Discussion
Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement, say whistleblowers
hmate9: Is this unavoidable? I mean it does generate clicks and views and user engagement so if one platform is doing it, doesn't that automatically mean that the other has to do it? Otherwise they will continuously lose market share.
bigfishrunning: I feel like this is general knowledge for the past 5 or so years, but the real question is "What do we do about it?". Personally, I put real effort into not spending time being outraged online, but this is a societal ill that's bigger then I am...
Forgeties79: I remember The Social Dilemma’s entire premise was basically this headline minus TikTok, and that came out what? 7 or 8 years ago?Not saying “well duh” I just think at this point I have to ask “are we going to do anything about it?”
AndrewKemendo: It’s like asking how do you get people to stop drinking alcoholAs long as there are people who don’t acknowledge or care about the health effects it will exist. If that’s a plurality of your population then you have a fundamental population problem IF you are in the group who thinks it’s bad.Aka every minority-majority split on every issue ever.So the answer is: live in a society governed by science. Unfortunately none exist
nemomarx: We handled smoking pretty well by making it cost more and banning it in public places. If tiktok was banned from official app stores it would essentially go away.
hmate9: I think the burden to curate your feed so that you do not have such content is now resting with the user and they cannot rely on the platform to do it for them.
pocksuppet: If the user even wants to do that. Why would they? They're looking for a sugar rush, they're not looking to eat their intellectual vegetables. How do you get children to eat vegetables?
brookst: "They" being others, but definitely not you right? Those people...
b65e8bee43c2ed0: >"What do we do about it?"nothing. if it isn't illegal, it isn't illegal.previous generations of neurotics objected to many current (at the time) things we don't bat an eye about. when was the last time you saw anyone campaign against satanic music, violent video games, or hardcore pornography?
brookst: Not a fan of conflating personal enjoyment of a vice with promoting hatred.
toomuchtodo: Regulate it. Laws, consequences, etc.
cj: "Make the drug less good" likely isn't the answer. Nor is banning it.What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Maybe Gen Z has the answer.
munk-a: "What do we do about it?"Shut down the behavior with regulations or shut down the companies. Meta and TikTok have no natural right to exist if they are a net negative to society.
bborud: Laws appear to have fallen out of fashion. And a disturbing proportion of the loudest people like it. Then you have those who ought to know better but are attention-seeking, selfish assholes who somehow find it «interesting» or think they adhere to «principles».The latter category know who you are. You downvoted this comment.
cdrnsf: Of course they did. As long as they're legally allowed to do so and profit from doing so they will continue.
bigfishrunning: I'm not suggesting that it should be illegal, I'm just seeing this monetization of bad vibes and wondering how we can have less bad vibes. Pump the brakes a little.
bdangubic: Social media addiction is much deeper than nicotine addiction. And people still smoke, see Phillip Morris stock and earnings :)
fakedang: Make it legal and expensive?
sigmar: You in the 90s: "Leaded fuel isn't illegal guys, stop your campaigning, let's keep huffing it"How about coming up with an actual defense of social media rather than an ad hominem about "neurotics"?
b65e8bee43c2ed0: >You in the 90s: "Leaded fuel isn't illegal guys, stop your campaigning, let's keep huffing it"people who raised alarm about such things could easily be branded as conspiracy theorists. even now, at this very website, so full of well-educated folx, people who speak out against xenoestrogens, for example, are being downvoted to hell.
jqbd: Decades of science communication and real life examples of knowing (of) alcohol addicts
aerodexis: Real life experience with alcoholics would at-best be constant over time, or be diminishing (since gen Z drinks less).Also seems like the science on whether science communication actual changes behavior doesn't point towards it being much of a cause here.
KennyBlanken: Given how TikTok "trends" seem to consist mostly of "get teenagers to do stuff that causes huge expenses for US society":* "eat tide pods" * "stick a fork in electrical sockets in your school" * "destroy your school's shit" aka "Devious Licks" - bathrooms, chromebooks (jamming stuff into the charging ports to start fires...) * "drink a shitload of Benadryl to see what happens" * "steal a kia/hyundai and drive 80mph, run from the cops, etc"...convince me that this is not a purposeful attack on US society by the CCP?
bdangubic: regulation will never happen because these are instruments to control the masses
techpression: The people who were voted to power (across the globe, not just the US) to do something about it are stuck getting their dopamine kicks posting garbage on the same platforms. It’s truly a terrible timeline we are in.
charcircuit: British people complaining about free speech and trying to censor the internet. America needs to keep standing up to British censorship interests.
barbazoo: You're only allowed to drink as an adult. We're talking about letting those companies rot our brains in those first 18 years.
