Do carmakers “capitalize on vulnerability” when they advertise pickup trucks as big tough vehicles for tough, outdoorsy men?
Do providers of health insurance for pets “capitalize on vulnerability” when they say you need to buy their product if you love your pet?
At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions. And I can’t get that worked up about Meta’s free product.
It's been studied under so many different names Knowledge Gap Theory, Info Asymmetry, Bounded Rationality etc The more info Adults have to digest, bad decisions/exploitation are garaunteed.
If you think those legal protections aren’t fit for purpose (they were created long before social media even existed), then you should take that up with your legislators. I personally wouldn’t trust them to approach that task without implementing something horribly tyrannical, like implementing a requirement for a full KYC process for creating social media accounts. So I’d advise that you be careful what you ask for in that respect.
Do tv shows target teens too much with high energy music and dancing?
Does media target them too closely with intentionally addictive music riffs from Taylor Swift to Billy Eilish?
Will we shut down all these video games that clearly target kids with bright colors and, let's call it what it is, "aestheticized violence"?
We need to be careful about how we go about trying to protect children in this regard.
we as a society are going to have to seriously engage the fact that we are now fully capable of manufacturing addiction, and at the moment, do so, both in adults and in children.
"Their own decisions" is not a stable concept. Setting aside esoteric philosophy of mind, you need look no further than your own relationship to your phone—tested out for many of us at the Thanksgiving table last week, as duly noted by Chris Ware's cover of last week's New Yorker magazine—to confirm this.
The mechanisms of surveillance captialism and a foundation of decades of consumer psychology (etc ad nausuem) have quite literally left us adrift in a world of stochastic mind control. At that same table many of us encountered the inexplicable world views of relatives whose propoganda bubbles did not intersect our own.
And we all have such bubbles, not least as a result of the cheerful professionalism of many who browse here.
Your decisions, just like teenagers' decisions, are not "your own" in the sense someone might have meant c. 1923. And before one cries, it has ever been thus, to that I say: no, it absolutely has not. The technologies for behavioral steering of today are as unalike what people contended with in advertising (etc.) a hundred years ago, as our logistic transport and energy industries are, amongst others.
Until we take this on, head on, as a society, the problem will just get worse.
You're asking this of a group that largely can't vote, sign contracts, and which America doesn't trust to drink.
I can get worked up about Meta targeting children in ways which they don't have the experience, or knowledge to know about let alone to avoid. Children should be protected from bad actors like Meta and let me be clear, any company taking advantage of kids is a bad actor.
The entire toy unboxing industry is built around advertising to children.
Yes.
You can be expected to make responsible decisions as an adult. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors trying to take advantage of you, and that this behaviour isn't borderline unethical.
This is like saying “everything in moderation” in a discussion about nutrition. No shit. We’re trying to find that delineation.
That point should come when they are no longer children. Targeting children to produce perfect little ecosystem consumers is... kinda evil.
There is no "Free" product. You are paying with freedom, you are paying with attention, you are paying with privacy. It's not "free", it's extracting value from you.
It doesn't cost money, yes, but neither does working, yet we assume that transfer of value is such that it ought to be paid for. It's not Meta offering a "free" product. It's their users. Their users give Meta their data for "free", which then Meta uses for profit.
We already do that. When they turn 18, we expect people to be responsible for their own decisions.
The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.
Marketing gets a lot of freedom because of the assumption that they only take over a small part of the information a person has access to. To the extent that this assumption becomes incorrect, those actions become attacks.
Examples: Drinking disclaimers (drink responsibly). Cigarette disclaimers and off putting mandated packet visuals. The traffic light system in the UK (which displays a colour coded breakdown warning of unhealthy food macros on the front of all ready meals). Alcoholic beverages by law having to specify their alcohol percentages. Foods by law having to specify their nutritional content and ingredients.
All of these regulations have been introduced to ensure customers are not blind to unhealthy choices (e.g., the traffic light system warning against high sugar content designed to make cheap addictive food). While not always effective, I believe that on balance these regulations make society a better place to live in. Similarly one could envision mandated social media disclaimers and warnings, and to regulate this way would be entirely within the wider norm, rather than something unusual.
Previously, children's exposure to marketing and propaganda was mostly confined to their entertainment hours, during which they watched television or read magazines. There was at least some hope for moderation. However, "apps" have blurred these boundaries, as the same devices used for education and social interaction are also channels for persistent advertising and messaging, making it harder to limit exposure to just "entertainment" time.
For teen girls - the apps are designed to scare them about being socially excluded. For teen boys - the apps are designed to fill their need to master skills.
