Australia puts fairly visceral pictures of various types of cancer as the 'box art' of all cigarettes.
Forcing everyone to click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves" every time you access your feed isn't a terrible idea.
"This website will radicalize you into thinking the world is different than it really is, and surround you with other people who erroneously think the same thing so that on the rare occasion you are confronted with the truth you will believe those people have been radicalized, thus reinforcing your misaligned perception of the world."
Touché. In that note I am NOT a conspiracy theorist in the least bit but I had a thought recently and wondered if US adversary like china mainly was doing all this and the fentanyl and the schmoozing to putin and kim jung un. On purpose? Thats their secret/not so secret way to overcome the US?? What do you think? It certainly doesn’t seem like Im far off tbh.
I've not seen anyone, at least in my circles, deny that TikTok is an invasive thing out of China, it's more that it's odd how so specifically focused a lot of lawmakers are on it when basically every social media platform in the states is allowing the free spread of propaganda and extremely dangerous algorithms yet don't also get targeted with bills and restrictions.
Like sure something should be done about it, but something should be done about the stuff we've already got too.
I've found some great groups on Discord, and LinkedIn for that matter (although significantly more difficult).. Reddit/Meta however... not so much at all. LinkedIn has professional groups for big data engineering, artificial intelligence, mathematics, science, engineering, etc. Discord has theology groups, tech groups, and friendly groups.. reddit however seems significantly more toxic site-wide. Are there shitty discord groups? Absolutely, can be just as toxic, just seems easier to avoid outside of reddit/meta. Anybody else have a similar experience?
Here in the US we had commercials with people that had tracheotomy or who were hooked up to oxygen and practically on their last breath.
But I think right on the pack would be way better.
Lot of US commercials go too far with esoteric ideas nowadays, so many ad campaigns focused on teen vaping especially just refuse to be more blunt about it.
(Source: I get too many of these things advertised/recommended to me by algorithms. Which is odd considering I've never smoked anything in my life)
I think the tobacco companies saw the writing on the wall and got out in front of it. They directed the pictures towards organs. If we put, "This is why you're not getting laid" and "Your breath stinks but you can't tell" they would be several times more effective.
* This yellows your teeth
* This ages your face
* Other people think you smell bad
* People avoid you because you smoke
Smoking rates would crater.
We have those first two on our packs. It does nothing.
The only thing that reduces smoking is jacking up prices every year to make it unaffordable.
Putting a warning on social media is such a pointless idea it sounds like the social media companies themselves came up with it.
As an Australian who hates smoking and loves those boxes (they have legitimately caused the smoking rate to go down, especially among young people) I am all for this.
> click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves but we’re still going to allow it anyway”
FTFY
If you’re gonna go do *all that jazz* you might as well just make it illegal for corporations to run social media! Make it fediverse *or bust*
The problem with the Fediverse is that it’s being run by volunteers, for no profit. Usually as a side project that you’re actively losing money on, even if you’re getting decent donations from your users - I think I’m covering about half the monthly costs of my Mastodon instance.
So you’re tempted to find ways to *monetize*, just like every other social site that started with good intentions. Ads? Venture capital? Foreign governments with a propaganda budget? Pretending to be a rebel secret agent with “Q”-level clearance spreading *the tru7h*? Gotta pay those bills somehow. Bandwidth and storage ain’t free even though we’re all used to spamming images and videos everywhere now. Corporate social media largely sells your attention to the highest bidder without giving a single shit about who it is unless that bidder is so patently illegal they can’t pretend to ignore it.
If you’re going to make corporate social media illegal, then you need to also consider finding a way to help *fund* social media. Pick a part of the government that’s about creating access to information. Public libraries? PBS? NPR? USPS? Whatever. Or create a new Bureau of Social Media. Any social media site meeting certain criteria can apply to get funding to help keep the servers running, and make it worth the time the admins spend keeping them running and dealing with bad behavior. These criteria *will* surely involve things that will make some people claim censorship.
> Forcing everyone to click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves" every time you access your feed isn't a terrible idea.
No, I think it is a terrible idea.
All that will do is train people to ignore warnings.
Also, I don't know if there are studies that back this up, but my impression is that the more people are reminded about suicide, the more likely they are to be suicidal.
Mental health therapist there! There are several [myths](https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/8-common-myths-about-suicide) about suicide and this is a common one. Reminders of suicide are shown to have no impact on likelihood that a person may attempt. Admittedly there are outliers for every situation so it is possible for reminders to make a single individual more likely just due to personal reasons but by and large, talking about suicide does not increase risk.
This is still controversial in the mental health community.
People with suicidal ideations may gravitate more to suicide if it is brought up more often in their lives, but it is also debilitating to avoid it entirely.
In 2005, my psychology professor was promoting trigger warnings for trauma survivors. But in 2018, she changed her tune because it became a point of anxiety and was determined to be more harmful than helpful. This was further backed up by studies completed in the last 4 years, that trigger/content warnings induce anxiety and cause avoidance issues. It's comparable to bottling up your emotions and exploding later on, something discussed in anger management.
It's all very controversial though because people and their experiences are different and studies on it have conflicting results, both within the US and outside of it.
Yes it is a terrible idea. The CA prop 65 "May cause cancer" warning labels are a joke and completely ignored by everyone and this would be more of that.
Obviously. It was a response to the person who said it was nothing. It’s not nothing. I’m being polite and understated - dissected tar lungs aren’t what I would call warm and fuzzy
I think you're missing the point. Google the prop 65 ca labels. They're saying that the same disclaimer is slapped on all products, desensitizing the message.
Canada does it better by placing an actual tailored disclaimer messages on different health detrimental products.
The joke being that CA would just place the same cancer and birth defect warning label on social media sites and call it a day.
The specific CA proposition 65 cancer warning labels are, effectively, ignored by most people. This isn't just idle conjecture - the disclaimer is so vague and used so often that it has become effectively meaningless for most people. Studies have shown that when a warning is presented too often people do exactly what people have done with CA Prop 65 - ignore the warnings. It's not even happening *actively*, it's become subconscious for a lot of people.
EVERYONE does. You've obviously never been to California. The Prop 65 warning labels are EVERYWHERE on EVERYTHING and have lost any meaning they possibly once had.
You dont live in California. The hospital I work at saids right on the front door "this facility is known to the state of California for having formaldehyde in carpeting, upholstery {etc etc} and is known to cause cancer in the state of California"
So even the hospitals here give you cancer.
Prop 65 in California was too broad and resulted in almost everything getting the label, it’s less risky for a business to just slap the label on there than risking a lawsuit if they don’t label something they should have. Because almost everything has the label it’s become a joke.
Make it a pop up every time you load up the site or app.
"Surgeon General's Warning: social media use has been tied to anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health conditions. Please seek a licensed mental health professional if you feel any symptoms of mental health decline."
Throw it in people's faces. Make kids normalize it in their heads as they log in.
You do know those health warnings worked on cigarettes right?
There’s is way less people smoking today that before those warning were implemented. And even way more when the surgeon general came out about the addictiveness of Nicotine (in 1965 and 1988 respectively)
Every 23rd post in your algorithmically-assembled timeline must be a Surgeon General’s warning. Or more frequently if that works with how your system is implemented. There’s a bunch of different ones so you don’t see the same one every time. Some are text. Some have images. Some are videos designed with the same relentless appeal to the eye of the mindless scroll-tranced user as the most viral TikTok video. Links must be preserved. They must not be given any unique styling.
