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
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.
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.
Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.
The only risk in a bank deposit is up at the "societal collapse" level. Are you really so extreme as to say that's gambling, and if so isn't having money at all a form of gambling?
If you fiddle with "investments" with the intent of making money without doing anything else, that's gambling.
Sticking money in the bank with the hope that it's still there next time you come back to it is not really gambling. You're just doing the default thing.
But that applies to having money at all. That can't be enough to call it gambling.
> expectation, intent
I understand your argument here, but I disagree. Shifting to the bank that offers the best rate is good management, not gambling. Understanding how interest works and being motivated by interest to do bog-standard money storage doesn't turn that storage into gambling.
> without doing anything else
I don't understand how this connects at all. Maybe it reflects badly on you if you want to turn money into free income, but that doesn't make it any more or less of a gamble. It's a totally different axis.
There are lot of value investors which sit at home do stock picking occasionally. They don't work for their money. I don't think they are gambling.
The only investors that fits your non gambling definition seems to be the active investors who take part in the companies. But most investors don't
Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.
But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:
Roulette - generally gambling
Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible
Poker - not gambling
Stock market investing - not gambling
Roughly that.
Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.
I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.
This is what I was talking about in the second half of my comment: Every time I bring up the fact that these proposals would be overbearing, people start brainstorming infinite carve outs and exceptions that would exempt the products they use, but harm the products they don’t want other people using.
If these laws hit the books they’re not going to be neatly shaped to avoid the things you like and only impact the things you don’t.
> when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show.
The television is a tool for watching shows. The show is ostensibly the draw, and the television is the vehicle for watching it, no? So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something? If there is no show that one wants to watch, why the compulsion to sit in front of the television?
I've spent countless nights in front of Netscape Navigator surfing from site to site. I'm fully aware how compelling the device-content system can be. But it's always been the content side, not the device side, that was compelling.
I have the same experience with youtube, reddit and HN. I don't really know what I expect to see when I open the HN front page. If I knew, I'd navigate to that site directly. But I know I'll see something on HN. Maybe something that catches my eye.
Netflix is just the same. "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."
> "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."
Because I have kids, an active life, and a lot of physical hobbies and activities.
And some times it’s 10PM, too early for bed, too tired from a busy day, and I’m looking to relax and enjoy a show with my wife for an hour.
I said two hours per week because that’s about how much it ends up being. The fact that this is attracting criticism and even a sister comment calling me “addicted” is bizarre. What even is the goal here? Shaming people for relaxing and enjoying things? Feeling a smug sense of superiority over others for their consumption choices during down time?
Is it lost on you that these criticisms are coming in the comments section of a social news site where people waste a lot of time?
I'm a happy paid user of Spotify and just ignore the recommendations (I'm not looking at a screen), and I use YouTube heavily with a browser plugin that hides recommendations (which kills the end of video loop). I get recommendations from people, and use the products for curation, bookmarking and subscriptions. They're good.
Whereas Instagram and TikTok are vacuous and useless to me - I can't make myself use them. I think my brain knows what's wrong with them, and makes a kind of disgust reaction very quickly.
I agree, there's a very low level, emotional difference between them. I'm not sure I could encode it in law, but it is different.
Sleep-deprived teenager autopsy: a teenager with enormous purple eye bags, phone surgically fused to their hand, lying face-down on a school desk at 3 AM.
Body-image filter ward: rows of teenage faces grotesquely stretched, pinched, inflated, beautified and looksmaxed until everyone looks like the same embalmed Instagram mannequin.
Doomscroll thumb: a gigantic swollen thumb with the fingerprint worn completely smooth from infinite scrolling. The tendon is labeled "ENGAGEMENT."
Facebook scam victim: an elderly person's wallet dissected on an autopsy table -- completely hollow, with a Facebook ad where the money used to be.
Algorithmic stomach contents: an autopsy tray containing "suggested for you": rage bait, diet videos, conspiracy sludge, influencer ads, and one photo from somebody you actually know.
