> There's no hard evidence

There are thousands of manchildren living in moms' basements, with corkboards festooned with scraps of photographs that are connected by colored yarn and pushpins, and they would all vehemently argue to the contrary!

The facts are basically: Facebook's own researchers and independent researchers presented real harms caused by Facebook's algorithms, and they fired them, ignored them and took the datasets away and continued doing as they want.

You don't need to go to any conspiracy anything; that just makes the claims sound crazy aby unnecesary ssociation.

Fourth option: product becomes less addictive and the algorithms stop optimising on "angry users click more". Less advertising profits, perhaps less engagement but probably still profits on advertising.

Fifth option: don't aim to continually increase profits and instead change the rules of capitalism to be less focused on making "profit at any price" to perhaps a more gentler form. After all, Monopoly(TM) is restarted once one player has all the money, it's about time that we do that in real life too or how many more trillionaires do we need?

So there are also grey choices here and not only b/w.

My personal preference would be laws to restrict ad surveillance and laws to mandate third-party interoperability to break that calculus. But absent that, I'll take massive damage awards from the legal system.

[0] Or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or...

Social media has a direct impact on dopamine and uninhibited oversharing.

The mechanism isn’t even ambiguous, which is exactly why there’s a case, about the production of a deliberately addictive substance. The chemicals and effects differ, but it’s deliberate use and production as the same exact means to an end do not.

There’s zero ambiguity here of the alignment on an end goal.

Side note: is META hiring and can you refer me?

I think this is a fun historical example. Ships passing through Denmark needed to pay a tax of 1-2% of the value of their cargo. They self-assessed that value.

The twist that makes it interesting was that the King could choose to purchase any cargo immediately at the reported value. If a ship underreported, they might save on tax, but they risked taking a hefty loss.

I have no idea how effective this was, but it's compelling. I wonder whether great self-regulation might need clever design like that example.

This is fraud. Promising something you didn't deliver is fraud

Sure some tech bros won't get their Lambos but I can live with that.

As someone who does both, it's quite lovely! You might even be happier doing that than whatever it is the modern internet has become.

Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.

Basically, for $x amount, a competitor can buy the winning car (or its engine, or similar). Where $x is the amount the group decides should be a reasonable amount to spend on building a car.

A racer is free to spend more, but if they win too much, somebody will write a check and buy the car.

In theory. In reality, plenty of people have the money to spend $x^2 and risk the loss.

This is just people seeing dollar signs asking for handouts. Nothing of an real value to society. Why is it okay for FB to be sued but not say Pokemon? I think Pokemon is way more dangerous, addictive, and is basically gambling with the card packs.

Have some personal responsibility for once.

Protecting children is a noble goal that I personally agree with, but it's also often used to sane-wash further erosion of privacy.

As has been discussed here and elsewhere, age verification turns out to be the complete loss of Internet anonymity due to its implementation techniques. There are proposed alternative implementations, very conveniently for some, this is not part of the discussion.

This is exactly the time when nerds like us should speak up.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

But not all entertainment is made equal, a simple example is single player games and microtransactions based games.

Similarly, social media as we know it abuses reward mechanism specifically to maximise engagement and screen time with complete disregard of the person's well being and proclivity for compulsive behaviour.

> Have some personal responsibility for once.

I am of this same opinion, people need to assume some level of responsibility for them to get better, but the fact is that addiction forces people to make choices they regret later. It robs the person from their individuality.

We literally treat minors differently under the law because they are assumed to be incapable of personal responsibility.

As in, the only form of entertainment that society should (or does) offer should be specifically designed to trigger as much addictive behavior as possible?

I can see why a person, looking at our current world, might think that. Hello Dopamine Fracking.

But is that the world we want? It certainly is not the world that existed before modern extractive capitalism started turning to extracting from the people it is supposed to serve.

Fortunately, capitalism is more efficient that state/centralized planning, so capitalism is doing a better job of turning us into their farm animals than lords ever could do for their serfs.

its probably a bit unrealistic to expect children to "Have some personal responsibility for once." id agree with you if a 50 year old said, "omgolly meta, you used trickery on me."

but if the evidence shows they have specifically targeted children, then i can understand the concerns.

and yes, im aware how dangerous it is to declare "lets protect the children" but we also have to recognize this is a messy situation, and one that needs to be sorted out. i dont pretend to hold the answers, but to hand waive it away as hysteria or whatever is probably not a good solution.

this is exactly facebook's business model ???

No doubt that it will be good news to gambling advertisers, but the push for age verification was already underway in 2020, well before government recommended an end to gambling advertising (2023).

It's a neat explanation, so an easy sell, but doesn't match the chronology.