The issue that the government has to deal with with app addictions is self harm attempts by girls (e.g. emergency room visits) and underperformance of boys in the real world (e.g. low college enrollment).
If you are trying to make an addictive app, this is a good reference to understand the science: https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc...
BJ Fogg is a good reference too: https://www.bjfogg.com
Isn't this just how all big tech companies operate as a normal business practice? Certainly Youtube is no better when it comes to targeted content and advertisements to children to their detriment.
My main point is that I don't think it makes any difference whether Meta has some internal document proving that they specifically target children with these practices. The problem is so much bigger than a single policy or company, and legislatures need to figure out a better way to address the overarching problems. I don't have much faith that these one-off lawsuits will make that much of an impact given that they almost always lead to some fine or settlement that is an acceptable business loss for the company.
I'm all for Meta being decimated by a thousand cuts in the form of lawsuits from various levels of government, but at best it would just be replaced with something else unless more regulation exists at the top levels (US / EU / etc).
I think a core class that should be taught is how to safety deserialize sensory input as to avoid causing RCEs. Or basically 'patching' these known vulnerabilities.
With broadcast media like TV, I can see what the programming is, and I can watch the same ads that every other house is getting broadcast to know what's being shown to kids (and research companies do this). Similarly for retail media, I can go to a store and see what a retailer is doing.
For Meta with AI newsfeeds and targeted ads, it's impossible to know exactly what any one persons experience is. I don't know the veracity of this specific case is but as a minimum I think there should be some legislation that force these companies to be auditable in some way...
Above all else since turning public, Meta is in the business of making money. It's not illegal to target user's vulnerabilities in order to get the user to spend more time or money on their platform. It's unethical as hell, but it's business 101 - the shareholders would revolt if Zuck came out and said "here's this opportunity to make you all a ton of money, but we're placing our personal ethics above doing this, so we're not". He'd get sued for breach of fiduciary duty.
Now, are Meta's product strategies unethical (or questionably ethical), harmful to society, and setting bad precedent? Yeah, I'd agree with that. But the market and shareholders like money.
This case is basically projecting everyone's misplaced hate of social media without doing a proper controlled experiment of it's benefits/harm to the society.
You can't do controlled experiments on humans and hence the states have no case except overreach. If they really want to cater to their constituents then pass specific laws.
https://ia800508.us.archive.org/12/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
Employee names are still redacted. Given Zuckerberg's views on privacy, one wonders why they should remain "anonymous".
https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/metro/jewish-teacher-hides-in-...
How do you regulate legal but unethical? You can't. So let's make it illegal. But how?
Maximum notifications per day? Deep introspection of the actual content? Good and bad influencers? Curfue? It's impossible to codify this into law, unless you're China.
Not saying this to start a flame thing, just advocating a sense of perspective for the sake of 8,000 murdered children, their mothers, and our shared humanity.
With Twitter even if I pay, still get the same number ads.
I want to customize what is shown in my feed.
I suppose that the broader concern is over precisely what duties a company has to its customers. They obviously have the duty to be truthful when making offers, but every customer relationship will have an adversarial component where each party benefits at the other's expense (or at the expense of third parties). In cases like a bar serving alcohol to customers, there's usually some responsibility to prevent patrons from getting extremely intoxicated and getting in a car. But that case involves a clear signal that someone is dangerous. Facebook doesn't know if someone's grades are suffering or if they're having mental health issues. It doesn't know if it should tell the user to "touch grass".
Recent reports from teachers indicate that many children are intellectually behind their peers. A concerning trend is that these children struggle to hold conversations, a problem attributed to their parents phone/social networks addiction. Rather than engaging and raising their children through conversation and interaction, these parents often resort to pacifying them with tablets or phones.
citation needed? or are we just assuming because, well, there's education and social information and apps available on them?
This isn't Wikipedia. It's a casual internet forum, and you don't need someone to come armed with mountains of proof for casual (and obvious) statements.
BTW: One of my kids learned to read by playing a Cookie Monster word game during the pandemic. We've had enough "edutainment" software for a few decades that you don't need to ask for proof in a casual atmosphere.
Basically we need more things like Facebook's push a few years ago to show more personal updates from close friends and less mass-shared political posts from organizations.
(Disclaimer: it talks about my work)
Any female magazine ever.
Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?
I worry that if nothing is done, this will only get worse, addiction will become the norm, of one sort or another, and you can just look at history of the Opium War to see where this leads.