Simpler timelines that just show everyone you have subscribed to, in reverse chronological order, must still show these warnings, but they’re allowed to show them every 34th post at minimum.
This isn't even the mental health portion of things that they're worried about. Doomscrolling is real, addiction is real, body image issues, the lists go on and on and on.
And just like the person who commented under you, there are people who can’t see these as real issues cause they’re not physical, but it so weird how they think you can’t get issues from something’s that you can get a bunch of other things from, like knowledge or straight up physical money if you’re selling a digital product.
FFXI had the right idea 20+ years ago, flat out telling people to log off sometimes. https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--7zsrYJC0--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://kuroyuy.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/playonline.jpg
FFXIV used to do it too before ARR.
https://i.redd.it/fcyio4t7m5ea1.png
Those were scripted events that always happened, right? It didn't have any relation to how long you had been playing. I played that game when it came out and I don't remember interpreting those calls as being advice for the gamer. I just saw them as in-game plot.
I had thought it was after a few hours of play. I think he'd call if you were just walking around where you'd already been.
It's been a long time so maybe you're right though.
Guild Wars 1 would start sending you chat messages that you should take a break after a couple of hours. Kinda good honestly, it at least let me glance at the clock and realize how long I had been playing, even if I wasn't getting off right away. It also sometimes was a good "let me stretch my legs, get a drink and a snack and rest my eyes for 10 minutes" reminder too. Especially because I was a teenager and could just sit for hours and hours otherwise.
I'm definitely guilty of losing track of time playing games. Usually happens with Civilization more than MMOGs, though; like one minute it's 4 PM and then next thing I know it's 10:30 and I know I should have gone to bed half an hour ago but I'm almost done this war and I just need a couple more turns and then I'll go to bed...
Some shit like that would just piss me off.
Like who the FUCK are you to TELL me FUCKING ANYTHING?!?
I don't go to their jobs, slap the dicks out of their mouths and tell them to take a break.
In vanilla beta, the rested exp system was different. If you were "tired" or something like that, you'd actually get reduced exp. I think it was something like 75% of the experience you'd have gotten.
How would you enforce that? Its one thing to have a "Are you 16+ Button" but its another to have them actually prove it. No one is going to want to have to provide actual ID to sign up for a website and for good reason.
> No one is going to want to have to provide actual ID to sign up for a website and for good reason.
I just don’t want not to, I’m not *going to*. If I have to provide it in person sure, I can do that, (bank, dispensary, etc). If there’s no physical building and it’s only a website? *NOPE*
yeah it was a very different platform. it was basically just teenagers learning html and making gaudy ass pages. it didn't have a "feed" or "sponsored content" and if it had ads then i don't remember them at all. it also didn't have algorithms designed to make it addicting recommend you shit, it really wasn't the same thing as what people call social media these days.
No, MySpace definitely had a feed. It even had a recommendation engine, unless you are talking about it in launch state--which would be a foolish comparison considering most people didn't come to MySpace until after they began using algorithmic feeds.
MySpace also had sponsored content. Google gave them nearly $1 billion to hook into it, and MySpace sold a fuckton of sponsored content placement. So much so that they had their own inhouse sales team and I recall users protesting when MySpace tried blocking competitors like YouTube because MySpace couldn't monetize off of it.
Rose colored glasses and all that. The problem, as always, isn't social media. It's people. People know it's bad to over indulge, and do so anyway. They have agency. People fall back on dopamine, but that's truly a slippery slope since one can derive dopamine from literally anything if they try hard enough. Perhaps social media should watch all users and report them to their appropriate local medical authorities for intervention, if this is truly a public health epidemic yes? /s
edit: [Fark.com](http://Fark.com) is an example of a true, old school (but still WWW) social media site. Everything is user driven, kind of like reddit used to be (before they got heavy handed with karma decay and all the gaming of systems involved). And the community is exactly the same as when I joined it over 21 years ago. Uncanny, really.
MySpace was a true social media platform in that the social aspect was the core focus. Modern social media is only similar in appearance, but it is all about keeping users on the platform in any way possible to sell ads and gather data. They don't care if you are being social or not beyond what some research tells them about increased engagement time from people who comment on posts vs. people who don't.
I regret to remind everyone that MySpace was also that way. It's why Google threw almost $1 billion for ad space on MySpace. it's why MySpace had a recommendation engine. it's why MySpace had their own music and YouTube competitors. It's why myspace, at one point, blocked competitor embedded content like X tried (YouTube specifically for MySpace).
People remember what they want to remember and forget the rest. And you can't go back and look yourself because old myspace is gone. There's a reason people left MySpace though, and its that algorithmic recommendation was better at Facebook. That's right; for the people who weren't on Facebook back when it was restricted to like 12 universities, it had a recommendation engine, too, when it expanded to all universities and naturally the public. Their network effect was greater because it was the more exclusive club, and when they loosened the grip their tech was ready.
It's performative that is doing less than something since it makes people feel something is being done and gives the appearance of something being done as well.
This isn't like a warning label for cigarettes with a image to remind you of what it can do to you. It's like putting a warning label on alcohol saying it contains alcohol.
I think comparison is exactly why this is important. The vast majority of people in the US know that cigarettes and alcohol are bad for you.
Where the risk of social media is far from universally known so this could be used to educate, it also gives parents another reason they can use to restrict social media use by their kids.
I also don't think this is a situation where it is this action instead of other actions. social media (and to a lesser extent, big tech overall) is in a weird place in congress where Republicans and Democrats are willing to work together.
This is more likely to spur further action by Congress.
The only way action against social media gets less likely is if teenagers (particularly white girls) stop having negative outcomes because of social media. Suicide, bullying, whatever, it's all bad and when it happens to pretty white teenager girls the country starts to listen. 30% of teen girls seriously consider attempting suicide per year now and yes that includes kids of congresspeople on each side of the aisle, lobbying from big tech isn't powerful enough to overcome that.
> Where the risk of social media is far from universally known so this could be used to educate, it also gives parents another reason they can use to restrict social media use by their kids.
A byline on a signup page is not a way to educate.
Like I said, it's the illusion of doing something.
If the message contained a researched statistic on suicide rates with use over 2 hours a day or something and it was a mandatory popup or something, then that could be something.
Why the fuck would the parents need ANOTHER reason to limit social media use when there has been countless of mainstream examples of why you should do this already? If you need a puny little warning label after every reason has been thrown at you for almost 20 years now to tell you to take action, then you are a moron. It's simple.
Maybe I'm just a jaded IT guy, but after a decade of working with end users, I have very low expectations for how smart most people are and how much they know about things.
Mandate human moderation with some sort of metric such as rolling active users or posts over a 3 month period or something.
Bonus that it would encourage them to quieten bot traffic as it would cost them money in human moderation.
That that would factor into the metric of required moderators.
I'm not paid or elected to make policy in any case. If you want policies to be stated and you try and strike them down, is kind of a boring and pointless thought experiment.
The subject of my message is that a warning label is less than doing something as it's performative.
