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This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (as

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive? At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case

deleted 29d ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 29d ago
A trial is also the wrong venue. It isn't illegal to make an addictive website. Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.
Pxtl 29d ago
> We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.
- ggm 29d ago
  If we set the barrier to entry in prediction markets to an equivalent of an age/height check on entry, it would be well north of "yes, I am a mom-and-pop first time investor, I have never been here before, I know nothing except what some spammer told me and claude" Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing. (thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")
- mslt 29d ago
  It’s such a joke. But we also need to find ways to study and measure non-gambling digital platform addiction like 15 years ago. Thanks to algorithmic consumption, we’re nearing a whole generation of adults that have no idea how to navigate their societal agency and 3 trailing generations that had once learned and since forgot.
- m4ck_ 29d ago
  Those are relatively new and the president's children have financial interests in them, so they won't see any regulation any time soon. But it's certainly possible they will be regulated in the future... if we ever have a less-openly-corrupt government again.
meowkit 29d ago
“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.
- matrix87 29d ago
  Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time. Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
  - mslt 29d ago
    You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?
    - bad_haircut72 29d ago
      No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether
  - oblio 29d ago
    > It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time. You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.
    - matrix87 29d ago
      What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis
SpicyLemonZest 29d ago
It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.
- matrix87 29d ago
  > It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.
- curiousllama 29d ago
  > does it have to be answered in general? 100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
didibus 29d ago
You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.
- matrix87 29d ago
  But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive
  - dyarosla 29d ago
    Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up. If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise. I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
    - nitwit005 29d ago
      Look at video games and you'll see the surface area of "addictive design" is basically infinite. People have gotten addicted to a huge variety of games, with not all that much in common.
      - Erem 29d ago
        You can still regulate the addictive features that are in common though. Paid Lootboxes for example. Isn't there some jurisdiction that already regulates those?
curiousllama 29d ago
NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof. So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up." It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway. The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
wpietri 29d ago
It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices. And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare. But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out. My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
- SwtCyber 29d ago
  That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be
- danielmarkbruce 29d ago
  It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling. In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
  - vasco 29d ago
    Having "underlying risk" to something just means you invested in it before. So for you it's not a gambling as long as you... have gambled before in the other direction? Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
Krasnol 29d ago
I'm sure the companies marketing research divisions have very clear definitions. We just use those.
mantas 29d ago
Let’s start with banning algorithmic personalized feeds. That seems to be the common determinator of the bad apples.
- 13hours 29d ago
  I find it very convenient for music discovery for example. Maybe start by making it opt in and give parents control over their children's feeds?
  - mantas 28d ago
    Even for music, it sucks compared to the old human-powered Pandora or legendary torrent tracker forums. Although it may be possible to replicate either with AI. But it still should be conversation style rather than infinite feed thing without any input.
watwut 29d ago
Nit: Prediction markets are gambling and we dont regulate that.
- petesergeant 29d ago
  Who is “we”? They’re absolutely regulated in most of the world. Smarkets has a UK and Irish gambling license.
lazide 29d ago
There are literally emails back and forth with Zuck where it's brought up that they're essentially making things as addictive as possible and it's bad for people, and he goes (to paraphrase) 'yeah, whatever. keep doing what you're doing'.
- alex1138 29d ago
  He said 'if you need info on people at Harvard just ask'. Called people who gave him information 'dumb fucks' (so, who's the next person on HN that's going to dare to reply to me that he was 'making a good point'? Do you see the Google founders saying that? Even as a joke?). Killed the competition of Instagram and Whatsapp. Copied every single Snapchat feature. Wants AI friend profiles for people. Hijacked emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 . Free Basics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 List goes on. Socio.
SwtCyber 29d ago
[flagged]
lukan 29d ago
In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive. Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.
- mm263 29d ago
  How would you prove this? What if the product was not intentionally designed to be engaging but ends up being more engaging than TikTok?
  - lukan 29d ago
    Check for the targets of the dev teams. What gets them promotion. Right now they openly optimize for 'engagement".
    - zos_kia 29d ago
      Agreed, why would we have lawyers and judges if it wasn't to adjudicate exactly this kind of delicate issues ? We're not in a procedural show where you can gotcha the judge with a logical backflip. "Oh but your honor if you find me guilty then you must also shut down YouTube", he said with a confident smirk. As if it was not trivial to establish intent in the case of meta, who were probably high fiving while sharing reports titled "Basic methods to make teenage addiction go up".
- Mattified 29d ago
  Agreed. https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/ https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/
- weatherlite 29d ago
  > Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.
conception 29d ago
The best idea ive seen is if you decide what a user sees in an algorithm way (beyond “natural” ones like chronological) you are liable for the content - you are no longer a common carrier and can be sued for damages. That should be step 1.
- blackoil 29d ago
  > beyond “natural” ones like chronological So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?
  - amelius 29d ago
    No, because mail programs can be configured by the user to turn off any algorithms that try to be smart.
  - scottious 28d ago
    That kind of algorithm doesn't show you anything besides the messages in your inbox. It's never making a decision to show you X instead of Y, it's just deciding the ordering in which you see them. Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
  - conception 28d ago
    There are already a couple of answers for standard male programs, but if the male programs such as Gmail pushes up content to your inbox, save from Google then yes, that would be an algorithm that would qualify. I would really argue what you are describing is a filter rather than a content algorithm.
atmavatar 29d ago
A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections. If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.
- bonzini 29d ago
  How do you distinguish engagement maximization and usability maximization?
  - seanicus 28d ago
    I really have no idea how we can define most of this esp using the framework of previously established law but I do think that a definition of Dark Patterns could be tangentially worked into the psychological make-up of gambling.
- tzs 28d ago
  Section 230 has nothing whatsoever to do with any distinctions or differences between "publishers" and "platforms". That's just an internet myth. In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.
esseph 29d ago
> But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case What if I told you that judicial outcomes are often nondeterministic?
cloudie78 29d ago
[flagged]
somenameforme 29d ago
Tobacco regulations don't regulate the general case, they regulate tobacco products. I think the same will apply to social media. There's no need to define an addictive platform anymore than there's a need to define an addictive substance. Instead all that you need to define is a social media platform. And that can be expanded/adjusted as necessary. As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.
johnsmith4739 29d ago
For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed. If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential. Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling. "For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule." For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.
NietTim 28d ago
The same way we already distinguish between card games and gambling. I can think of quite a few to distinguish normal platforms from addictive ones; - non-chronological timeline - promoted content from people you don't follow - Rewards for using the app (reddit is a great example of this) - Dark patterns to take control away from the user about what they see And I'm sure I can think of a bunch more if I spent time on it.
anon373839 28d ago
> how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts. For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as: - Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior; - Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists; - Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product; - Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use; and so on.
nkrisc 28d ago
This seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be decided by a trial. It’s some mix of intent and the actual outcomes, more or less as you stated. I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter. In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.

