> adding unknown people as friends

The number of my outer circle of friends who fall for the “copied profile” adding of unknown people or accept a friend request from the attractive young woman who somehow is interested in them is shocking. (I’m gauging this from looking at the “mutual friends” in the friend request.)

Why can’t you do a power of attorney(?) over her finances or move them into a living trust, etc. seems like there are legal protections out there if you can convince her it’s in her best interest to let her family manage her estate so she can focus on enjoying final years (obviously don’t say it like that)

My friend is a bank manager. He says everyday 2-3 elderly people come in confused about a scam.

This is a silent crisis impacting almost eveyone. My grandma personally had her gold stolen by a scammer.

She is now in a home for dimensia.

I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here...

I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.

Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.

Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?

It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.

But hey, at least the money is good..

Opening YouTube on a new machine / OS / browser / without login is eye opening in terms of the awful stuff that gets recommended by default and how quickly it tilts worse if you watch any of it.

YouTube should be held liable for what it is pushing. It literally can kill and seriously harm people.

In case anyone needs to help a relative without a Google account block YouTube channels or videos, the subreddit for uBlock Origin has a wiki that can help. You can block videos by channel or video title or URL using CSS rules. Removing the clickbait and watching a few videos of decent content with them helps a lot.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube

Have you seen some of the ads between the videos? There are some shady get rich quick types of influencers selling stuff that might really set them back financially as well.

That was horrible. This also makes me think that all those researches on "unhappiness Vs spending"

I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?

These are verified facts that make up the substance of my message:

- Meta protects their biggest scammers, per internal policy from leadership

- Meta makes a huge profit from these scammers (10% of total revenue; or in other words, their scam revenue is approximately 5x larger than the total Oculus revenue)

- The scams that Meta promotes represent one-third of the total online scams in the US

> 0.15% of Meta revenue

That must be a gigantic amount of money, you (or someone else) don't happen to know who any of those people (or organizations?) are?

> One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.

And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers.

Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities?

My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.

But hey, it's a free market /s

Maybe EU's regulation of digital markets isn't such a bad idea after all.

That may hurt Meta, but not nearly as much as it hurts the elderly people who the spammers will defraud.

Why would that hurt Meta? The entire point here is that they don't care and if anything benefit from such activity.

Don’t forget the All-Fats-Are-Bad sugar scam.

Petrochemical, Dow & Industrial Big Chem, Pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, finance companies, Monsanto, mining companies.

I mean, let's be real. That's really isn't a big company that achieves scale that doesn't have skeletons in the closet. Period.

It's a well worn playbook by now. But Meta seems to be the only one where we now have proof of internal research being scuttled for showing the inconvenient truth.

I agree false demand effects exist. But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life. Or just tell you "this company is willing to spend a lot on ads, they're not just a fly-by-night operation".

One hypothesis for why Africa is underdeveloped is they have too many inefficient mom-and-pop businesses selling uneven-quality products, and not enough major brands working to build strong reputations and exploit economies of scale.

The positive benefits in education, science research and logistics are hard to understate. Mass advertising existed before the internet. Can you be more explicit about which downsides you thibk the additional mass advertising on the internet caused that can come anywhere close to the immeasurable benefits provided by the internet?

Cigarette companies hiding known addictive effects?

I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them. Those people shape the dominant company in that space, and then go off to spread that culture in other companies that they start or join. And, competitors are often looking to the dominant company and trying to emulate that company.

For the uninformed, what large negative impact has Robinhood had on society?

Also, tobacco companies and oil companies famously got into trouble from revelations that they were perfectly aware of their negative impacts. For the gambling and alcohol industry, it probably wouldn't even make the news if some internal report leaked that they were "aware" of their negative impact (as if anyone thought they would not be?)

Social media is way down on the list of companies aware of their negative impact. The negative impact arguably isn't even central to their business model, which it certainly is for the other industries mentioned.

I guess we can speculate or theorise on potential strategies but beyond hope we should also try to do something. I have seen some X clones with variations but a lot of the same behaviour plays out when you have no rules around posting, moderation, types of content, etc. Effectively these platforms end up in the same place of gamification and driving engagement through addictive behaviours because they want users. Essentially I think true community is different, true community keeps each other accountable and in check. Somehow we need to get back to some of that. Maybe co-operative led tools. Non profits. I think Mastodon meant well and didn't end up in the right place. Element/Matrix is OK but again doesn't feel quite right. Maybe we should never try to replicate what was, I don't know. BitChat (https://bitchat.free/) is an interesting alternative from Jack Dorsey - who I think is trying to fix the loss of Twitter and the stronghold of WhatsApp.

Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?

Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.

Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.

As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).

As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire

> We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.

Surely "plot the downfall of civilization" is an exaggeration. Knowing that certain actions have harmful consequences to the environment or the humanity, and nevertheless persisting in them, is what many individuals lawfully do without getting together.

Well said, and yes, this is practically what must happen.

The group of pretty much all humans is such a group because we all conspire to burn fossil fuels. Do you really think a global civilization death penalty is a good idea? That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

go further. humanity can't police itself.

To your point...

1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]

2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.

No one expects government to police itself.

Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.

> so does government

The public is supposed to police the government, and replace it if it acts against the public interest.

But now that you mention it, perhaps we should also give everyone an equal vote on replacing the boards of too-big-to-fail corporations

Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams is eye opening here, and it's pretty close to exactly that.

> I think they just did not give a fuck.

It's that people like Zuck and Sandberg were just so happily ensconced in their happy little worlds of private jets and Davos and etc., that they really could not care less if it wasn't something that affected them (and really, the very vast majority of issues facing Meta, don't affect them, only their bonuses and compensation).