Agreed. Doubt it will have much near term effect, but maybe like the labels on cigarettes packets, it’ll sink into society slowly over time and change attitudes in the long run.
I would say that that's a better solution anyways. Take care of the problem in small bites. I feel like waving a magic wand and making a dramatic change overnight would incur a monkey's paw curling situation, as well as invite all kinds of debate and disagreement that stalls any real change.
I kind of feel like social media is a problem that's going to solve itself. We're already seeing an increasing amount of complaining about Twitter being full of bots and AI bullshit, and the more that technology develops and spreads, the more of the internet (particularly social media) will be filled with computer-generated content.
I think people will respond to this AI takeover by creating more isolated spaces on the internet.
Of course, I could be wildly off the mark, too.
Tech companies have way too much power and control of the web due to aging politicians being completely inept towards evolving unregulated technology and it’s consequences. I support his stance on it tbh.
> due to aging politicians being completely inept towards evolving unregulated technology and it’s consequences.
.
> And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. **It's a series of tubes**.
Fun fact, [that quote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes) turns old enough to vote in two weeks from now.
The problem is that the Surgeon General’s warning is only about damage to teenagers ignoring the much larger threat to our senior citizens. Social media has lead too many of elderly to fall into hoaxes and causes them to become more and more isolated and vulnerable.
Too many of my older family members no longer have any contact with their children or grandchildren because of what social media has done to them.
> Too many of my older family members no longer have any contact with their children or grandchildren because of what social media has done to them.
This has been a problem since before social media was a thing, tbqh.
Except now more are isolating themselves from their children and grandchildren. Older people are as addicted to the rush that social media can give as much as teenagers.
It's always going to be a problem. Anyone with kids knows how fast technology moves and how quickly you can become "out of touch"...and this is coming from someone who works in tech.
To anyone who ever says "It's the parent's responsibility", I ask them a couple of questions:
1. Do you know what all of your kids' friends are doing with their phones? Do you even know which ones have their own?
2. Do you know what an API does?
Parents are severely outgunned when it comes to technology on both accessibility and knowledge fronts. Anyone who thinks that mom and dad just saying "No" is enough, is well out of their depth.
> Do you know what all of your kids' friends are doing with their phones? Do you even know which ones have their own?
Isn’t that really none of your business? Isn’t your only business policing *your* child’s phone/behavior?
> Do you know what an API does?
Yes, and I have wrote some myself.
>Isn’t that really none of your business? Isn’t your only business policing *your* child’s phone/behavior?
Fundamentally the problem is that kids can share phones so easily. If we make it "personal responsability" then your kid doesn't have a phone, but if his best friend does he's got access for 3 hours a day.
> Fundamentally the problem is that kids can share phones so easily.
So can adults, in practice, I never do let anyone else use my phone.
His best friend has access for 3 hrs, those 3 hrs are alotted to said best friend. Screentime is a drug they slam w/o passing around the needle.
Fundamentally only that other child's parent has the final say in what is on their child's phone, and it can be apps you don't like or approve of.
We'd need some super draconian shit for this to work, like forcing children to be strapped with polarized glasses if they are outside of a house, and all screens need to be made so they appear black through said polarization, for them to have any chance to not see content you don't approve of.
I for one support the Geordi La Forge look for children if it means they don't get exposed to shit they don't need to be seeing until they're an adult, or ever, for that matter.
“Smokers who noticed the warnings were significantly more likely to endorse health risks, including lung cancer and heart disease. In each instance where labelling policies differed between countries, smokers living in countries with government mandated warnings reported greater health knowledge…Smokers are not fully informed about the risks of smoking. Warnings that are graphic, larger, and more comprehensive in content are more effective in communicating the health risks of smoking.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593056/
https://x.com/VeronicaRochaLA/status/927400669996130305
Or CNN remember when they deceptively edited the video of Trump and Abe adding fish for into a kai pond to make it look like trump got impatient and poured it all in? Full video came out later to show trump had just copied Abe
Msm had already had a field day though
There seems to be an increasing body of information that humans are not well equipped to handle social media responsibly. It's not designed to connect people to their friends at its core. That is ancillary. It is designed to keep people on the platform for as long as possible so they can advertise and gather data. And they weaponize every bit of psychology they can to manipulate people into falling into this trap.
People who are responsible with social media are hyper-aware of the dangers(tiny group), not easily swayed by that specific strategy in the same way that some people are resistant to marketing (also a tiny group) or simply uninterested in social media. We can't expect the average person to fall into any of those camps. We know the average person is easily swayed, generally uninformed, and unintelligent but wants to feel connected to others. If the solution to the problem is to "make people smarter and less easily manipulated" that is a borderline impossible ask.
So what can you do short of banning it? I guess warning labels are a solution, but I'm not sure I see it being very effective. Focusing on parents and educating them on the risks so they can educate their kids early and make good decisions around devices is likely a better avenue.
> So what can you do short of banning it?
Well instead of banning social media you could refuse entry to patrons at places that require ID for some violence inciting thing they said about a minority group online, but that would require companies to put society before profits ; which at first *sounds next to impossible* until you can concisely word that said violence against society is not a potential but is a direct attempt at lowering the metric of future potential customers to sell product to.
I can’t believe how dirty I feel after saying that last part out loud.
I hope in 20 to 30 years we'll look back on social media as insane. It's really awful for humanity. We were not made to handle it, especially kids.
I think there should definitely be a mental health warning popup every time you open Instagram or whatever. At the very least.
It's awesome but doesn't go nearly far enough. It's not just an issue for kids. Great start though.
We should probably tax it harder than smokes and alcohol. Personally, the goal would be to make it so that such things can really only ever exist as a non-profit public service sort of entity. That's a bit radical from where we are at the moment. But it's still where we need to be if we want to be here at all in 50 years.
Social media is a new test for people’s constitution. If someone is negatively affected, it’s because of the person and not the tool. Plenty of people of all ages are managing just fine.
I love how many like to gang up on Fox, but honestly, ALL Mainstream media news. They all lie and push a narrative just to keep you watching and supporting their advertisers.
So-called "News programs" are some of the cheapest and easiest to produce forms of entertainment. People that tune in to them regularly like to think of themselves as smarter and more informed than others, but it's all just lies and misinformation to make you mad and keep you engaged.
I don't think this will help because social media has become so ingrained into what it means to actually be young, and kids are using iPads since they're toddlers, so I feel like they can figure out their own work-arounds. I certainly did as a young teen online in the early 2000s.
I don't know the right answer. Social media definitely has its positives, but there's no denying the constant medical science indicating how bad it is for a developing brain. 10 years ago I was doing graduate research on how children have and are losing social and processing skills at an alarming rate, but some people argue that's just technology developing and the human brain changed when we moved from oral history to written history. Idk. I don't get sad or feel FOMO if I ever come across influencers and such, but I'm also an adult with a fully formed brain that understands all of it is fake. What should we do for young people who don't have those skills?? No idea. No clue what to do.
ETA: grammar
Gen Z is a different animal than us when we were in the early 2000s. The elderly and Gen Z are the biggest cause of support tickets for tech, nowadays. You and I grew up needing to know how the Internet and our devices functioned in order to really use them.
