Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
slg · 23m ago
Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
palmotea · 11m ago
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
Apocryphon · 16m ago
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
swed420 · 17m ago
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
Taek · 1h ago
From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
yndoendo · 35m ago
This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
moolcool · 1h ago
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
pfortuny · 18m ago
Being the owner of a business does not exempt you from being a human being. Ethics apply. A person is more valuable than a company.
latexr · 1m ago
It’s worrying that we have to keep repeating this so often. The amount of people defend a version of the “fiduciary duty to shareholders” is insane.
yoyohello13 · 13m ago
History has unequivocally proven that the majority of big business leaders don’t give a shit about ethics. In fact, they will come up with whole new ideologies to justify their behavior (see effective altruism).
lossolo · 10m ago
Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.
bix6 · 48m ago
I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.
kace91 · 41m ago
Remember Facebook’s original use? I guess that’s an answer.
realz · 33m ago
A house built on weak foundation is bound to fall, or at least tilt.
bix6 · 36m ago
yeah but I consider that more weird / pathetic vs this which is blatantly anti-ethical
realz · 31m ago
They have one goal: $$
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
bix6 · 26m ago
I’m struggling to see a subjective version of this that is ethical?
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
watwut · 1h ago
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
yoyohello13 · 9m ago
This is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.
ModernMech · 2h ago
How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
It is the modern version of "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
binary132 · 2h ago
Why are you displacing blame from meta?
tengbretson · 1h ago
Am I supposed to blame a fox for eating my chickens?
magicalist · 1h ago
> Am I supposed to blame a fox for eating my chickens?
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
tengbretson · 1h ago
> but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
I think his argument is more of the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" variety. At some point complaining about ethics and morality of someone who has repeatedly shown no concern for either just makes you look like the unreasonable one.
josfredo · 1h ago
It’s the responsible thing to do. As a member of society you have to own your misbehaviors too. You can not have it both ways.
ModernMech · 1h ago
Because what are we going to blame them for? Acting in accordance to the way their corporate shareholders and thereby society expect them to? I'm not not interested in that fight anymore. If you want things to change, the idea of a corporation and its role in society has to fundamentally change.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
binary132 · 13m ago
that’s like saying DuPont and 3M weren’t the problem for hiding their knowledge about the dangers and wide prevalence of PFAS contamination from the public instead of handling it (because that might be bad for their Teflon product lines). would you also argue that they had no social obligation or responsibility for failing to do the right thing? how about the radium girls, same deal?
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
watwut · 1h ago
I think that other thing that needs to happen ia that executives need to stop being excused with "shareholders want it" whenever they do something illegal or immoral.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
utyop22 · 2h ago
Yeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.
cess11 · 2h ago
Don't get mad, organise.
ModernMech · 2h ago
Get mad -- organize.
delusional · 1h ago
Interestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
moolcool · 1h ago
Consider how much oil and tobacco companies knew about the harms of their products.
It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.
fmajid · 59m ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”—Upton Sinclair
anal_reactor · 1h ago
This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.
novok · 22m ago
Government divisions ignore ethics & morality all the time if it's politically inconvenient, and what is even worse is since they are the government, they are immune from most criminal and civil prosecution! Using the PRC as a bastion of morality isn't good idea either. (watch as I get pro-PRC troll replies)
Be careful what you wish for!
this_user · 11m ago
> This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides
Have you seen recent US governments?
everdrive · 1h ago
>Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
polytely · 1h ago
Atleast in China they have to option to give CEO's the death penalty if they step out of line. I think silicon valley behaviour would be better if the CEO's had some skin in the game.
itsoktocry · 1h ago
Kills the CEOs, but don't punish actual criminals, very left-coded.
polytely · 3m ago
don't worry, I also believe in prison for violent offenders, I just think that the more power you have the more serious punishment should get
jon-wood · 40m ago
And according to the right the CEOs need to be paid obscene amounts of money because they’re ultimately responsible for everything the company does. Can’t have it both ways.
dzink · 1h ago
There is a mistaken assumption here that government will ever do anything better for tech products.
afavour · 1h ago
The government is at least far more accountable to the people. Certainly, it could be a lot more accountable than it is, it’s very far from ideal. But it’s something.