This is why I find it funny that FAANG people call themselves software engineers. In the real world, an engineer is wholly responsible for the projects they bring into the world. Imagine a bridge collapses and someone dies. Then in court the family is told that the person was responsable to research bridge designs before using it. These social media companies are just run by money hungry a-holes.
Saying that addiction to a website isn't possible is unfounded.
People get addicted to online gambling. That's just "a website on a screen." It's clearly possible and it clearly happens.
Perhaps it should be illegal to target children in such ways? I'm tired of this argument that companies should be able to do whatever they wish in the name of profit, they need to be reigned with strong regulations.
The result is that we have a lot of amoral institutions playing a key role in our society.
Zuckerberg has super-voting shares that give him control over Facebook [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
Of course, we know how that worked out. What is galling is that Meta absolutely knows it is creating a bunch of cocaine addicted children.
Bringing up wrong historic points about "evil capitalists" doesn't really help your case against Meta.
having a social media company that's a B-corp would be a nice world.
This post has a list of the some of the better studies and gives a good synthesis of the results:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...
a) Broadband Internet
b) Transgenderism
c) iMessage
So, why Meta?
I dont think there are any smoking-gun causal studies, but the correlation evidence is very strong.
Do you think the rise in this premise of "rampant mental health issues" reflect an increase in actual expression of the phenotypes in the population? Or was this from an increase in diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues?
It would be government overreach to force such. Since I have no obligation to your existence itself, who cares what you have to say, or your philosophy? You’re just some pointless meat suit I have no responsibility to.
There you go; you got exactly the world you project you want.
They are their to basically provide security, insurance against calamities and proper enforcement of laws based on constitution.
Well-intentioned but still moronic socialism/communist projects fail for a reason. They fail to understand scale and human psychology and the basics of economics.
Ads stopped being useful about 20 years ago by now and like 10 (?) years ago they started to spy on us.
If you want to talk about kids cereal the real issue are TV ads pretending to be cartoons. A subject that has generated considerable concern, debate and state action over the years.
They are software engineers though. Engineers build all of our weapons.
The bridge collapsing isn't accidental-- it was the intended outcome. It's a carefully-engineered trap.
For more, here's an open, collaborative review of 386 studies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
Market of goods and services with prices determined by social behavior among buyers! Sounds like socialism!
I know language skills alone make it feel like yer smurt but when you go compose dumb logic, eh.
They used a natural product that contained cocaine. They very much "put this in" their drinks. The analogy is actually excellent because probably the early makers of Coca-cola didn't understand the dangers of what they were doing, either.
There isn't really a clear answer to your questions about whether or not "we" would continue to censor video games, popular media, and TV shows if limits were introduced about what minors can see on the internet. It would depend on the compromise reached between the citizenry and the enforcement agency that tasked with enforcing the bans. In some regards, I feel that American life is far too censored and supervised, but in others I feel that it is far too liberated and unrestricted. I happen to believe that there should be more content limitations on entertainment and social media, and less content limitations on political speech. If I were ever to meet with a large group of people who shared my beliefs, we would probably take political action to enforce our will for society.
I suppose that doesn't really prove or disprove your assertion that censorship laws would inevitably lead to more extreme censorship, but I think it's important to recognize that there are already many and forced censorship laws in the US, and altering them isn't really the craziest thing.
Nothing (besides parents) can prevent people under the age of 13 from joining social media. The kids just lie about their age. Everyone knows how to lie about their age to get something they want, from the time they're in kindergarten.
The value COPPA does provide is as a tool parents can use. If they report their underage children’s social media accounts, they will be removed. But of course they still have to actually do the parenting, which is how it should be. I think you shouldn’t want government to takeover those responsibilities for them.
The larger trends ("most of the effect is driven by teen who use no social media", etc.) aren't supported by the data he presents (look at the table of "social media time" -> Depression for example).
Are the researchers who look into this problem predisposed to finding a connection? Probably. But I do think the open, community based analysis Haidt led was done well and if you look at what they found digging through 386 studies, it's compelling.
Because this is how evidence based reasoning works. If the evidence that is supposed to support the hypothesis is fundamentally flawed, then our hypothesis doesn't actually have any support.
The fact that we can apparently so easily find flaws in what is supposed to be empirical evidence should make us more cautious about drawing firm conclusions. In fact, low quality literature is something of a plague in many social sciences at the moment (e.g. the replication crisis in social psychology).
This post presents a decent discussion of this sort of issue https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/beware-the-man-of-many-studies
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/176745/gambling-addiction-tr...
As someone who has had issue with addiction (a real one by your definition as well as screen based one), it's plainly obvious that the brain mechanisms at play are the same.
