

All of the three categories are defined as gambling in pretty much all jurisdictions across the globe. However, they are classified as different types, e.g. roulette is closer to slots than poker is. Then poker can be "cash tables" vs "tournament". The main classifier difference is "game of chance" vs "game of skill", yet there are lots of nuances.

As I stated in my comment, they weren't examples of the legal definition of gambling. What the law says something is can often differ greatly from the every day understanding. The legal definition can also change according to the whims of the legislature while the every day meaning tends to stay more static.

> Poker - not gambling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

In the distant past of 2011, offering online poker to Americans, even from overseas, brought serious Federal prison time. That was before the lobbyists got to work.

Poker is gambling and if you loose your money in poker, you lost them in gambling.

And betting on sports is ganbling too, despite the excuse of "skilled game" being deployed there too.

> My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it.

In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?

> In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"?

The jury.

A jury is relevant to the legal adjudication of harm, not the institutionalization of a certain ideas, activity, etc. as harmful. There are many so-called harms that are arbitrarily declared by agencies as such long before a lawsuit is conceived. Just the same, there are many legitimate harms that states and societies enact as their "right" at the expense of a person's liberty (i.e. conscription, expropriation of property, etc.).

You don't need to take an anti-democracy stance regarding juries.

Also there is a reason why trust in institutions are lower than Trump's approval, institutions are prone to corruptions and enriching the elites while advocating for policies that do not help worker's material needs.

We do this in the law all the time. Many here find it imprecise and aesthetically ugly, but it’s how the world works.

Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think of a clear answer in two minutes, there's no point in anybody looking at anything that harms people I don't care about."

But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.

> Let me know if you figure it out.

If you tell people at a dinner party your wealth came from it, will they be impressed and intrigued, or will they roll their eyes and be dismissive?

"I know how to throw dice" doesn't have quite the same intellectual ring as "I know how to trade derivatives contracts" haha

Let’s start with banning algorithmic personalized feeds. That seems to be the common determinator of the bad apples.

I find it very convenient for music discovery for example. Maybe start by making it opt in and give parents control over their children's feeds?

Even for music, it sucks compared to the old human-powered Pandora or legendary torrent tracker forums.

Although it may be possible to replicate either with AI. But it still should be conversation style rather than infinite feed thing without any input.

I'm sure the companies marketing research divisions have very clear definitions.

We just use those.

Nit: Prediction markets are gambling and we dont regulate that.

Who is “we”? They’re absolutely regulated in most of the world. Smarkets has a UK and Irish gambling license.

There are literally emails back and forth with Zuck where it's brought up that they're essentially making things as addictive as possible and it's bad for people, and he goes (to paraphrase) 'yeah, whatever. keep doing what you're doing'.

He said 'if you need info on people at Harvard just ask'. Called people who gave him information 'dumb fucks' (so, who's the next person on HN that's going to dare to reply to me that he was 'making a good point'? Do you see the Google founders saying that? Even as a joke?). Killed the competition of Instagram and Whatsapp. Copied every single Snapchat feature. Wants AI friend profiles for people. Hijacked emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 . Free Basics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

List goes on. Socio.

In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive.

Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.

How would you prove this? What if the product was not intentionally designed to be engaging but ends up being more engaging than TikTok?

Check for the targets of the dev teams. What gets them promotion. Right now they openly optimize for 'engagement".

Agreed, why would we have lawyers and judges if it wasn't to adjudicate exactly this kind of delicate issues ? We're not in a procedural show where you can gotcha the judge with a logical backflip.

"Oh but your honor if you find me guilty then you must also shut down YouTube", he said with a confident smirk. As if it was not trivial to establish intent in the case of meta, who were probably high fiving while sharing reports titled "Basic methods to make teenage addiction go up".

Agreed.

https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/

> Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted

So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.

Yes please.

I don't think that's what most people want though. Most people are fine getting entertained and addicted. Even in China they allow them to watch 100 episodes of one minute micro dramas created by an A.I per day. People hate boredom more than they hate becoming a zombie.

I am pretty sure most people do not want to become zombies. But entertainment is not the same as intentionally creating addictive mechanisms, the lines are blurry though.

> I am pretty sure most people do not want to become zombies

Well yeah they hate to think about themselves that way, but that's the life they choose. Now - would they like that choice to be taken away from that or substinatially reduced? Would they like to live without Netflix, Meta, Youtube, porn, junk food etc etc - or have these products completely transformed ? Seems like they wouldn't.

They chose? Highly debate able.. Addiction withdrawals are tough but it's time we grew a little wiser

I would love to see "SEO" qualifies.

The best idea ive seen is if you decide what a user sees in an algorithm way (beyond “natural” ones like chronological) you are liable for the content - you are no longer a common carrier and can be sued for damages. That should be step 1.

> beyond “natural” ones like chronological

So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?

No, because mail programs can be configured by the user to turn off any algorithms that try to be smart.

That kind of algorithm doesn't show you anything besides the messages in your inbox. It's never making a decision to show you X instead of Y, it's just deciding the ordering in which you see them.

Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.