MrDarcy · 1h ago
How is the Chinese government accountable to it’s people given the track record of killing those people who disagree with it?
ceejayoz · 1h ago
If they fuck up enough they wind up with heads on spikes.
That seems quite unlikely in the tech industry.
dzink · 1h ago
It is the least accountable to the people organization possible. Solving problems via government is akin to shooting drones with a cannon. No feedback mechanism, long terms with no elections, unlimited distribution of your money to people that are their buddies.
pfortuny · 16m ago
Exactly. Look at railroads in the USA… For instance.
anal_reactor · 1h ago
Yes, and it aligns with my experience. It takes a while, but it works. My home country created an app where I can have legally valid ID and driving license. When the coronavirus hit most of the infrastructure for the vaccination certificates was already there. The one where I live in now created a website where tax report boils down to a series of easily understandable questions, and most users will just click "next next next send". Train company has an app that allows me to check the timetable very easily.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
JCM9 · 34m ago
Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
Verdex · 1h ago
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
noitpmeder · 1h ago
I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.
dijit · 22m ago
Don’t they have communicators?
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Apocryphon · 13m ago
Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1h ago
How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.
everdrive · 1h ago
Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.
jedberg · 1h ago
Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
christophilus · 2h ago
I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
abeppu · 2h ago
In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
walthamstow · 1h ago
They didn't see "don't use", they said "don't trust", meaning apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
abeppu · 45m ago
I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
atonse · 14m ago
I actually would riff on this idea more like "Even though corporations are made of of people, don't expect them to have the same attributes of a human being, like empathy or the concept of doing the right thing. Expect that their actions are better explained through abstract concepts like group actions towards a larger goal that's separate from human well-being, like profits and self-survival of the organization at any cost."
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
walthamstow · 37m ago
It's just general advice, not an ironclad rule on how to live your life. Apply as you see fit.
deberon · 2h ago
Aren’t those all industries that are now highly regulated because they proved themselves to be untrustworthy?
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
Yes. Why do you think Google is requiring identity verification on Android now?
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
ndriscoll · 1h ago
The laws regarding haircuts are stupid, but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber. Likewise no one is going to stop the teenager next door from unlicensed babysitting, and no one is going to stop you from going to them (or to an adult that runs an unlicensed daycare in their home and goes over legal child:adult ratios).
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
> but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
ndriscoll · 1h ago
Most mobile devices do stop you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code (or code from someone else). That kind of thing is what should be illegal. Likewise with e.g. banks requiring people to submit control of the computer they own to the likes of Google even if the device itself in principle can be put under the owner's control.
Locking down car repair tools is another obviously abusive practice that primarily benefits the manufacturer and harms the owner, justified through some weak appeal to security, yes.
skizm · 13m ago
You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.
cm2012 · 32m ago
In my experience, big businesses are way better about worker compensation, benefits and treatments compared to small businesses in the same industy.
RianAtheer · 2h ago
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces.
They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
utyop22 · 2h ago
Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.
avgDev · 2h ago
Social Media is the new tobacco.
foobar_______ · 1h ago
I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
abeppu · 2h ago
How about:
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
andsoitis · 2h ago
this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?
asimovfan · 1h ago
i think if there is a crime authorities care enough about, they seem to immediately get to the true identity and contact info of the criminal.
freejazz · 2h ago
e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos
gjsman-1000 · 2h ago
> validates age
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
mxkopy · 2h ago
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
gjsman-1000 · 2h ago
I don’t believe that for a second.
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
mxkopy · 1h ago
For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
blitzar · 2h ago
How dumb do you have to be to commision this reasearch at Meta? Did they honestly think the result was going to be good for them?
moolcool · 1h ago
There's cynical reasons to commission this research, since "user misery" is clearly one of the levers they pull to increase engagement.
It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.
Frost1x · 2h ago
This just in, private corporation with profit motive doesn’t voluntarily provide negative information that hurts their profit motive. News at 11.
Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.
blitzar · 1h ago
The original sin was writing a signed confession of their crimes and packaging it up with a video of them commiting said crimes.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
Lio · 2h ago
I saw Rob Pike online asking about what to tell people that don’t understand why anyone would boycott Meta services.
I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.
Just stop using it? Delete your accounts, uninstall the apps, and stop being miserable.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
doublerabbit · 24m ago
I'm someone who deleted my account back in 2008. I've lived life without Facebook, Instagram and it's been hell. I've been targeted with emotional sabotage by not having Facebook.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. However, I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden and disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains can only be contacted via WhatsApp.
We have a signal group only because of me for my family. However they all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's their contacts are, I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so you however miss out on a lot of stuff around you.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries, so IRL isn't possible. SMS and phone calls are expensive, I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Andorid integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the ecosystem of WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I dislike it, it has been the only "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed when the whole world uses the technology your trying to escape from.
MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
randunel · 2h ago
I deleted my account at some point after they removed the "sort by date" feature in the timeline, probably more than 10 years ago, because that's when it became clear they wanted to be fully in control of my data sources and that's a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for keeping in touch with distant friends such as former classmates.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
outime · 2h ago
What if the real disruptor is just not using social networks?
Zagreus2142 · 2h ago
Yes this, exactly this.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
macintux · 1h ago
Volunteer work is so very good for my mental health. The pandemic directly and indirectly caused me to stop it for a few years, but now that I’m volunteering again, I’m much happier.
255kb · 2h ago
Exactly, do we need social media in the first place?
I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
BeFlatXIII · 1h ago
The grass shall be touched.
fullshark · 1h ago
I don't miss the old facebook, but I'm also not 20 anymore. I just don't want to share random thoughts or my life's highlights with everyone I've ever met anymore. The only people who do are people doing advertising.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
andy99 · 2h ago
I'm curious what properties a "good" social network would have?
otterley · 2h ago
Facebook in the mid 2000s was pretty good. It was a chronological timeline of your friends’ posts along with a photo album. It was like LiveJournal but with a much better UI.
ratelimitsteve · 1h ago
no algorithmic content driving the variable reward schedule in order to induce compulsive behavior, just content I've explicitly selected and a willingness to say "we've run out of content" instead of just filling the infinite feed with whatever
fsflover · 1h ago
So you're searching for Mastodon.
SketchySeaBeast · 2h ago
Honestly, I think it has already. People have dropped off them. Even my parents now primarily communicate over WhatsApp/Signal.
HankStallone · 1h ago
I dunno, I've been hearing for years that no one uses Facebook anymore, or it's just Boomers, but that's not how it is in my area. Most of the small businesses use it as their main presence online, because it's so easy to toss up a post about a new product or sale or a picture of their new menu. All the small towns have active FB groups where people share community activities and help each other find lost pets and such. My own family uses FB messenger to plan events and keep each other informed about things, which is the only reason I still use it.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
BeFlatXIII · 1h ago
IME, it's that no one posts to their profile anymore. It's either read-only or posting to groups.
barbazoo · 1h ago
What’s keeping you on there?
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2h ago
The unending quest for growth leads to bad incentives. We could absolutely build products that turn a reasonable profit and respect users. They already did this in their early days. Chasing growth forever doesn't allow this.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
disruption in the space will make it worse, not better, see: tiktok
crawsome · 1h ago
The frog has boiled. These companies actively profit when kids are engaged and unhappy.
MengerSponge · 21m ago
Meta delenda est.
kevmo · 2h ago
We are feeding children to the wolves to boost quarterly Big Tech numbers.
Society is breaking down in part because of it.
America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.
barbazoo · 31m ago
True, plus Meta's harmful impact goes way beyond the US of A so it would benefit probably everybody.
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
If it wasn't Big Tech, the people here would have us feeding them to Mastodon. I do not believe that's much of an improvement.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
fsflover · 1h ago
Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors; it doesn't track you, doesn't show you ads or tries to earn money from you. It's like email.
mixedbit · 2h ago
I hate that Meta and Google - companies that are among the leaders in AI and invest billions in cutting-edge machine learning R&D - pretend they are unable to detect that children are accessing their platforms in violation of age restrictions (13 years in most cases).
djrj477dhsnv · 1h ago
The responsibility to protect children should be put on their parents.