And that's funny because in the incentive salience theory of addiction, which they cite at the start of their paper, the nucleus accumbens populations don't encode for wanting, those populations encode for liking. The actual voxels of the brain this study should have been watching would be the ventral pallidum and ventral tegmental area. Those are necessary and sufficient for wanting(craving). The nucleus accumbens is not.
You'd think the director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic who cites the incentive salience theory in his first paragraph would actually take the time to understand the neurological correlates of the theory he's citing (but then again, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."). This lack should make you question the other aspects of this study.
Like how a 19 person MRI studies might as well not be studies at all in the neuroscience sense. They're for getting more funding to do a study with actual statistical power to make inferences. And note that in the actual paper they don't call it addiction, it's gambling disorder.
Well the original post said
> Recent reports from teachers indicate
I don't think teachers are incompetent but they aren't researchers.
Insurance, defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, home security systems, cars, body spray, McDonalds, Coke, politicians; it's all fear, status, greed. It's explicitly taking advantage of our vulnerabilities with every combination of precision and blunt force, to sell pointless, stupid, toxic shit. Put on your They Live sunglasses. The planet is burning.
Let's advertise carrots on TV. Let's advertise public transport, and public healthcare. Let's advertise free fucking college.
What makes advertising, I dunno, a remote controlled plane to a kid so much more unethical than advertising it to an adult?
It is possible that this doesn't harm children. However, the deliberate injection of emotional manipulation and disunity into families with young children in order to stimulate the purchase of toys doesn't strike me as particularly good for the nation, and I don't know that I would have to think very hard about my decision if given the option to prevent it using the law.
I would say more that this effect is more well studied on US teens so we can say more conclusive things on US teens. In addition, there is some indication that the effect could also be present in non-US teens and should be further studied.
That makes putting it on social media alone much more tenuous, though.
Any act of "god" where pure bad luck is involved, some central entity should absolutely take care of them.
However, Government should also not be in the business of prepping bad choices -- diet, family formation, bad lifestyle. Any society that is given unconditional support will degenerate
How does that work for people who have never been able to work (i.e. chilren in bad households and people with disabilities from birth/young age)? They can't pay for membership, so why would a private insurance company insure them for free? What if all insurance companies happen to not accept them as customers?
> However, Government should also not be in the business of prepping bad choices -- diet, family formation, bad lifestyle. Any society that is given unconditional support will degenerate
How do you guarantee that no bad choices are propped up without letting individuals die due to missing coverage?
As someone who grew up just before smartphones became a thing, I kinda also managed using books and shit.
Don't get me wrong, I am not dogmatically against smartphones/tablets for kids and I understand the pressures parents operate under, but if you want to figure out whether it is good to let your kids do X vs not doing it, you should probably take into account:
- what are the benefits? (claimed: easier learning and socializing, but also: parents don't need to deal with their kids)
- what are the downsides? (there are man studies linking e.g. depression to excessive smartphone use in kids, also: parents don't deal with their kids, smartphones are mostly used for consumption, hard to monitor where the algorithm takes them)
- are there any alternatives that have similar advantages while having less of the bad stuff? (I mentioned books, but of course it might be even feasible to limit the amart phone use to certain times of the day etc.)
And then you weigh those for yourself and decide. This was the point of my post before.
This reminds me of similar effects where people attributed misinformation online to mostly right wing people, but it was actually right wing was only a catalyst when a predisponsity for chaos was also present OR when de-policing and federal investigations were blamed for rise in crime when it was only also when a particular district had a "viral" event.
I don't think social media is a causal factor in itself, but it is definitely a catalyst factor in the presence of other things like wealth inequality, clout chasing, and cyberbullying.
Disabilities birth/young age is act of "god". It's perfectly fine to take care of them. However they only account 1-2% of the population.
Death due to Missing Coverage is overrated. All Emergency Units take in patients and most exaggerated medical bill people actually don't pay the said bill
And many of those children in bad households have been able to get where they are due to being helped by the state, which you do not want. So what do they do? Just die? If you don't give a concrete solution, that will be the outcome. Remember that we're talking about basic needs like food and shelter - a child can't do much about not having these available.
> Disabilities birth/young age is act of "god". It's perfectly fine to take care of them. However they only account 1-2% of the population.
Okay, then please explain to me what central entity should help these people, if it's not the state. As I previously said, what if all private insurance doesn't take these people on for free? What do they do except die?