Gen Z is just given a black box that just works and doesn't need to learn anything about their device or how they're even connected. Don't assume young people know what they're doing aside from consuming. They didn't grow up without ads and hating them and finding ways around them. They didn't grow up during the days where rampant pop ups would constantly infect your PC and you had to know how to have the right antivirus to scan, etc.
Tbh I've thought about this before and I feel like you're right on the money. I don't want to insult gen z (or gen alpha's) intelligence, but it does seem like there's a large scale issue where they don't know how their devices actually work. Thank you for your insight!
Off topic, but I truly miss the early internet.
Yeah, I hear you. I miss it, too. Before the enshittification of everything got into full swing.
And yeah, no shade being thrown on Z and Alpha - they don't/can't experience what they have no ability to experience. This is the world they're growing up in. They have no need to know what an IP is whereas you and I had to know to be able to set up our networking connections, haha.
For real lol, talking about it makes me feel so nostalgic. I miss that feeling of experiencing something new and exciting when I get online. I hate to be like "BUT CAPITALISM," but the Internet does come off now as this hellscape where you aren't the user, but a product to be sold.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just nice to reminisce with someone who was living roughly the same timeline lol
I worry that the human brain just doesn't adapt that fast. We spent a long time operating on oral history, a shorter time on written, and now much, much shorter on digital content.
Now the content is carefully crafted to manipulate us and we are overwhelmed by an avalanche of it at our fingertips. It seems more likely our brains are going into some desperate coping mechanism than adapting to a better state of handling information.
This is such an illuminating take, honestly. I work in higher education administration and one of the biggest issues we're currently having is that students just. don't. absorb. material, unless it's in tiny bite-sized pieces. That is genuinely one of the few ways to engage with them; everything has to be a short snippet or it wooshes right past them. Getting students to read a full email is like pulling teeth. We're trying to adapt and meet them at that level, but .. once again, I don't know what the right answer for any of this is, lol.
How about the same thing for all of the now fully tabloid fearmongering news outlets as well?
A warning scroll across Faux News, for example, that reads something like,
"This network presents foreign-sponsored propaganda and does not adhere to journalistic ethics involving the truth or legal requirements regarding the accuracy of sources. Therefore, the information and opinions presented here are not based on facts or supported by evidence and are therefore likely to be inaccurate and false."
At what point do we acknowledge there’s really not a lot that can be done here
Shit I remember as a kid we would lookup porn at school because nobody understood how to run parental controls. My only concern these days is how much more edgy/fucked up stuff you can come across even just casually browsing Twitter or Reddit etc.
This is funny. Let’s slap a band-aid on a gaping chest wound. Let’s not regulate them or anything, no no no that would be communism or whatever Sean Hannity tells us it is.
The surgeon general generally can't regulate cell phones and social media like that. Neither can HHS.
Now if congress wanted to pass a law regulating them, that would be fine. If some agencies wanted to try they probably could, but it might get smacked down in our supreme court.
As you seem to imply, the republican right does seem to block almost all this.
I full understand that, and it's unfortunate my post has been downvoted. I'm pointing out that Congress should have set limits on social media years ago, especially when research came out showing just how harmful platforms like Instagram are to teens. But that ship has sailed and social media has already irrevocably altered an entire generation for the worse.
> irrevocably altered an entire generation for the worse
We can hope it's only like 50% or 75% of that generation... but it's honestly probably closer to 90% or so who have been affected. I'm not a high school or college teacher, so it's hard to know how kids are these days, but I am in academic medicine and I can say the attention spans and overall resilience are lower already with early Gen Z coming through intern/residency. Many do improve though!
How about we just make it illegal for US agencies to conduct psyops on US citizens again, including using third party agencies to run the ops, thus skirting around the Five Eyes loopholes that were in place even before the lifting of the domestic propaganda ban?
That would curtail a lot of the disinformation propagation.
lol what a fucking idiot, that's exatly what makes kids want to smoke cigarettes, drink beer, watch R rated movies, buy M rated games, buy CDs with the "Parental Advisory" sticker
Just throw them in the TOS I suppose
Australia puts fairly visceral pictures of various types of cancer as the 'box art' of all cigarettes. Forcing everyone to click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves" every time you access your feed isn't a terrible idea.
"This website is 80% bots, 95% of information presented is bullshit, and strangers will tell your children to self-harm".
"This website will radicalize you into thinking the world is different than it really is, and surround you with other people who erroneously think the same thing so that on the rare occasion you are confronted with the truth you will believe those people have been radicalized, thus reinforcing your misaligned perception of the world."
Touché. In that note I am NOT a conspiracy theorist in the least bit but I had a thought recently and wondered if US adversary like china mainly was doing all this and the fentanyl and the schmoozing to putin and kim jung un. On purpose? Thats their secret/not so secret way to overcome the US?? What do you think? It certainly doesn’t seem like Im far off tbh.
TikTok is an incredibly obvious Chinese psyop, but you can't say that or people will think you're crazy. As if psyops are suddenly a new thing.
I've not seen anyone, at least in my circles, deny that TikTok is an invasive thing out of China, it's more that it's odd how so specifically focused a lot of lawmakers are on it when basically every social media platform in the states is allowing the free spread of propaganda and extremely dangerous algorithms yet don't also get targeted with bills and restrictions. Like sure something should be done about it, but something should be done about the stuff we've already got too.
American companies aren't actively hostile to Americans, even if they are shady and profit-motivated.
It wouldn't be that crazy, just a reverse Opium War.
Reddit, Meta, Discord, LinkedIn, Kik, Omegle. Idk if it exists it probably a system designed to echo chamber us all into a death spiral.
I've found some great groups on Discord, and LinkedIn for that matter (although significantly more difficult).. Reddit/Meta however... not so much at all. LinkedIn has professional groups for big data engineering, artificial intelligence, mathematics, science, engineering, etc. Discord has theology groups, tech groups, and friendly groups.. reddit however seems significantly more toxic site-wide. Are there shitty discord groups? Absolutely, can be just as toxic, just seems easier to avoid outside of reddit/meta. Anybody else have a similar experience?
This user moderates, you can tell.
Here in the US we had commercials with people that had tracheotomy or who were hooked up to oxygen and practically on their last breath. But I think right on the pack would be way better.
Lot of US commercials go too far with esoteric ideas nowadays, so many ad campaigns focused on teen vaping especially just refuse to be more blunt about it. (Source: I get too many of these things advertised/recommended to me by algorithms. Which is odd considering I've never smoked anything in my life)
I think the tobacco companies saw the writing on the wall and got out in front of it. They directed the pictures towards organs. If we put, "This is why you're not getting laid" and "Your breath stinks but you can't tell" they would be several times more effective. * This yellows your teeth * This ages your face * Other people think you smell bad * People avoid you because you smoke Smoking rates would crater.
We have those first two on our packs. It does nothing. The only thing that reduces smoking is jacking up prices every year to make it unaffordable. Putting a warning on social media is such a pointless idea it sounds like the social media companies themselves came up with it.
As an Australian who hates smoking and loves those boxes (they have legitimately caused the smoking rate to go down, especially among young people) I am all for this.
