They are investing big fat 0 in safety features. The only money they spend is on facade of safety. I have reported many times obviously fake scam bot accounts that would send me private messages and at best I would receive feedback that they didn't remove the account.
Can we just, I mean just stop using and caring about most social media. Especially facebook, it offers no meaningful value. It's slow, obtuse and haven't made life better for anyone in the last decade I suppose.
Maybe whatsapp has some use, but otherwise what's even the point. I don't even have ads on whatsapp not yet anyways, I will get my family to switch when they do.
I don't care about you Meta/Facebook or whatever it is.
I think attitudes mattered more than law, but some laws (e.g. advertising restrictions, and packaging requirements) may have helped change attitudes, but growing awareness of the health issues was the key.
In 1950 tobacco was cool. By 2000 it was very definitely not. In western Europe at least, sales of premium brands were falling sharply and volumes shifting to cheap brands - a lot less profitable even for the same volume. Long before UK law changed to ban indoor smoking most offices started banning smoking indoors, and pubs started doing so too (a major chain, Wetherspoons, gradually banned smoking at all its pubs).
The manufacturers tried to grow in other markets - one tobacco company investor relations person showed me some beautiful pastel coloured cigarettes in a very fancy box aimed at Eastern Europe. It did not work in the long run as attitudes changed globally.
Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"!
Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok did not exist, be delivered in just as socially harmful (and beneficial) a form by sufficiently-accessible versions of the apps and protocols you value and use every day.
I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.
For me, Signal and Hacker News are the most addictive pieces of software I still use.
Serial television (best delivered by WebTorrent and The Pirate Bay) is by far the most addictive, for me, so much so that I had to quit.
And you can definitely run successful social movements and political campaigns (for both very good and very bad things) over HN or WhatsApp/Signal, given sufficient adoption.
I would argue that it's more or less that humans don't like change, and that boomers get upset about change. It seems that the older you get, the more egotistical/selfish you become.
I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
> I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
Ever considered that you may be the selfish one for even wanting her to switch?
You want to make your life more convenient at the expense of her convenience because switching from whatsapp is a huge inconvenience.
I understand the comparison, and if it were up to me, Facebook (aka Meta) and so forth should be disbanded and chopped up at once. But ...
> Recent research shows that social media design features like infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds may encourage compulsive use and contribute to anxiety, depression, and social comparison.
So their design is addictive; not disagreeing. I think most of us know that, even as adults, how infinite scrolling on youtube for shorts, lead to a "just one more video" effect. But even with those shenanigans in mind, I simply do not see this anywhere on the same level as smoking. The health data with regards to smoking is all there, people lose about 10 years when smoking for a long time - at the least. You can find similar data points elsewhere, e. g. sumo wrestlers in Japan dying about 15 years earlier than the rest of the population. Those data points are absolutely significant. There is no way to deny that. But comparing this to the addictive scrolling or what not ... we don't have anywhere near similar data points.
That does not mean one should look at addictive design as anything but "innocent" or "harmless", but the comparison to smoking is simply not on a factual level. If anything Facebook should be eliminated for lobbying and bribes - we witness this right now when so many states push for age sniffing of everyone using the internet while concomitantly attacking VPNs. This is not accidental - this is deliberate. And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
i sort of want to defend the article because it isn't comparing the health effects of the tobacco industry and social media, but rather their pr strategies... but that being said the article is very weak, so i don't want to defend it.
Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
> And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
I’m the first one to call out “think about the kids” bullshit, but this is directly applicable here.
> Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
Any doomscrolling effect on mental faculties in 20-30 years would be completely dwarfed by the effect of AI. It won't even be a rounding error.
I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibes. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
Doomscrolling has nothing on the +ignorance that all-in AI users are experiencing, especially since they can't tell that they're getting objectively dumber.
> I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibes. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
What makes you think they’re ignorant instead of just not giving a shit? There’s no money to make in “achievable on current Linux distros without any extra software”. The hustle culture that permeates this is another consequence of social networks.
Maybe whatsapp has some use, but otherwise what's even the point. I don't even have ads on whatsapp not yet anyways, I will get my family to switch when they do.
I don't care about you Meta/Facebook or whatever it is.
It would not work. What ultimately worked were laws designed to curb tobacco use combined with public education campaigns.
In 1950 tobacco was cool. By 2000 it was very definitely not. In western Europe at least, sales of premium brands were falling sharply and volumes shifting to cheap brands - a lot less profitable even for the same volume. Long before UK law changed to ban indoor smoking most offices started banning smoking indoors, and pubs started doing so too (a major chain, Wetherspoons, gradually banned smoking at all its pubs).
The manufacturers tried to grow in other markets - one tobacco company investor relations person showed me some beautiful pastel coloured cigarettes in a very fancy box aimed at Eastern Europe. It did not work in the long run as attitudes changed globally.
Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok did not exist, be delivered in just as socially harmful (and beneficial) a form by sufficiently-accessible versions of the apps and protocols you value and use every day.
I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.
For me, Signal and Hacker News are the most addictive pieces of software I still use.
Serial television (best delivered by WebTorrent and The Pirate Bay) is by far the most addictive, for me, so much so that I had to quit.
And you can definitely run successful social movements and political campaigns (for both very good and very bad things) over HN or WhatsApp/Signal, given sufficient adoption.
The only thing will break it is a better / easier alternative. And with enough success that will probably turn into the next big bad.
I would argue that it's more or less that humans don't like change, and that boomers get upset about change. It seems that the older you get, the more egotistical/selfish you become.
I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
Ever considered that you may be the selfish one for even wanting her to switch?
You want to make your life more convenient at the expense of her convenience because switching from whatsapp is a huge inconvenience.
FTFY.
> Recent research shows that social media design features like infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds may encourage compulsive use and contribute to anxiety, depression, and social comparison.
So their design is addictive; not disagreeing. I think most of us know that, even as adults, how infinite scrolling on youtube for shorts, lead to a "just one more video" effect. But even with those shenanigans in mind, I simply do not see this anywhere on the same level as smoking. The health data with regards to smoking is all there, people lose about 10 years when smoking for a long time - at the least. You can find similar data points elsewhere, e. g. sumo wrestlers in Japan dying about 15 years earlier than the rest of the population. Those data points are absolutely significant. There is no way to deny that. But comparing this to the addictive scrolling or what not ... we don't have anywhere near similar data points.
That does not mean one should look at addictive design as anything but "innocent" or "harmless", but the comparison to smoking is simply not on a factual level. If anything Facebook should be eliminated for lobbying and bribes - we witness this right now when so many states push for age sniffing of everyone using the internet while concomitantly attacking VPNs. This is not accidental - this is deliberate. And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
> And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
I’m the first one to call out “think about the kids” bullshit, but this is directly applicable here.
Any doomscrolling effect on mental faculties in 20-30 years would be completely dwarfed by the effect of AI. It won't even be a rounding error.
I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibes. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
Doomscrolling has nothing on the +ignorance that all-in AI users are experiencing, especially since they can't tell that they're getting objectively dumber.
What makes you think they’re ignorant instead of just not giving a shit? There’s no money to make in “achievable on current Linux distros without any extra software”. The hustle culture that permeates this is another consequence of social networks.