> Death due to Missing Coverage is overrated. All Emergency Units take in patients and most exaggerated medical bill people actually don't pay the said bill
I am not solely talking about health insurance. You stated that you want to solve food and housing problems with similar insurance. Why would these private insurance companies give coverage to those who can't afford it? Please don't handwave this point away.
Should nothing be there? Only healthy vegetables? Is it unethical to sell things with added sugar in the first place? Or a certain amount of sugar per volume period?
Seems like an arbitrary place to draw the unethical/ethical line.
Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.
The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.
I think it is useful when ideas about government regulation start coming in (like the poster who I responded to wrote). I do not want leaders to (completely) capriciously determine what is and is not allowed.
> that would describe all business.
What if it does? Should we avoid an honest conclusion because it has profound consequences?
There are many kinds of economic transactions that occur. The best kinds are the win-win transactions. I have an excess of X and a dearth of Y, you have the opposite, and we swap them to our mutual benefit and walk away happy in the long term thinking that we both made a good deal, and even a third party analysis by experts would agree it was a good deal. This is basically the kind of transaction that happens when I swap $2 for a bunch of fresh cilantro at the market, to cook a meal with. Or when I pay a skilled mechanic a reasonable fee to do maintenance on my car that I can't do myself.
Then there's the other kinds of transactions: the exploitative ones. One person substantially and noticeably wins and the other person equally loses. There is no upside for the loser in the bigger economic picture of our lives. Lots of basic examples of this are common, and some are borderline fraud. An example would be the mechanic who charges 10x what he really /needed/ to make a healthy margin, because he's the only mechanic in town and I'm immobilized by my failed car, and I'm poor, and I'm putting it on a credit card because I don't have the money but have to get the car working to keep my job.
I'm positing that, in a larger holistic sense, the transactions for the candy in the checkout aisle (all the advertising that goes into it as well!) are like that. They're not so much economically harmful: it may in fact be a "good deal" in a basic math sense to pay $2 for the candy's ingredients and manufacturing process. But at the end of the day, they're turning a profit and you're continuing an unhealthy sugar addiction and eventually dying of diabetes. It's a transaction that's explicitly designed to exploit you and harm you for their collective profit. This is not a win-win, at least not in a larger, holistic sense.
I am not pro-corporate as some are accusing me. I've never even had a facebook, twitter, or the like account in my life. I think these are terrible services and platforms. But it is even more dangerous to apply a label like "addiction" to them because then politicians think they can treat them like drugs... and we know how dangerous that response is.
You're incorrectly making assumptions about that wording. They're all disorders now. E.g. a heroin addiction is officially "opioid use disorder" in the DSM. It's probably part of some initiative to be more inclusive or avoid the accusatory nature of the word addiction.
More than that, you're interpreting in the wrong direction. Gambling disorder and substance use disorders were both moved into the same chapter of the DSM-V ("Substance-related and addictive disorders"), reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-014-0027-6 if you want more info on the history of categorizing gambling and other addictive but non-substance-abuse disorders.
>reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.
Yes, people find things that are intermittently rewarding to have more incentive salience eventually. But gambling with random operant condition is not hijacking those neuronal populations responsible for reward prediction (like the dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area) and activating them in the absence of reward. It is merely reacting appropriately to actual reward as encoded by activation of the glutamergic populations of the shell of the nucleus accumbens (at least). That's a huge difference... though apparently not big enough to stem the political and social tides.
The second, more important, is that even if we rename it properly to "internet disorder" there's still not significant evidence for making it a behavioral disorder. This is backed up by the lack of inclusion in the DSMV updates and ICD10 updates or 11 just released. People have certainly tried to have these things included: their income depended upon it. But the science rejected it.
You could also make the same correlations between autism spectrum disorder and the rise of popular (ie, non-usenet, irc, etc) social networks online. But it obviously wasn't caused by it. It was caused by a better identification of the phenotype and more accessible treatment. I think the claimed and unverifiable "increase in bad mental health/etc/etc in teens" is much of the same.
my dude, teens leaving school are crossing the street without even looking up, because they're scrolling insta. Ok so they are dumb teens. What about the crossing guard lady ? She is paid money by the school board to monitor the crossing lane so the cars don't hit the teens. Now, the crossing guard also doesn't look up, because she is scrolling insta too. How do you think all this ends ?
It's not in the Bible either. So clearly this isn't a real problem.
Why are we trusting acceptance by a community of gatekeeping charlatans as the final say on whether or not a problem exists? Meta hires psychologists to engineer these very exploitative patterns they deny the existence of. They can't put that in the DSM-V. People would take notice that they're a rehab clinic in the business of selling heroin.