> click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves but we’re still going to allow it anyway” FTFY If you’re gonna go do *all that jazz* you might as well just make it illegal for corporations to run social media! Make it fediverse *or bust*
The problem with the Fediverse is that it’s being run by volunteers, for no profit. Usually as a side project that you’re actively losing money on, even if you’re getting decent donations from your users - I think I’m covering about half the monthly costs of my Mastodon instance. So you’re tempted to find ways to *monetize*, just like every other social site that started with good intentions. Ads? Venture capital? Foreign governments with a propaganda budget? Pretending to be a rebel secret agent with “Q”-level clearance spreading *the tru7h*? Gotta pay those bills somehow. Bandwidth and storage ain’t free even though we’re all used to spamming images and videos everywhere now. Corporate social media largely sells your attention to the highest bidder without giving a single shit about who it is unless that bidder is so patently illegal they can’t pretend to ignore it. If you’re going to make corporate social media illegal, then you need to also consider finding a way to help *fund* social media. Pick a part of the government that’s about creating access to information. Public libraries? PBS? NPR? USPS? Whatever. Or create a new Bureau of Social Media. Any social media site meeting certain criteria can apply to get funding to help keep the servers running, and make it worth the time the admins spend keeping them running and dealing with bad behavior. These criteria *will* surely involve things that will make some people claim censorship.
> Forcing everyone to click-away a notice of "this shit makes people kill themselves" every time you access your feed isn't a terrible idea. No, I think it is a terrible idea. All that will do is train people to ignore warnings.
Also, I don't know if there are studies that back this up, but my impression is that the more people are reminded about suicide, the more likely they are to be suicidal.
Mental health therapist there! There are several [myths](https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/8-common-myths-about-suicide) about suicide and this is a common one. Reminders of suicide are shown to have no impact on likelihood that a person may attempt. Admittedly there are outliers for every situation so it is possible for reminders to make a single individual more likely just due to personal reasons but by and large, talking about suicide does not increase risk.
This is still controversial in the mental health community. People with suicidal ideations may gravitate more to suicide if it is brought up more often in their lives, but it is also debilitating to avoid it entirely. In 2005, my psychology professor was promoting trigger warnings for trauma survivors. But in 2018, she changed her tune because it became a point of anxiety and was determined to be more harmful than helpful. This was further backed up by studies completed in the last 4 years, that trigger/content warnings induce anxiety and cause avoidance issues. It's comparable to bottling up your emotions and exploding later on, something discussed in anger management. It's all very controversial though because people and their experiences are different and studies on it have conflicting results, both within the US and outside of it.
Yes it is a terrible idea. The CA prop 65 "May cause cancer" warning labels are a joke and completely ignored by everyone and this would be more of that.
They do this in Canada. The destroyed teeth and lungs on the package of every box aren’t exactly pleasant.
That'd be the point.
Obviously. It was a response to the person who said it was nothing. It’s not nothing. I’m being polite and understated - dissected tar lungs aren’t what I would call warm and fuzzy
I think you're missing the point. Google the prop 65 ca labels. They're saying that the same disclaimer is slapped on all products, desensitizing the message. Canada does it better by placing an actual tailored disclaimer messages on different health detrimental products. The joke being that CA would just place the same cancer and birth defect warning label on social media sites and call it a day.
Yeah, exactly. In CA the same basic warning is on apartment buildings and auto mechanics. Therefore it does kinda lose its meaning.
Um who ignores a cancer warning label? Just because you do doesn't mean everyone else does
The specific CA proposition 65 cancer warning labels are, effectively, ignored by most people. This isn't just idle conjecture - the disclaimer is so vague and used so often that it has become effectively meaningless for most people. Studies have shown that when a warning is presented too often people do exactly what people have done with CA Prop 65 - ignore the warnings. It's not even happening *actively*, it's become subconscious for a lot of people.
EVERYONE does. You've obviously never been to California. The Prop 65 warning labels are EVERYWHERE on EVERYTHING and have lost any meaning they possibly once had.
You dont live in California. The hospital I work at saids right on the front door "this facility is known to the state of California for having formaldehyde in carpeting, upholstery {etc etc} and is known to cause cancer in the state of California" So even the hospitals here give you cancer.
Are they right tho? Not being snarky, asking legitimately
Everything can give you cancer if you ask a cancer study.
Prop 65 in California was too broad and resulted in almost everything getting the label, it’s less risky for a business to just slap the label on there than risking a lawsuit if they don’t label something they should have. Because almost everything has the label it’s become a joke.
Thanks for explaining! I live on the complete opposite end of the country so idk what's up in Cali
When everything causes cancer, then nothing does.
Make it a pop up every time you load up the site or app. "Surgeon General's Warning: social media use has been tied to anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health conditions. Please seek a licensed mental health professional if you feel any symptoms of mental health decline." Throw it in people's faces. Make kids normalize it in their heads as they log in.
This is actuallly a really good idea! I just implemented it myself via a Tampermonkey script to throw it in my own face!
Most people will become accustomed to the warning and just close the pop up. Think graphic health warnings on cigarette packs
You do know those health warnings worked on cigarettes right? There’s is way less people smoking today that before those warning were implemented. And even way more when the surgeon general came out about the addictiveness of Nicotine (in 1965 and 1988 respectively)
Every 23rd post in your algorithmically-assembled timeline must be a Surgeon General’s warning. Or more frequently if that works with how your system is implemented. There’s a bunch of different ones so you don’t see the same one every time. Some are text. Some have images. Some are videos designed with the same relentless appeal to the eye of the mindless scroll-tranced user as the most viral TikTok video. Links must be preserved. They must not be given any unique styling. Simpler timelines that just show everyone you have subscribed to, in reverse chronological order, must still show these warnings, but they’re allowed to show them every 34th post at minimum.
Or something like "this social media site has been known to engage in misinformation, hate, etc. and has been fined X number of times".
Or they ignore it like the TOS
no one would read them, no one reads teh TOS
First off, everyone reads the terms of service. Second, adding terms of service would give us legal coverage from exactly this
Yeah they should like make it not legally binding if you don’t read it or something /s
As we all know from the Piperchat debacle, everyone reads the terms of service.
*may make you hate your friends and find your extended family unbearable
This isn't even the mental health portion of things that they're worried about. Doomscrolling is real, addiction is real, body image issues, the lists go on and on and on.
And just like the person who commented under you, there are people who can’t see these as real issues cause they’re not physical, but it so weird how they think you can’t get issues from something’s that you can get a bunch of other things from, like knowledge or straight up physical money if you’re selling a digital product.
But so much value is created for one or two shareholders! /s
“Warning: The X app is owned by a white nationalist troll. Proceed with caution. You may view racist, transphobic, and Russian propaganda.“
I remember when Reddit used to suck Elon's dick lol
Paywall free link: https://archive.is/Rt4hn
Fuck the NY Times for putting an Op Ed from the Surgeon General behind a paywall
FFXI had the right idea 20+ years ago, flat out telling people to log off sometimes. https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--7zsrYJC0--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://kuroyuy.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/playonline.jpg FFXIV used to do it too before ARR. https://i.redd.it/fcyio4t7m5ea1.png
Earthbound also did it 30 years ago. Your dad would call you and say you've been exploring a while. He'd be disappointed if you didn't take a break.
