alt Hacker NewsThat rationale never convinced me.
Smoking has definite physiological effects. Molecules bind to receptors or neurons and initiate cascades/responses.
I don't see this with user interface in a browser at all. IF you wish to reason for that, why are regular ads allowed? They piss me off. Why do I have to see them? They cause my brain an addiction to want to buy crappy products. So why is there no ban here?
Let's face it - the EU is on a path of "Minority Report" here.
> I think the EU and other jurisdictions should really look beyond just limiting this stuff to kids
Yeah they try to restrict what we can do. We oldschool people call this fascism. See the EU trying to destroy VPN. And this is a meta-strategy we see here - many lobbyists are activated and try to "sync" laws that never made any sense to as many countries as possible. I see where corruption happens. And I don't buy the "we protect kids" fake lie for a moment.
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To hold this view you have to think of information as "not real", not like "real" molecules and receptors, the mind as distinct from the body, and then restrict the legal definition of harm to only "real" things.
This is an odd thing to do, because :
- information is real, it exists in the universe.
- the harm of social media is real, as measured by many of the same measures as the harm of smoking
Why not do something about ads? No, that's a good thought, we should do that too.
I think a decent conceptualization here is "psychic damage", as in a video game. These things deal a lot of it.
With some of the legal discovery happening at Facebook, we know that the company did internal research showing that it's products can be addicting and detrimental to kids: https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/facebook-knows-instag...
That's why I make the cigarette comparison. They know it's bad, but it's profitable for people to be addicted to it. I think it's bad for adults for a different reason, I've seen adults in my own life get influenced by things they see online (conspiracy theories, pseudo-science around health and nutrition, political radicalization). And this happens because it's profitable for people to be hooked on these topics with false or misleading information, not because it's true. That's not to say this never happened before recommendation algorithms, but it's a difference in magnitude. I think that's the reason we are seeing such a dramatic rise in political polarization- because it's profitable.
> Yeah they try to restrict what we can do. We oldschool people call this fascism.
Come on, this is an absurd statement. Governments regulate what people can do, yes. It’s part of their role. It’s why I can’t sell tainted meat on the street. It’s a good thing.
Of course there is a line you can cross where the control becomes excessive but “the government sets rules around what people can do, that’s fascism!” is absurd.
Already Hippocrates was linking the mind to the physical brain, and if you've never felt a physical reaction from looking at the fairer sex I feel bad for you son, yet if you got ninety-nine problems at least sex ain't one.
It's just so tedious to see this "information cannot harm anyone" theory in a context where a huge fraction of the people spend their entire day jobs tying to make phishing less effective.