I really think this is just plain dumb. Meta has not done anything illegal; if anything, we should be litigating the worst comeptition destroying move in the Instagram acquisition. Instead, we are debating if Instagram is bad for kids? Really?
This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive?
At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case
It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices.
And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.
But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.
My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows. I'm a responsible adult. I want those things. I make use of them. I do not want regulations coming along and making all of my products worse due to heavy-handed regulation.
Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.
I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.
Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
> Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.
Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.
Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.
In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.
No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether
Suppose you have a video service which takes context from previous videos you watched to show you more videos you're interested in. Doesn't sound very addictive, does it? You described it in an innocuous way, but I can absolutely see that being a lead-in to a parasocial "relationship" or even AI psychosis.
> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
I'm not sure about that example. I'm seeing non tech people getting very addicted to their customized chat bots. Companies are very primed to eventually nudge them to enshittify the content of the responses and it could get bad.
What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness
Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis
If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw? I think what matters is the intent of the design. E.g. if they design the product to make you need more of it (while it has an actively detrimental effect)
According to "Build things that last" author, 90% of the businesses evaluated are "customer first", meaning business listen to the customer and improve their produce based on that feedback.
voluntary feedback - things like "I wish the customer service was faster" - is not the same thing as measuring engagement time down to the millisecond and using that data to feed a presentation loop.
So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.
Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.
why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]
NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof.
So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."
It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.
The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.
But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive
This, with a decent regulatory agency, wouldn't be that difficult to manage. We really could just say "infinite scrolling" and then add more things to the list as needed. We do it with firearms, medicines, drugs, vehicle parts, and about a million other things.
Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up.
If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.
I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.
100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
If we set the barrier to entry in prediction markets to an equivalent of an age/height check on entry, it would be well north of "yes, I am a mom-and-pop first time investor, I have never been here before, I know nothing except what some spammer told me and claude"
Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing.
(thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")
It’s such a joke. But we also need to find ways to study and measure non-gambling digital platform addiction like 15 years ago. Thanks to algorithmic consumption, we’re nearing a whole generation of adults that have no idea how to navigate their societal agency and 3 trailing generations that had once learned and since forgot.
I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite content. Was the intent to _addict_ people? It doesn't have to be, to create a system people have become addicted to. Even if the harm is not intended, does that mean it cannot be regulated? Surely not! Let's ban infinite scroll for a start. The question of whether to punish Meta is quite separate from the question of how to reduce the harms of its products.
I do wonder what’s going to happen in the future to addictive social media algorithms.
Feels like one of those things that’s so powerful, but skirts by because it doesn’t feel like it should be (like targeted advertising).
I really hope it gets legislated away or kneecapped to the point where it isn't so effective. With all the legislation coming out regarding kids and social media, I hope that people will start to draw a line to the fact that maybe adults shouldn't be hooked up to it too. I don't think all content recommendation algorithms should go away, but we need to dial down the intensity by an order of magnitude or two.
With the amount of money behind them, I regret to say I don’t think they’ll get legislated away. My best guess is that social shaming slowly dwindles their usage. It’s actively shameful to scroll at dinner among Gen Z, for example. The problem becomes using the apps alone at home.
Of course, but the users can’t be trusted to stay away from something designed to addict them.
Only real solution is regulation, although the how is still a big question mark.
I would ask, where is the line drawn between 'enjoyment and addiction.'
Is it the harm provided? Then what do we count as harm, and where is the line.
IE, There's no one stopping me from eating unhealthy, IE sugary foods, which are heavily addictive. I ride a motorbike, and I'd consider myself addicted to that, and it's got a high chance of harm, but we don't ban those. Ditto with gaming, social media, hobby XYZ.
I personally think the freedom to choose your vice is reasonable.
I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.
Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws.
I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.
Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.
I’d bet that an exceptional legal team could make a pretty solid case based purely on the volume and testimony of behavioral psychologists on their payroll
IIRC, the lovely book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas claims that gambling addiction was a concept pushed by the casinos, to put the blame onto individuals, rather than the machine.
the underlying cause of addiction is very different. But if there is enough evidence that they're similarly damaging (in magnitude), I think that fundamental difference is irrelevant.
Biological addiction is different from psychological addiction, sure. But both are addictive. And personally I believe both cigarettes and Meta products are damaging to a subset of the people consuming them.
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
The big tobacco lawsuits hinges on the same things these will:
(1) Did they know they were hurting users?
(2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
Not when they condition children and allow access to them by predators. Reports of bad content, fake, and scam behavior go deliberately rejected and Meta profits from scammers doing their scamming among children. (Read up on Officer Gomez reports of grooming all over Instagram and Facebook and TikTok)
Is the argument here that social media wasn't designed to be addictive? And no, cigarettes were not designed to cause cancer. It makes no sense to design a product that kills the customer.
So what are your thoughts on tavern slot machines where legal? No chemicals but plenty of people who will openly tell you they wish they weren’t doing thus while they cash out a 90% loss and buy another beer to head back in for another round of punishment
If heroin was free, nobody would be breaking into cars but there'd still be a problem.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
They're also not doing that to pay for tobacco. Come on. Heroin is justifiably illegal for good reason already; you're stretching the analogy past breaking point.
Have you experienced addiction before? Nicotine withdrawal doesn't make your hand move on it's own, it makes you crave a cigarette, and then you pick up a cigarette and smoke it to make the craving go away.
If you crave scrolling instagram, even when you want to be doing anything else, isn't that the same thing? Maybe you can't point at a specific molecular basis - yet (if you were to look at dopamine and other neurotransmitters, I wouldn't be surprised if social media spikes them in a way similar to other vices) - but the outcome is the same.
"By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris scientists had discovered that ammonia could also be used to increase the free nicotine in cigarette smoke, providing a more powerful nicotine kick than the milder low-pH tobaccos traditionally used in American-blend cigarettes."
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
This product that kills the users of it with remarkably high rates and has effectively no positive use is fundamentally different from light and sound.
At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case
And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.
But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.
My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
Roughly that.
Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.
I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.
Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.
Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.
In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.
> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.
You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.
Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis
If you as a person engage with a product to a degree where it causes demonstrable, measurable harm to yourself or your life, you are addicted.
If you repeatedly willingly do so despite the harm, then yes.
I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.
Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.
Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.
But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.
Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."
It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.
The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.
I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.
Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.
Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing.
(thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")
Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.
Those both have problems too, I'm sure.
New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.
Is it the harm provided? Then what do we count as harm, and where is the line.
IE, There's no one stopping me from eating unhealthy, IE sugary foods, which are heavily addictive. I ride a motorbike, and I'd consider myself addicted to that, and it's got a high chance of harm, but we don't ban those. Ditto with gaming, social media, hobby XYZ.
I personally think the freedom to choose your vice is reasonable.
One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.
It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.
I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.
Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.
Fidelity zero is compelling, in a retirement account.
Heroin is addictive, nicotine is addictive. Light and sound are fundamentally different.
Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
fundamentally different how? Because they use your visual cortex to trigger neurons?
Have you experienced addiction before? Nicotine withdrawal doesn't make your hand move on it's own, it makes you crave a cigarette, and then you pick up a cigarette and smoke it to make the craving go away.
If you crave scrolling instagram, even when you want to be doing anything else, isn't that the same thing? Maybe you can't point at a specific molecular basis - yet (if you were to look at dopamine and other neurotransmitters, I wouldn't be surprised if social media spikes them in a way similar to other vices) - but the outcome is the same.
What?
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
This product that kills the users of it with remarkably high rates and has effectively no positive use is fundamentally different from light and sound.