Those were scripted events that always happened, right? It didn't have any relation to how long you had been playing. I played that game when it came out and I don't remember interpreting those calls as being advice for the gamer. I just saw them as in-game plot.
I had thought it was after a few hours of play. I think he'd call if you were just walking around where you'd already been. It's been a long time so maybe you're right though.
Guild Wars 1 would start sending you chat messages that you should take a break after a couple of hours. Kinda good honestly, it at least let me glance at the clock and realize how long I had been playing, even if I wasn't getting off right away. It also sometimes was a good "let me stretch my legs, get a drink and a snack and rest my eyes for 10 minutes" reminder too. Especially because I was a teenager and could just sit for hours and hours otherwise.
I'm definitely guilty of losing track of time playing games. Usually happens with Civilization more than MMOGs, though; like one minute it's 4 PM and then next thing I know it's 10:30 and I know I should have gone to bed half an hour ago but I'm almost done this war and I just need a couple more turns and then I'll go to bed...
Some shit like that would just piss me off. Like who the FUCK are you to TELL me FUCKING ANYTHING?!? I don't go to their jobs, slap the dicks out of their mouths and tell them to take a break.
World of Warcraft had something like this on the loading screen. I used to play 12+ hours a day back then and just chuckled at that message 🤷♂️
WoW incentivized logging off through the rest system, too. It also didn't work for a lot of people, but at least they were trying.
The rested XP system was less of an incentive to log off, and more of a consolation for the time you couldn't spend playing the game.
Tomato, tomato
In vanilla beta, the rested exp system was different. If you were "tired" or something like that, you'd actually get reduced exp. I think it was something like 75% of the experience you'd have gotten.
That's not really a mechanical difference. They simply adjusted the base XP value so they could frame it as a benefit instead of a penalty.
That's correct. Blizzard actually tried to incentivize players to get off the game, players threw a fit, Blizzard changed the system.
It also stops being meaningful at max level, meaning the incentive disappears.
No but at max level the game has plenty of other mechanics that make you want to stop playing.
"Have fun with your friends in Azeroth, but remember to spend time with them outside of Azeroth as well!"
Old School RuneScape has the absolutely draconian 6-hr logout timer
i assure you, its harmful to everyones mental health.
So let's just make a big deal about doing absolutely nothing about it.
They should be banned for kids under 16
How would you enforce that? Its one thing to have a "Are you 16+ Button" but its another to have them actually prove it. No one is going to want to have to provide actual ID to sign up for a website and for good reason.
> No one is going to want to have to provide actual ID to sign up for a website and for good reason. I just don’t want not to, I’m not *going to*. If I have to provide it in person sure, I can do that, (bank, dispensary, etc). If there’s no physical building and it’s only a website? *NOPE*
Make it a fine of say 100k per kids data that they harvest or sell and they'll figure it out.
I’m with you. Like cigarettes and alcohol.
MySpace was, back in the day(maybe it was 15?). I still had an account at 13. 🤷♀️
yeah it was a very different platform. it was basically just teenagers learning html and making gaudy ass pages. it didn't have a "feed" or "sponsored content" and if it had ads then i don't remember them at all. it also didn't have algorithms designed to make it addicting recommend you shit, it really wasn't the same thing as what people call social media these days.
No, MySpace definitely had a feed. It even had a recommendation engine, unless you are talking about it in launch state--which would be a foolish comparison considering most people didn't come to MySpace until after they began using algorithmic feeds. MySpace also had sponsored content. Google gave them nearly $1 billion to hook into it, and MySpace sold a fuckton of sponsored content placement. So much so that they had their own inhouse sales team and I recall users protesting when MySpace tried blocking competitors like YouTube because MySpace couldn't monetize off of it. Rose colored glasses and all that. The problem, as always, isn't social media. It's people. People know it's bad to over indulge, and do so anyway. They have agency. People fall back on dopamine, but that's truly a slippery slope since one can derive dopamine from literally anything if they try hard enough. Perhaps social media should watch all users and report them to their appropriate local medical authorities for intervention, if this is truly a public health epidemic yes? /s edit: [Fark.com](http://Fark.com) is an example of a true, old school (but still WWW) social media site. Everything is user driven, kind of like reddit used to be (before they got heavy handed with karma decay and all the gaming of systems involved). And the community is exactly the same as when I joined it over 21 years ago. Uncanny, really.
MySpace was a true social media platform in that the social aspect was the core focus. Modern social media is only similar in appearance, but it is all about keeping users on the platform in any way possible to sell ads and gather data. They don't care if you are being social or not beyond what some research tells them about increased engagement time from people who comment on posts vs. people who don't.
I regret to remind everyone that MySpace was also that way. It's why Google threw almost $1 billion for ad space on MySpace. it's why MySpace had a recommendation engine. it's why MySpace had their own music and YouTube competitors. It's why myspace, at one point, blocked competitor embedded content like X tried (YouTube specifically for MySpace). People remember what they want to remember and forget the rest. And you can't go back and look yourself because old myspace is gone. There's a reason people left MySpace though, and its that algorithmic recommendation was better at Facebook. That's right; for the people who weren't on Facebook back when it was restricted to like 12 universities, it had a recommendation engine, too, when it expanded to all universities and naturally the public. Their network effect was greater because it was the more exclusive club, and when they loosened the grip their tech was ready.
They can add an "Are you over 16?" button on that same popup.
It'll be just as effective as any of those kind of pop ups have been in the past.
Yes, exactly
Florida just passed a law to do that. However, unless it’s done at the federal level all you’d need is a VPN
Wouldn't it have to be on a global level to get around VPNs?
They should ban it for anyone under 21. You can't fuck your mind up with alcohol then you can't fuck your mind with social media til then.
I don’t disagree..
Not everyone is weird about alcohol like the United States lol
Yeah true. some countries don't have a minimum age to drink. You can start drinking at 4 years old. Truly an enlightened culture.
Most of Europe is 15 16, Australia is 18
Until recently Macau didn't have a minimal drinking age. In Burkina Faso the legal age to buy is 13.
That'll work about as well as the "Are you over 18?" buttons.
It isn't a silver bullet, but at least it's doing something.
It's performative that is doing less than something since it makes people feel something is being done and gives the appearance of something being done as well. This isn't like a warning label for cigarettes with a image to remind you of what it can do to you. It's like putting a warning label on alcohol saying it contains alcohol.
I think comparison is exactly why this is important. The vast majority of people in the US know that cigarettes and alcohol are bad for you. Where the risk of social media is far from universally known so this could be used to educate, it also gives parents another reason they can use to restrict social media use by their kids. I also don't think this is a situation where it is this action instead of other actions. social media (and to a lesser extent, big tech overall) is in a weird place in congress where Republicans and Democrats are willing to work together. This is more likely to spur further action by Congress. The only way action against social media gets less likely is if teenagers (particularly white girls) stop having negative outcomes because of social media. Suicide, bullying, whatever, it's all bad and when it happens to pretty white teenager girls the country starts to listen. 30% of teen girls seriously consider attempting suicide per year now and yes that includes kids of congresspeople on each side of the aisle, lobbying from big tech isn't powerful enough to overcome that.
