Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children (reuters.com)

I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.

But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.

Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?

I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....

This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.

Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).

Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.

But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.

And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)

And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.

And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.

And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch

does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.

so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.

that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.

in more detail: Largely no.

Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.

This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.

The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.

A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.

It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.

Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.

Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.

Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.

but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...

also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.

and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)

the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...

If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.

For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.

That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.

Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008

Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.

I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.

Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.

This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.

Social media is manipulation. Period.

No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.

I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.

Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.

This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.

No. "Just" is understating the effect.

> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put

Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.

There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.

Hm, odd. I didn't know parents didn't have authority or agency. Good to know.

Just like how Meta, it's staff and leadership all knew they were making decisions that harmed people, and did nothing to stop it while profiting immensely.

There are multiple studies showing that social media use leads to worse mental health in users.

Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.

My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.

Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.