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0 pointsConst-me1y ago0 comments

> similar tangible harm caused by lack of regulation on data collection?

There’s a spike in teenager suicides, girls in particular. The phenomenon is well researched, it correlates with popularity of social media among teenagers. I believe that’s causation not just correlation, because social media didn’t became popular everywhere at once, they did gradually for different countries/languages, the teenager suicides spike follows.

Restricting data collection will fix that by dismantling the business model. Will be harder for tech companies to convert screen time into profits. Will even flip the motivation developing addictive apps: the more time users will spend there the more bandwidth they consume i.e. profits will turn into costs. Which is good for most people, except employees and stock owners of social media companies.

P.S. Personally, I prefer more radical approach: total ban of advertisements on the internets. Many cities did it for billboards, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do the same online.

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mgraczyk1y ago

Banning online advertisements would essentially cripple small businesses in the US. Even local businesses today rely on online ads for foot traffic. Banning ads would send us back to the economy of the 1950s, where most profit accrues to a number of powerful corporations, and small manufacturers and creators have no market power.

I used data and ran experiments to measure and mitigate teen well being and harm at Instagram. I was not on the team responsible for this, but I worked on organic ranking and was responsible for understanding and measuring the impact of these things. I can say with certainty nobody cares more about teen well being than Meta. It's their future, and the success Instagram over Snapchat is essentially completely due to better positive interventions for well being. We measured this carefully with RCTs and had more data than anyone on the planet.

Overall Instagram is net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage. Meta spends hundreds of millions trying to fix those latter, rarer cases.

Const-meOP1y ago

> where most profit accrues to a number of powerful corporations, and small manufacturers and creators have no market power

You’re describing the status quo with online ads still legal. Amazon has 37.6% share of e-commerce; small manufacturers can’t compete. Google hosts 79% of videos viewed over the internets, and it abuses small creators really bad, with no ways to appeal or contact humans.

One of the reasons how these corporations became that powerful was unrestricted and legal digital surveillance. Another reason, anti-monopoly regulators asleep at their job allowing big tech companies to easily acquire competitors (e.g. Google was competing with YouTube for a year or so with “Google Video” product, failed, then acquired the competitor).

> net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage

Many researchers who don’t work for FB were warning for years. Couple years ago some of that internal research was leaked, here’s a copy-paste “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” https://archive.is/qBpaq#selection-915.1-915.113 I would not call 32% “a small percentage”.

Another thing, “negative for just a small percentage” is a poor defense. Even if it’s indeed tiny, it still doesn’t mean the business model should be legal. Imagine a lottery where 0.1% people win $1M, 1% people win $10k, 10% people win $1k, 89.9% don’t win or lose anything, and 0.01% lose their life – don’t you think a business model like that should be illegal?

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