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Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

119 points by tartoran

by everdrive

5 subcomments

Large groups of people just don't know how to solve these sorts of problems. A government will never say "facebook should either not exist or should radically modify its product so that it is no longer successful" At best, they will push for identity verification or age verification.
These are not the only two possible courses, but these will be the choices put in front of us. Get used to reading books and going on walks. The internet is almost dead.

by intended

0 subcomment

These are the types of cases that shed light on the desire for age verification.

by josefritzishere

2 subcomments

This is an area where we really could use case law to protect kids from the Zuckerberg's of the world. It's important for the future. We're not going to "self-regulate" our way out of this.

by alex1138

0 subcomment

Addiction has a lot of definitions one can split hairs over but I note the following
The feeds are and have been for years highly random (at least one anecdote of two people who were 'married' - relationship status - on FB yet none saw the others' posts)
If you don't go on FB they really don't like it and they spam you to death
Can Zuck meaningfully claim they're not in the business of addiction, whatever else? No. His life philosophy is "dumb fucks"
Edit: Oh, and People You May know. Now everyone can friend you and you have 2000 friends... none of whose posts you'll ever see. And the psychological baggage. Is the cute girl I like looking at my profile and that's why they're on there, or is it shamelessly pulled from geolocation data?

by hnisfrauds

0 subcomment

by hparadiz

3 subcomments

Seriously losing confidence in the American judicial system with rulings like this. Facebook is already blocking children below age 13 and now with social media bans in place in many states the cut off is now 16. So frankly rulings like this just seem like the government seeing dollar signs and asking for hand outs. And all because people apparently can't accept any personal responsibility.
Disclaimer: I do not have a FB account.

by snickerbockers

2 subcomments

This actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research.
There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.