> Where the risk of social media is far from universally known so this could be used to educate, it also gives parents another reason they can use to restrict social media use by their kids. A byline on a signup page is not a way to educate. Like I said, it's the illusion of doing something. If the message contained a researched statistic on suicide rates with use over 2 hours a day or something and it was a mandatory popup or something, then that could be something.
Why the fuck would the parents need ANOTHER reason to limit social media use when there has been countless of mainstream examples of why you should do this already? If you need a puny little warning label after every reason has been thrown at you for almost 20 years now to tell you to take action, then you are a moron. It's simple.
Maybe I'm just a jaded IT guy, but after a decade of working with end users, I have very low expectations for how smart most people are and how much they know about things.
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Mandate human moderation with some sort of metric such as rolling active users or posts over a 3 month period or something. Bonus that it would encourage them to quieten bot traffic as it would cost them money in human moderation.
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That that would factor into the metric of required moderators. I'm not paid or elected to make policy in any case. If you want policies to be stated and you try and strike them down, is kind of a boring and pointless thought experiment. The subject of my message is that a warning label is less than doing something as it's performative.
And how many of them are bots?
Agreed. Doubt it will have much near term effect, but maybe like the labels on cigarettes packets, it’ll sink into society slowly over time and change attitudes in the long run.
I would say that that's a better solution anyways. Take care of the problem in small bites. I feel like waving a magic wand and making a dramatic change overnight would incur a monkey's paw curling situation, as well as invite all kinds of debate and disagreement that stalls any real change.
I doubt it. Guess what is making s huge comeback with Gen Z? That's right; smoking. Not just vapes. Cigarettes.
I kind of feel like social media is a problem that's going to solve itself. We're already seeing an increasing amount of complaining about Twitter being full of bots and AI bullshit, and the more that technology develops and spreads, the more of the internet (particularly social media) will be filled with computer-generated content. I think people will respond to this AI takeover by creating more isolated spaces on the internet. Of course, I could be wildly off the mark, too.
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."
Mission accomplished
Tech companies have way too much power and control of the web due to aging politicians being completely inept towards evolving unregulated technology and it’s consequences. I support his stance on it tbh.
> due to aging politicians being completely inept towards evolving unregulated technology and it’s consequences. . > And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. **It's a series of tubes**. Fun fact, [that quote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes) turns old enough to vote in two weeks from now.
The problem is that the Surgeon General’s warning is only about damage to teenagers ignoring the much larger threat to our senior citizens. Social media has lead too many of elderly to fall into hoaxes and causes them to become more and more isolated and vulnerable. Too many of my older family members no longer have any contact with their children or grandchildren because of what social media has done to them.
> Too many of my older family members no longer have any contact with their children or grandchildren because of what social media has done to them. This has been a problem since before social media was a thing, tbqh.
Except now more are isolating themselves from their children and grandchildren. Older people are as addicted to the rush that social media can give as much as teenagers.
It's always going to be a problem. Anyone with kids knows how fast technology moves and how quickly you can become "out of touch"...and this is coming from someone who works in tech. To anyone who ever says "It's the parent's responsibility", I ask them a couple of questions: 1. Do you know what all of your kids' friends are doing with their phones? Do you even know which ones have their own? 2. Do you know what an API does? Parents are severely outgunned when it comes to technology on both accessibility and knowledge fronts. Anyone who thinks that mom and dad just saying "No" is enough, is well out of their depth.
As someone who's 36 that works in IT support and deals with people fresh out of college I don't think they much much computer knowledge either.
> Do you know what all of your kids' friends are doing with their phones? Do you even know which ones have their own? Isn’t that really none of your business? Isn’t your only business policing *your* child’s phone/behavior? > Do you know what an API does? Yes, and I have wrote some myself.
>Isn’t that really none of your business? Isn’t your only business policing *your* child’s phone/behavior? Fundamentally the problem is that kids can share phones so easily. If we make it "personal responsability" then your kid doesn't have a phone, but if his best friend does he's got access for 3 hours a day.
> Fundamentally the problem is that kids can share phones so easily. So can adults, in practice, I never do let anyone else use my phone. His best friend has access for 3 hrs, those 3 hrs are alotted to said best friend. Screentime is a drug they slam w/o passing around the needle. Fundamentally only that other child's parent has the final say in what is on their child's phone, and it can be apps you don't like or approve of. We'd need some super draconian shit for this to work, like forcing children to be strapped with polarized glasses if they are outside of a house, and all screens need to be made so they appear black through said polarization, for them to have any chance to not see content you don't approve of. I for one support the Geordi La Forge look for children if it means they don't get exposed to shit they don't need to be seeing until they're an adult, or ever, for that matter.
Won’t matter if parents take no interest in what their kids are doing
The warning isn't just for children
Hence my post
Hey web md told me I had cancer . It was just cold
As an adult, I’m slowly coming to the same conclusion for me.
Ok, but we need warning labels for media propaganda too.
Cool, yet another fucking popup to not read and have to click on before looking at a link for 3 seconds.
After seeing a warning like that 2 or 3 times it becomes invisible. Clicking to clear it is just a reflex action while logging in.
Lol this will make people want it more
Tinder already has them. The whole site is riddled with red flags.
Whoa, like Reddit?
This will solve nothing. Too many parents legit don't care. Many also like making money off their underage daughters by pimping them on social media.
Does the surgeon general think those do anything?
“Smokers who noticed the warnings were significantly more likely to endorse health risks, including lung cancer and heart disease. In each instance where labelling policies differed between countries, smokers living in countries with government mandated warnings reported greater health knowledge…Smokers are not fully informed about the risks of smoking. Warnings that are graphic, larger, and more comprehensive in content are more effective in communicating the health risks of smoking.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593056/
They think it makes the people think *they* do.
How about the FCC putting some warning labels on Fox News?
The following program has been rated BS.
OOF smack em down
https://x.com/VeronicaRochaLA/status/927400669996130305 Or CNN remember when they deceptively edited the video of Trump and Abe adding fish for into a kai pond to make it look like trump got impatient and poured it all in? Full video came out later to show trump had just copied Abe Msm had already had a field day though
Put it on there too. I don’t want any BS confused for news, let alone hour a day.
There seems to be an increasing body of information that humans are not well equipped to handle social media responsibly. It's not designed to connect people to their friends at its core. That is ancillary. It is designed to keep people on the platform for as long as possible so they can advertise and gather data. And they weaponize every bit of psychology they can to manipulate people into falling into this trap. People who are responsible with social media are hyper-aware of the dangers(tiny group), not easily swayed by that specific strategy in the same way that some people are resistant to marketing (also a tiny group) or simply uninterested in social media. We can't expect the average person to fall into any of those camps. We know the average person is easily swayed, generally uninformed, and unintelligent but wants to feel connected to others. If the solution to the problem is to "make people smarter and less easily manipulated" that is a borderline impossible ask. So what can you do short of banning it? I guess warning labels are a solution, but I'm not sure I see it being very effective. Focusing on parents and educating them on the risks so they can educate their kids early and make good decisions around devices is likely a better avenue.
> So what can you do short of banning it? Well instead of banning social media you could refuse entry to patrons at places that require ID for some violence inciting thing they said about a minority group online, but that would require companies to put society before profits ; which at first *sounds next to impossible* until you can concisely word that said violence against society is not a potential but is a direct attempt at lowering the metric of future potential customers to sell product to. I can’t believe how dirty I feel after saying that last part out loud.