If they want to give their children devices to use unsupervised, then they should block access to whatever they deem harmful.
noitpmeder · 1h ago
Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices? Should it be soley on the parents to prevent your kid from accessing drugs? What about cigarettes/weed/alcohol? Or anything that society has put in place age-based or other legal gates.
Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?
What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".
Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.
There's a spectrum here.
mixedbit · 1h ago
If social media is harmful to children, each child deserves to be protected, no matter what is their parents' opinion. This is obvious for other harmful things, we don't argue that it is up to parents to decide if their child should be allowed to use alcohol or cigarettes.
djrj477dhsnv · 1h ago
Harm is subjective and I'd much rather parents make that call than the government.
And there absolutely isn't consensus on when it's harmful to give children alcohol. Many would say it's good to give a child a glass of wine at a family dinner so that they learn to drink responsibly.
Msot agree that cigarettes are harmful at all ages, so that's not really relevant.
mixedbit · 1h ago
The government already made the call, that's why due to child privacy or other protection laws, terms of service of social media platforms require age 13 or up. My complain is that companies pretend they are unable to enforce it.
freejazz · 1h ago
>Harm is subjective and I'd much rather parents make that call than the government.
Is that what Meta's research indicated?
zasz · 1h ago
Ahaha, by this logic we should just ban vaccines if that's popular.
dataflow · 48m ago
How do you expect your child to react when they end up the only ones in their classes left our of whatever others are doing?
11101010001100 · 1h ago
All the responsibility should be put on the parents? I suggest you run through scenarios of what that might look like....
watwut · 1h ago
Because it is totally reasonable to expect parents to have total surveillance of all their kids every single moment of kids life up to 18 years old.
The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.
We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.
xrd · 1h ago
I laughed out loud at this. It is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.
Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.
You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.
There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.
DalasNoin · 1h ago
I mean grok has an AI girlfriend that will undress for you. It's specifically instructed to be extremely jealous and to pretend to be madly in love with the user. Apparently no meaningful age restrictions of any kind. All this data of perhaps kids chatting explicitly with their AI partners land on company servers.
iphone_elegance · 1h ago
zucks for the children
sniffers · 2h ago
The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
"Meta suppressed research on child safety" again ... why is anyone still using this company for anything ever?
ITB · 2h ago
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
realz · 2h ago
Have you considered that maybe the outrage is about what the research results contain?
ITB · 2h ago
I’m not saying social media is good for children.
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
freejazz · 2h ago
Is the issue that meta didn't "release" the research or that they didn't do anything about the findings and told workers to ignore it?
tuckerman · 1h ago
I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
> You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks
Who doesn't like these?
nova22033 · 2h ago
We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."
barbazoo · 31m ago
Who is "you" here?
add-sub-mul-div · 2h ago
You're so close to getting it. Maybe there's one more option...
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.
Be careful what you wish for!
Have you seen recent US governments?
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
That seems quite unlikely in the tech industry.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
Locking down car repair tools is another obviously abusive practice that primarily benefits the manufacturer and harms the owner, justified through some weak appeal to security, yes.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.
Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
For me it’s stuff like this.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. However, I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden and disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains can only be contacted via WhatsApp.
We have a signal group only because of me for my family. However they all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's their contacts are, I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so you however miss out on a lot of stuff around you.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries, so IRL isn't possible. SMS and phone calls are expensive, I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Andorid integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the ecosystem of WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I dislike it, it has been the only "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed when the whole world uses the technology your trying to escape from.
MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
Society is breaking down in part because of it.
America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
If they want to give their children devices to use unsupervised, then they should block access to whatever they deem harmful.
Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?
What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".
Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.
There's a spectrum here.
And there absolutely isn't consensus on when it's harmful to give children alcohol. Many would say it's good to give a child a glass of wine at a family dinner so that they learn to drink responsibly.
Msot agree that cigarettes are harmful at all ages, so that's not really relevant.
Is that what Meta's research indicated?
The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.
We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.
I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.
Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.
You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.
There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674
Who doesn't like these?