deleted 29d ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 29d ago

A trial is also the wrong venue. It isn't illegal to make an addictive website. Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.

Pxtl 29d ago

> We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.

ggm 29d ago
If we set the barrier to entry in prediction markets to an equivalent of an age/height check on entry, it would be well north of "yes, I am a mom-and-pop first time investor, I have never been here before, I know nothing except what some spammer told me and claude" Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing. (thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")
mslt 29d ago
It’s such a joke. But we also need to find ways to study and measure non-gambling digital platform addiction like 15 years ago. Thanks to algorithmic consumption, we’re nearing a whole generation of adults that have no idea how to navigate their societal agency and 3 trailing generations that had once learned and since forgot.
m4ck_ 29d ago
Those are relatively new and the president's children have financial interests in them, so they won't see any regulation any time soon. But it's certainly possible they will be regulated in the future... if we ever have a less-openly-corrupt government again.

meowkit 29d ago

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.

matrix87 29d ago
Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time. Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
- mslt 29d ago
  You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?
  - bad_haircut72 29d ago
    No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether
- oblio 29d ago
  > It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time. You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.
  - matrix87 29d ago
    What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis

SpicyLemonZest 29d ago

It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? I could imagine supporting a policy that infinite scroll in particular is addictive and app developers can't use it without strong warning labels and time alerts.

matrix87 29d ago
> It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general? Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.
curiousllama 29d ago
> does it have to be answered in general? 100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.

didibus 29d ago

You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.

matrix87 29d ago
But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive
- dyarosla 29d ago
  Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up. If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise. I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
  - nitwit005 29d ago
    Look at video games and you'll see the surface area of "addictive design" is basically infinite. People have gotten addicted to a huge variety of games, with not all that much in common.
    - Erem 29d ago
      You can still regulate the addictive features that are in common though. Paid Lootboxes for example. Isn't there some jurisdiction that already regulates those?

curiousllama 29d ago

NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof. So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up." It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway. The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.

wpietri 29d ago

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices. And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare. But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out. My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.

SwtCyber 29d ago
That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be
danielmarkbruce 29d ago
It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling. In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
- vasco 29d ago
  Having "underlying risk" to something just means you invested in it before. So for you it's not a gambling as long as you... have gambled before in the other direction? Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.