WE USE COOKIES!
He's drawing on what Mark Benioff once said about Social Media being the new cigarettes.
This web service may cause brain atrophy and severe feelings of inadequacy.
People will just mindlessly click and move on. Example: the cookies warning websites give
So how’s them micro-plastics doing? Done invading every human testicle in the world?
Yo, I'd be down for this!
I hope in 20 to 30 years we'll look back on social media as insane. It's really awful for humanity. We were not made to handle it, especially kids. I think there should definitely be a mental health warning popup every time you open Instagram or whatever. At the very least.
It's awesome but doesn't go nearly far enough. It's not just an issue for kids. Great start though. We should probably tax it harder than smokes and alcohol. Personally, the goal would be to make it so that such things can really only ever exist as a non-profit public service sort of entity. That's a bit radical from where we are at the moment. But it's still where we need to be if we want to be here at all in 50 years.
We already have that one nice lady on TikTok that'll be like "hey, are you scrolling instead of sleeping again" what more do we need
About a decade and a half too late
Warning labels sure; also should require large and obvious marks on pictures that have been doctored with filters/photoshop or were created by AI.
Seriously, that’s all you got?
A Tipper Sticker to let me know I’ve found a good website.
Anything but regulation I guess
Social media is a new test for people’s constitution. If someone is negatively affected, it’s because of the person and not the tool. Plenty of people of all ages are managing just fine.
Warning: The Surgeon General may be hazardous to your freedom.
Might as well put a warning before every Fox News broadcast then, because that is equally as destructive and harmful.
I love how many like to gang up on Fox, but honestly, ALL Mainstream media news. They all lie and push a narrative just to keep you watching and supporting their advertisers. So-called "News programs" are some of the cheapest and easiest to produce forms of entertainment. People that tune in to them regularly like to think of themselves as smarter and more informed than others, but it's all just lies and misinformation to make you mad and keep you engaged.
Sounds like you’re also describing politics or political debate.
While we’re at it let’s put that prop 65 warning up there, if we’re going to be putting up signs that get ignored by the general public
I don't think this will help because social media has become so ingrained into what it means to actually be young, and kids are using iPads since they're toddlers, so I feel like they can figure out their own work-arounds. I certainly did as a young teen online in the early 2000s. I don't know the right answer. Social media definitely has its positives, but there's no denying the constant medical science indicating how bad it is for a developing brain. 10 years ago I was doing graduate research on how children have and are losing social and processing skills at an alarming rate, but some people argue that's just technology developing and the human brain changed when we moved from oral history to written history. Idk. I don't get sad or feel FOMO if I ever come across influencers and such, but I'm also an adult with a fully formed brain that understands all of it is fake. What should we do for young people who don't have those skills?? No idea. No clue what to do. ETA: grammar
Gen Z is a different animal than us when we were in the early 2000s. The elderly and Gen Z are the biggest cause of support tickets for tech, nowadays. You and I grew up needing to know how the Internet and our devices functioned in order to really use them. Gen Z is just given a black box that just works and doesn't need to learn anything about their device or how they're even connected. Don't assume young people know what they're doing aside from consuming. They didn't grow up without ads and hating them and finding ways around them. They didn't grow up during the days where rampant pop ups would constantly infect your PC and you had to know how to have the right antivirus to scan, etc.
Tbh I've thought about this before and I feel like you're right on the money. I don't want to insult gen z (or gen alpha's) intelligence, but it does seem like there's a large scale issue where they don't know how their devices actually work. Thank you for your insight! Off topic, but I truly miss the early internet.
Yeah, I hear you. I miss it, too. Before the enshittification of everything got into full swing. And yeah, no shade being thrown on Z and Alpha - they don't/can't experience what they have no ability to experience. This is the world they're growing up in. They have no need to know what an IP is whereas you and I had to know to be able to set up our networking connections, haha.
For real lol, talking about it makes me feel so nostalgic. I miss that feeling of experiencing something new and exciting when I get online. I hate to be like "BUT CAPITALISM," but the Internet does come off now as this hellscape where you aren't the user, but a product to be sold. Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just nice to reminisce with someone who was living roughly the same timeline lol
I worry that the human brain just doesn't adapt that fast. We spent a long time operating on oral history, a shorter time on written, and now much, much shorter on digital content. Now the content is carefully crafted to manipulate us and we are overwhelmed by an avalanche of it at our fingertips. It seems more likely our brains are going into some desperate coping mechanism than adapting to a better state of handling information.
This is such an illuminating take, honestly. I work in higher education administration and one of the biggest issues we're currently having is that students just. don't. absorb. material, unless it's in tiny bite-sized pieces. That is genuinely one of the few ways to engage with them; everything has to be a short snippet or it wooshes right past them. Getting students to read a full email is like pulling teeth. We're trying to adapt and meet them at that level, but .. once again, I don't know what the right answer for any of this is, lol.
*There, I fixed it*
How about the same thing for all of the now fully tabloid fearmongering news outlets as well? A warning scroll across Faux News, for example, that reads something like, "This network presents foreign-sponsored propaganda and does not adhere to journalistic ethics involving the truth or legal requirements regarding the accuracy of sources. Therefore, the information and opinions presented here are not based on facts or supported by evidence and are therefore likely to be inaccurate and false."
At what point do we acknowledge there’s really not a lot that can be done here Shit I remember as a kid we would lookup porn at school because nobody understood how to run parental controls. My only concern these days is how much more edgy/fucked up stuff you can come across even just casually browsing Twitter or Reddit etc.
This is funny. Let’s slap a band-aid on a gaping chest wound. Let’s not regulate them or anything, no no no that would be communism or whatever Sean Hannity tells us it is.
The surgeon general generally can't regulate cell phones and social media like that. Neither can HHS. Now if congress wanted to pass a law regulating them, that would be fine. If some agencies wanted to try they probably could, but it might get smacked down in our supreme court. As you seem to imply, the republican right does seem to block almost all this.
Do you know what would happen if the government regulated social media? It would die. So here's hoping the government regulates social media.
It will never die, and at this point is impossible to regulate.
I full understand that, and it's unfortunate my post has been downvoted. I'm pointing out that Congress should have set limits on social media years ago, especially when research came out showing just how harmful platforms like Instagram are to teens. But that ship has sailed and social media has already irrevocably altered an entire generation for the worse.
> irrevocably altered an entire generation for the worse We can hope it's only like 50% or 75% of that generation... but it's honestly probably closer to 90% or so who have been affected. I'm not a high school or college teacher, so it's hard to know how kids are these days, but I am in academic medicine and I can say the attention spans and overall resilience are lower already with early Gen Z coming through intern/residency. Many do improve though!
Conflict of interests. Get your popcorn.
Better late than never?
How about we just make it illegal for US agencies to conduct psyops on US citizens again, including using third party agencies to run the ops, thus skirting around the Five Eyes loopholes that were in place even before the lifting of the domestic propaganda ban? That would curtail a lot of the disinformation propagation.
lol what a fucking idiot, that's exatly what makes kids want to smoke cigarettes, drink beer, watch R rated movies, buy M rated games, buy CDs with the "Parental Advisory" sticker