Your actions will lead to active harm? "But not to me, so, so what, if it helps our numbers".

I'm saying social media companies are using Section 230 as a shield with the illusion of "neutrality" when they're anything but. And if they're taking a very non-neutral stance on content, which they are, they should be treated as a publisher not a platform.

We moderate consumption of alcohol, sugar, gambling, and tobacco with taxes and laws. We have regulations on what you can show on TV or films. It is complete misuse of the term to claim a law prohibiting sale of alcohol for minors is ‘moral panic’. It is not some individual decision and we need those regulations to have a functioning society.

Likewise in few generations we hopefully find a way to transfer the cost in medical bills of mental health caused by these companies to be paid by those companies in taxes, like we did with tobacco. At this point using these apps is hopefully seen to be as lame as smoking is today.

"Society didn't collapse" is a very very low bar.

> Yet generations grew up handling them and society didn’t collapse.

Society did not collapse. That does not mean those things did not have negative effects on society.

I don't think any of those items have had the significance and decisiveness of social media, or have been controlled by billionaires who have corrupted the election systems.

Social media seems far more dangerous and harder to control because of the power it grants its "friends". It'll be much harder to moderate than anything else you mentioned.

Where are the parents when you need them?

If I remember correctly, other research has shown that it's not just the addictive piece. The social comparison piece is a big cause, especially for teenagers. This means Instagram, for example, which is highly visual and includes friends and friends-of-fiends, would have a worse effect than, say, Reddit.

What about it being addictive by its nature? I find myself spending too much time on HN and there’s no algorithm driving content to me specifically.

I think group chats (per interest gathering places) without incentives for engagement are the most natural and least likely to cause harm due to the exposure alone.

I wouldn’t say I felt better.

Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.

A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.

Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.

> You need to be careful with those arguments because you can fall into the trap of "think of the children" for everything

In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.

Fair point, but the fuller context is absurd—the OP's rendering is correct in tone and emphasis.

Teens don't care about politics for the most part and have absolutely horrible outcomes from social media

That's a pretty good reason to leave FB though.

What does political news have to do with loneliness and social comparison?

Cigarettes aren't the only source of smoke

It matters because it points towards a common failure mode which we've seen repeatedly in the past. In the 1990s, people routinely published news articles like the OP (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/26/business/technology-digit...) about how researchers "knew" that violent video games were causing harm and the dastardly companies producing them ignored the evidence. In the 1980s, those same articles (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/arts/tv-view-the-networks...) were published about television: why won't the networks acknowledge the plain, obvious fact that showing violence on TV makes violence more acceptable in real life?

Is the evidence better this time, and the argument for corporate misconduct more ironclad? Maybe, I guess, but I'm skeptical.

What policy proposals would you have made with respect to MTV decades ago, and how would people at the time have reacted to them? MTV peaked (I think) before I was alive or at least old enough to have formative memories involving it, but people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades and I'm sure there was political pressure against MTV's programming on some grounds or another, by stodgy cultural conservatives who hated freedom of expression or challenges to their dogma. Were they correct? Would it have been good for the US federal government in the 80s and 90s to have actually imposed meaningful legal censorship on MTV for the benefit of the mental health of its youth audience?

Plus if we don’t do anything about it now, rohan_2 twenty years from now will use the same argument about whatever comes next!

13th century France is irrelevant because it was, religiously speaking, a different style of society from America since its founding.

In the past, America, unlike 13th century France, allowed multiple parallel religions who each enforced their own moral codes on top of the secular law using behavioral manipulation tactics including shame.

This seems to have worked up until quite recently. In the early 1900s religion was still massively influential in America. Your view on what freedom of religion means practically is a ret con, because people took it seriously up until universal mass secular schooling and electronic media.

I’m not saying we should return to Jesus or whatever, I’m just saying that there is a receptiveness in the human brain to having behavior enforced in a completely non-violent way where the behavior code is entered into voluntarily and can be abandoned non-violently as well, and hmm wonder if it makes sense to leverage that to solve problems that we are currently leaning for the levers of violence to fix (in the sense that state power enforcement is fundamentally rooted in violence, ie the threat of forced confinement at gunpoint).

On you vs others, I don’t have in mind some kind of religiously enforced corporate regulations, that’s obviously ridiculous. I’m referring to religiously enforced individual abstinence from social media, similar to religiously enforced abstinence from alcohol, or from casual sex, etc, all because they are considered harmful (by the people in the religion) to you, not (primarily) to others. If the abstinence was enforced socially the same way monogamy was in the early 1900s (yes, I know there were some exceptions, blah blah blah, it was basically ironclad relative to today), the social media companies would wither and blow away.

Without an explicit religion, the moral code of the group becomes some fuzzy, lowest common denominator Frankenstein.

Note that I’m not advocating for existing religions, just wondering about the use of religion as a tool (since it is baked into our legal code with an ability to use it for exactly this kind of thing).

I am not referring to existing established religions, I am just talking about the construct of religion in general. We are allowed to invent new ones, you know.

Interestingly the post is climbing it's way back to zero.

I find the downvote without counterargument to be an odd response to a good faith post. It seems like it would strengthen the argument if the message they send is "I don't have a counter to this but I don't like it and I don't like that others will see this point of view"

I have come to realise that I have a much higher threshold when it comes to upvoting, downvoting, or rating things. It seems like a lot of people freely upvote, like, heart, or downvote without a care. We live in a world where a 4.8 star rating (comprised entirely of an aggregate of zero and five star ratings) is considered a concern. So I try not to be bothered by it, but I'm pretty sure subconsciously a downvote hurts more than someone saying "I disagree"

Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.