There are already a couple of answers for standard male programs, but if the male programs such as Gmail pushes up content to your inbox, save from Google then yes, that would be an algorithm that would qualify. I would really argue what you are describing is a filter rather than a content algorithm.

A trial is also the wrong venue. It isn't illegal to make an addictive website.

Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.

A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections.

If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.

How do you distinguish engagement maximization and usability maximization?

I really have no idea how we can define most of this esp using the framework of previously established law but I do think that a definition of Dark Patterns could be tangentially worked into the psychological make-up of gambling.

Section 230 has nothing whatsoever to do with any distinctions or differences between "publishers" and "platforms". That's just an internet myth.

In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.

> But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case

What if I told you that judicial outcomes are often nondeterministic?

Tobacco regulations don't regulate the general case, they regulate tobacco products. I think the same will apply to social media. There's no need to define an addictive platform anymore than there's a need to define an addictive substance. Instead all that you need to define is a social media platform. And that can be expanded/adjusted as necessary.

As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.

For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed.

If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.

Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.

"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."

For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.

The same way we already distinguish between card games and gambling. I can think of quite a few to distinguish normal platforms from addictive ones;

  - non-chronological timeline  
  - promoted content from people you don't follow   
  - Rewards for using the app (reddit is a great example of this) 
  - Dark patterns to take control away from the user about what they see

And I'm sure I can think of a bunch more if I spent time on it.

> how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform?

Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts.

For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as:

- Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior;

- Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists;

- Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product;

- Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use;

and so on.

This seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be decided by a trial. It’s some mix of intent and the actual outcomes, more or less as you stated.

I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter.

In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.

Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws.

I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.

Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.

I’d bet that an exceptional legal team could make a pretty solid case based purely on the volume and testimony of behavioral psychologists on their payroll

Yeah, the internal research could be far more damaging than the existence of the harmful effects themselves

People at Meta knew it was bad, and brought it up to higher leadership.

At some point choices were made, with full awareness of the tradeoffs, to move products in a specific direction.

Absolutely none of this, the harms, the patterns, the tech, is unknown to people who work in trust and safety, content moderation, and policy.

At various times, meta and other tech firms did try to hold the line, but they eventually succumbed to the financial pressures they were under.

If there is any lesson to be taken, it is that ideals don’t survive beyond a few years in contact with market incentives.

Yup and this is what discovery is looking for / has already found.

I'm delighted to see this headline because I've been comparing Facebook to cigarettes for more than a decade. The parallels are striking. Both industries knew their products were poisonous and intentionally hid that knowledge while intentionally engineering them to be as addictive as possible, and ended up marketing them directly to children.

I am old and used to use FB back when it was cool. Think 2010-14 period, and it was addictive even then even when it was just content from friends. Humans have deep need for connection with other humans and they will be addicted to anything that provides it given that modern society is increasingly isolated.

People are addicted to reddit, heck I know people who are addicted to Stocks app because they just need something to scroll.

Modern day addictions are complex and products are not the sole cause imo, they are just filling a void. Why that void exists needs to be answered. You remove Instagram and that time will be replaced by Reddit, tiktok or whatever product gives you some dopamine

People are lazy. If you give people an easy way to "fill that void" they will do so, even if it's detrimental to their long term health.

No social media? People will still find ways to socialize. It might not be as easy, but they will do it. Maybe you'll even see a resurgence in social clubs.

I wouldn't say social media is just "filling a void". I feel like it's more accurate to say that social media is exploiting weaknesses in the human brain for profit and causing harm to individuals and society as a whole. I'd even say that it's preventing people from filling that void because it's sucking away people's time.

Imagine if a tobacco executive said "you remove cigarettes and people will just replace it with alcohol or other drugs or another vice altogether". It may be true for some people but overall we've reduced harm by fighting back against cigarettes

I do wonder what’s going to happen in the future to addictive social media algorithms. Feels like one of those things that’s so powerful, but skirts by because it doesn’t feel like it should be (like targeted advertising).

Can we just ban algorithms for content and go back to chronological feeds circa 2004 Facebook?

Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.

Those both have problems too, I'm sure.

I think the major issue is, people still have the option of those older forms of feeds, people just don't like them.

New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.

Of course, but the users can’t be trusted to stay away from something designed to addict them. Only real solution is regulation, although the how is still a big question mark.

I would ask, where is the line drawn between 'enjoyment and addiction.'

Is it the harm provided? Then what do we count as harm, and where is the line.

IE, There's no one stopping me from eating unhealthy, IE sugary foods, which are heavily addictive. I ride a motorbike, and I'd consider myself addicted to that, and it's got a high chance of harm, but we don't ban those. Ditto with gaming, social media, hobby XYZ.

I personally think the freedom to choose your vice is reasonable.

Maybe this freedom sounds reasonable at first. Pew Research says 36% of 13–17 year olds are on social media almost constantly [0]. This is not a problem that existed 20 years ago. The ease of access to highly addictive products is rotting the soul of society.

0: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/12/09/teens-social...

How? The 2 feeds on my IG account: "posts" and "reels" show content of people that I do not follow.

Instagram definitely doesn't have the option but youtube for instance does, there's a subscription tab that's collecting dust in most people's accounts.