XorNot: In my experience the 60+ demographic have had far more damage done.
thewebguyd: I don't think deeper is the right word. Nicotine has a physical addiction element that social media does not. You cut off social media, you at worse face some boredom and FOMO.And PM's earnings are mostly from developing countries at this point. In the US alone, the adult smoking rate has fallen nearly 73% from 1965 to now, so clearly the regulations are working.We need to do the same for social media. People didn't quit smoking because they suddenly got more disciplined. We just made it inconvenient. The biggest start would be get rid of algorithmic feeds and "recommendations" keep it purely chronological, only from people you explicitly follow.
vinni2: Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403929
autoexec: We just haven't seen what 60 year old ipad kids look like yet. It's not going to be pretty
autoexec: All the more reason for regulation. If people catch on to the fact that they are being manipulated and abused by the platforms to "drive engagement" they might abandon them or spend less time on them. If the government regulates these platforms so that they are safer or at least less harmful people will feel better about using them giving the government a larger platform to use to control the masses.
zzzeek: oddly enough the TikTok referred to here was to be shut down in the US. But then the executive branch ignored the law while it could organize handing the company over to Larry Ellison instead. But these allegations date to when the company was fully under the control of ByteDance, and not US-regulated entities at all.
diacritical: Regulating content that makes people enraged seems like a slippery slide towards regulating any kind of "unwanted" speech. I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid), but regulating algorithms that show rage bait leaves a lot of judgement to the regulators. Obviously I don't trust TikTok or Meta at all, but I don't trust the current or the future governments with this much power.For example, some teen got radicalized with racist and sexist content. That's bad in my opinion, as I'm not a racist or a sexist. But should racist or sexist speech be censored or regulated? On what grounds? How do we know other unpopular (now or in the future) speech won't be censored or regulated in the future? Again, as much as I'm not a racist or sexist, I don't think the government should have a say in whether a company should be able to promote speech like "whites/blacks are X" or "men/women are Y". What's next? Should we regulate speech about religion (Christians/Muslims/atheists are Z) or ethics (anti-war people or vegans are Q) or politics or drugs or sex?The current situation is shitty, but giving too much power to regulators will likely make it way shittier. If not now, in the future, since passed regulations are rarely removed.
fc417fc802: At least in the US the government can't regulate speech (for the most part). But what we could do is regulate recommendation algorithms or other aspects of the overall design in a way that's generalized enough to be neutral in regards to any particular speech. And such regulations don't need to apply to any entity below some MAU or other metric.Even just mandating interoperability would likely do since that would open up the floor to competitors. Many users are well aware of the issues but don't feel they have a viable alternative that satisfies their goals.
bdangubic: > If people catch on to the fact that they are being manipulated and abused by the platformsI am not trying to be funny or anything but this sounds like "if only fat kid realized that eating 10 apple pies before bedtime might be the reason s/he is fat" We already know what social media platforms are doing, not to just young people but to all people.> If the government regulates these platformsThis is like saying "congressman care about our debt so they will vote to reduce their own salaries by 90%" - the government is not going to regulate tools they are using to control the narrative/masses etc...
slg: Specifically, I believe Section 230 protections shouldn't apply to algorithmicly promoted content. TikTok hosting my video isn't inherently an endorsement of what I'm saying, but proactively pushing that video to people is functionally equivalent even if you want to quible over dictionary definitions. These algorithms take these platforms from dumb content-agnostic pipes that deserve protections to editorial enterprises that should bear responsibility for what they promote.