Krasnol 29d ago

I'm sure the companies marketing research divisions have very clear definitions. We just use those.

mantas 29d ago

Let’s start with banning algorithmic personalized feeds. That seems to be the common determinator of the bad apples.

13hours 29d ago
I find it very convenient for music discovery for example. Maybe start by making it opt in and give parents control over their children's feeds?
- mantas 28d ago
  Even for music, it sucks compared to the old human-powered Pandora or legendary torrent tracker forums. Although it may be possible to replicate either with AI. But it still should be conversation style rather than infinite feed thing without any input.

watwut 29d ago

Nit: Prediction markets are gambling and we dont regulate that.

petesergeant 29d ago
Who is “we”? They’re absolutely regulated in most of the world. Smarkets has a UK and Irish gambling license.

lazide 29d ago

There are literally emails back and forth with Zuck where it's brought up that they're essentially making things as addictive as possible and it's bad for people, and he goes (to paraphrase) 'yeah, whatever. keep doing what you're doing'.

alex1138 29d ago
He said 'if you need info on people at Harvard just ask'. Called people who gave him information 'dumb fucks' (so, who's the next person on HN that's going to dare to reply to me that he was 'making a good point'? Do you see the Google founders saying that? Even as a joke?). Killed the competition of Instagram and Whatsapp. Copied every single Snapchat feature. Wants AI friend profiles for people. Hijacked emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 . Free Basics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 List goes on. Socio.

SwtCyber 29d ago

[flagged]

lukan 29d ago

In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive. Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.

mm263 29d ago
How would you prove this? What if the product was not intentionally designed to be engaging but ends up being more engaging than TikTok?
- lukan 29d ago
  Check for the targets of the dev teams. What gets them promotion. Right now they openly optimize for 'engagement".
  - zos_kia 29d ago
    Agreed, why would we have lawyers and judges if it wasn't to adjudicate exactly this kind of delicate issues ? We're not in a procedural show where you can gotcha the judge with a logical backflip. "Oh but your honor if you find me guilty then you must also shut down YouTube", he said with a confident smirk. As if it was not trivial to establish intent in the case of meta, who were probably high fiving while sharing reports titled "Basic methods to make teenage addiction go up".
Mattified 29d ago
Agreed. https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/ https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/
weatherlite 29d ago
> Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.

conception 29d ago

The best idea ive seen is if you decide what a user sees in an algorithm way (beyond “natural” ones like chronological) you are liable for the content - you are no longer a common carrier and can be sued for damages. That should be step 1.

blackoil 29d ago
> beyond “natural” ones like chronological So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?
- amelius 29d ago
  No, because mail programs can be configured by the user to turn off any algorithms that try to be smart.
- scottious 28d ago
  That kind of algorithm doesn't show you anything besides the messages in your inbox. It's never making a decision to show you X instead of Y, it's just deciding the ordering in which you see them. Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
- conception 28d ago
  There are already a couple of answers for standard male programs, but if the male programs such as Gmail pushes up content to your inbox, save from Google then yes, that would be an algorithm that would qualify. I would really argue what you are describing is a filter rather than a content algorithm.

atmavatar 29d ago

A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections. If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.

bonzini 29d ago
How do you distinguish engagement maximization and usability maximization?
- seanicus 28d ago
  I really have no idea how we can define most of this esp using the framework of previously established law but I do think that a definition of Dark Patterns could be tangentially worked into the psychological make-up of gambling.
tzs 28d ago
Section 230 has nothing whatsoever to do with any distinctions or differences between "publishers" and "platforms". That's just an internet myth. In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.

esseph 29d ago

> But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case What if I told you that judicial outcomes are often nondeterministic?

cloudie78 29d ago

[flagged]

somenameforme 29d ago

Tobacco regulations don't regulate the general case, they regulate tobacco products. I think the same will apply to social media. There's no need to define an addictive platform anymore than there's a need to define an addictive substance. Instead all that you need to define is a social media platform. And that can be expanded/adjusted as necessary. As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.

johnsmith4739 29d ago

For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed. If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential. Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling. "For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule." For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.

NietTim 28d ago

The same way we already distinguish between card games and gambling. I can think of quite a few to distinguish normal platforms from addictive ones; - non-chronological timeline - promoted content from people you don't follow - Rewards for using the app (reddit is a great example of this) - Dark patterns to take control away from the user about what they see And I'm sure I can think of a bunch more if I spent time on it.

anon373839 28d ago

> how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts. For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as: - Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior; - Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists; - Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product; - Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use; and so on.

nkrisc 28d ago

This seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be decided by a trial. It’s some mix of intent and the actual outcomes, more or less as you stated. I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter. In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.