NewPipe even has the subscription feed pretty centered

if you click on the ig logo you can switch to a feed that only shows accounts you follow

oo thanks for the tip. sadly, this view still shows posts from advertisers that I don't follow. but that is the nature of the beast I guess.

Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.

We have that in the EU, they mandated it. It finally made instagram use-able for me again. Did instagram geo-gate that feature? Wouldn't surprise me, but still.

With the amount of money behind them, I regret to say I don’t think they’ll get legislated away. My best guess is that social shaming slowly dwindles their usage. It’s actively shameful to scroll at dinner among Gen Z, for example. The problem becomes using the apps alone at home.

I really hope it gets legislated away or kneecapped to the point where it isn't so effective. With all the legislation coming out regarding kids and social media, I hope that people will start to draw a line to the fact that maybe adults shouldn't be hooked up to it too. I don't think all content recommendation algorithms should go away, but we need to dial down the intensity by an order of magnitude or two.

Meta employees reading this: whether you work in Reality Labs, ads, operations, ML compiler, LLMs, marketing, whatever. You're all complicit in the harm. Remember that.

Even those working on React? Asking for a friend

Absolutely! :D

Even bigger harm since Vercel/nextjs takeover

Even React.

Meta, good reminder to buy diversified funds and not whatever hot company. (-29% - 1 year)

Fidelity zero is compelling, in a retirement account.

FZROX (Fidelity Zero) is relatively highly concentrated in Meta (1.7%) (because Meta is a large chunk of the US stock market).

What's the gist of this case? Making social media addictive isn't a felony AFAIK. Big Tobacco has never been convicted of it either.

The case appears to be about them purposely knowing the impact of what they were doing and exploited it at the cost of children's mental health.

Brief summary

https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024...

Alternative to archive.ph

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   x="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov" 
   (
   printf 'GET /business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco HTTP/1.0\r\n'
   printf 'host: www.economist.com\r\n'
   printf 'user-agent: '$x'\r\n'
   printf '\r\n'
   sleep 1
   ) \
   |bssl client -connect 104.18.42.19:443 -server-name www.economist.com > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

Alternatives to bssl

   #|busybox ssl_client www.economist.com  > 1.htm
   #|openssl s_client -connect 104.18.42.19:443 -servername www.economist.com -ign_eof > 1.htm

   #FTPUSERAGENT="$x" \
   #tnftp -4o1.htm https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco

   #busybox wget --no-check-certificate -O1.htm -U "$x" \
   #https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco

   #curl -o1.htm -Haccept: --no-alpn -0 \
   #--resolve www.economist.com:443:104.18.42.19 \
   #-A "$x" \
   #https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco
   
   #links -http.fake-user-agent "$x" \
   #https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco

   #elinks -dump -eval \
   #'set protocol.http.user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov" ' \
   #https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/18/metas-blockbuster-trial-draws-parallels-to-big-tobacco

Hopefully META loses so they can stop this forceful age verification at OS level garbage being financed by META, f..k META.

Yes, but important to note that the prosecutors are pushing for AV (ID Checks) at the site level. Both sides of this fight are actively anti-privacy.

> It could, for instance, do so on the grounds that it is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which safeguards platforms from legal liability for content posted by third parties.

But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.

Section 230 has nothing to do with whether a platform is impartial or not. All it does is make it so they are not treated as the publisher or speaker of third party content.

So if I post something on Facebook full of libelous statements about you section 230 means you sue me, not Facebook, over that libel because that libel is my speech, not Facebooks.

If Facebook figures out that libels posts about you are engaging and starts pushing them in everyone's feeds section 230 would protect Facebook if you wanted to sue them for libel. I don't think section 230 would care though if you wanted to sue Facebook over their engagement seeking algorithm.

If nothing, at least 'Social Reckoning' movie will get some blockbuster success due to the timing.

A 1.4T penalty if due in 30 days would kill them. If paid over the course of 20-30 years maybe not so much.

That’s where it ends the analogy cuz big Tabacco still exists

Investors not panicking seems rational. Companies this large can survive astonishingly large fines...

Facebook causes Face Cancer: their interface and algorithm are so toxic that it causes users to React by scratching their eyes out because it hurts so much to look at and use.

Social media is the worst thing we've ever created. The current political state of the world is entirely to blame on it. The misinformation. The deceit. The false impression that everyone's opinion is equal. It's not.

and since all that tobacco money changed human behavior and gave people healthcarea and access to ways to quit smoking so they did, they lived happily ever after

oh wait no, what the states did is use all that money for other projects and let the smoking addicts pump up sales tax gains on the insane cigarette prices instead

so they are going to do the same with all that facebook money, nothing will change, they won't "protect the children" and they will funnel the millions into other projects for themselves

Just another shakedown

Good there should be way more. Meta is an enemy of humanity and they must be destroyed.

Yeah but follow the money, those affected never get any of it. All goes into the government coffers.

At worst Suckerberg just pays money. So the issue is not being solved.

These US corporations operate outside the law - and they are protected by the orange king who is just too incompetent for anything other than pocketing away more money from the people, which is the only real skill he has.

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