Aurornis: How would you square that with a site like Hacker News, which has algorithms for showing user-submitted links and user-generated comments?
temp8830: I wonder where folks like this came from, and at what point did people who associate themselves with hacker culture decide that censorship is great.The OG hackers thought of censorship as network damage that needed to be routed around.People who support censorship always think of themselves as smarter than the rest. Dunning-Krueger however would suggest something different.
diacritical: Nitpicking maybe, but nicotine isn't the main thing that makes cigarettes addictive and it's not that bad by itself. Gwern has a long article on nicotine that's worth a read [0].More importantly, why do you think society should make smoking inconvenient - more costly, more illegal or anything like that? If I'm not blowing smoke in your face, why interfere with my desire to smoke? If it's about medical bills, just let me sign a waiver that I won't get cancer treatments or whatever, and let me buy a pack of smokes for what it should cost - a few cents per pack, not a few dollars/euro.[0] https://gwern.net/nicotine
nemomarx: If I can smell it, I don't really care if you're blowing it directly at me or not, it's still a pain. If you want to smoke in private in your own home and then wash your clothes after so no one can tell you're doing it, I guess that's fine, but I don't see why it also has to be cheap?
diacritical: I admit I sometimes smoke near people, even if I try to move to the side. At bus stops I try to be 5-10 meters away from people, but often I don't do it and it inconveniences people. Sorry, truly. I will try to be more mindful. When I switched to e-cigs for a while a couple of years ago, I started noticing the smell of tobacco smoke. After I switched back to cigs, I stopped noticing it. Smokers don't notice it that much as they're around it often. It's not always smokers being inconsiderate, it's not realizing how it smells to others. If you let me smell the clothes of a smoker and a non-smoker, I wouldn't be able to tell the different if my life depended on it. Although I only smoke outdoors and wash my clothes regularly, so I hope my base smell isn't that offensive to non-smokers.So yeah, this comment really reminded me to not light up whenever and "try my best" to walk a few meters away, but to really think if I'd inconvenience people.On the other hand, if I'm alone on a street and you're walking towards me so I just pass you for a second, I can't imagine that the smell would be that bad from just a casual walk-by. When I'm passing people, I hold in my smoke till I pass them.Even if I agree that smoking outdoors is inconsiderate and annoying to others, I could still do it at home or in dedicated areas (smoking sections in bars with good ventilation, ofr example).> I don't see why it also has to be cheap?If we agree on the previous points, then why not let it be cheap? Tobacco is cheap to produce. Most of the price of cigarettes is artificial, to cover medical costs and whatnot. Let's say I sign a waiver that if I get sick, I either pay through the nose or don't receive treatment at all. Would you be OK with letting me buy tobacco at it's original cost (no subsidies, no artificial fees)?Or, as a thought experiment - let's say tobacco didn't have any smell and there were 0 negative effects of second-hand smoke. Like, you wouldn't know it if I smoked near you unless you saw me. Then what would be the justification in making smoking artificially expensive for me?
bdangubic: > You cut off social media, you at worse face some boredom and FOMO.I wish this was true but I know tens of people that quit smoking and (besides myself) know 1/2 of another person that quit social media. drunk at NYE two years I offered $10k to a group of 25 people to delete all social media apps from their phones for 60 days - still have that $10k in my account. I think quitting social media is around the same as getting off hard drug addiction (like hard, hard, hard one - opioid, heroin etc...) and maybe even tougher that that - for most people.> People didn't quit smoking because they suddenly got more disciplined. We just made it inconvenient.I want to believe this! I just haven't personally experienced this at all (I am in my 6 decade on Earth so plenty of time around). I don't know single person that stopped smoking because they could not burn one inside restaurants/clubs/... or because it costs $18/pack or any of that. 18 year old person has very little "regulation" when it comes to smoking. Little inconveniences to move 25 feet away from the building isn't much of a deterrent IMO.I am subjective on the matter of social media, I know that. But I am educated in its evil and would for instance never let my kid be on any social media as long as she is under my roof. This has already cause significant challenges for her (and my wife and I) but also it is an amazing learning experience to overcome silly social obstacles...
slopinthebag: Consuming social media doesn't have an inescapable negative impact on other people, unlike burning leaded fuel. In the same way that eating junk food doesn't. Should be ban junk food? What else do you want to ban from others just because it has a risk profile you personally don't feel comfortable with?Seems pretty neurotic to me...
slopinthebag: Why would someone want to get other people to stop drinking alcohol?
someotherperson: Given that the 'tide pod challenge' was before TikTok's time and took place on wholly US-owned platforms like YouTube, we can safely assume it's all in your head. Most of the other stuff you're sharing sounds like a reflection of what you find out in the streets of any major US city. Perhaps you should question if your government is the one that is attacking you.