Predator warning: a cute Instagram DM screen shown as an anglerfish -- friendly profile photo as the glowing lure, enormous teeth hiding behind it.
Facebook Hospital: a free to play educational game where you have to spend virtual currency for cures to the ailments Facebook gave you, like Bloaty Head from reading all the AI generated engagement porn.
> This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows.
Spotify recommending music and Netflix recommending shows that are similar to what? To previously recommended music/shows. This is exactly the problem.
> I'm a responsible adult. I want those things.
This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
What problem, exactly?
Helping me find new music to enjoy?
I’m beginning to think some people have forgotten what we’re supposed to be angry about and now we’re just angry at all things tech.
Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful. It improves my life. I lose nothing to it. I gain new exposure to music.
It’s fine. Let people enjoy things.
> This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
I assure you I am neither addicted nor am I gambling when I listen to new music on Spotify.
What are we even doing here? Is this some puritanical push against all things that people might enjoy?
You're claiming it's making your life better, ostensibly by a relative report of the hedonic response a newly introduced piece of music auto delivered to you by the recommendation algorithm invokes. The problem they hint at though is the passive nature involved. You aren't finding that new piece, it's getting pushed. That pushing incentivizes optimizing for continued engagement, an act children, intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals, as well as those in the throes of cognitive decline/impairment, are not at all well equipped to self-regulate against when pitted against paid behavioral psychologists designing maximally engagement encouraging interfaces.
The incentive, and the existence of predatible populations is the problem I take away from it. I can agree you should be free to opt-in mind, but I can also see the wisdom in a by default interface wherein engagement hacking is forbidden being the norm, and that norm coming with a minimally controversial algorithm boiling down to "chronological feed of known/subscribed to sources", followed by a link of some sort to open an interface to the recommendations.
Facebook/Insta/Shorts are absolutely not that non-engagement farming interface. Hell my grandmother toward the end was about driven mad by it, and it was all I could do to just try to remind her that just because the machine had it on offer doesn't mean she had to partake, but her community centric character made that a bit of an ordeal for her.
There is absolutely a pathological pattern to the way tech companies hunt for eyeballs to monetize, and it is a damn shame it's taken this long to start getting traction to even talk about it.
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
In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.
You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.
Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.
"You can stop gambling at any time"
As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.
The problem with your examples is that it's a person lying to themselves. GP is acting as an objective third party and telling the truth about their hypothetical.
There are lots of things you really can stop at any time. I could stop eating peanut butter at any time, if I had a compelling reason.
You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.
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
If you as a person engage with a product to a degree where it causes demonstrable, measurable harm to yourself or your life, you are addicted.
If you repeatedly willingly do so despite the harm, then yes.
- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")
- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer
- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds
- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups
And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.
In other words, regulate and educate
> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.
> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.
If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.
No matter what the “algorithm” is, at some point it’s a choice of what to put in front of the user - a publishing choice.
Unless the rules are solely determined by myself and deterministic (no selection or choice on the platform end) then they are publishers.
And liable.
Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.
But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.
Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.
Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.
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.
So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?
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.
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.
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.
Well yeah they hate to think about themselves that way, but that's the life they choose. Now - would they like that choice to be taken away from that or substinatially reduced? Would they like to live without Netflix, Meta, Youtube, porn, junk food etc etc - or have these products completely transformed ? Seems like they wouldn't.
"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".
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.
Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.
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
Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.
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")
What if I told you that judicial outcomes are often nondeterministic?
List goes on. Socio.
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.
Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.
We just use those.
It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.
People are addicted to reddit, heck I know people who are addicted to Stocks app because they just need something to scroll.
Modern day addictions are complex and products are not the sole cause imo, they are just filling a void. Why that void exists needs to be answered. You remove Instagram and that time will be replaced by Reddit, tiktok or whatever product gives you some dopamine
Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.
Those both have problems too, I'm sure.
New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.
Is it the harm provided? Then what do we count as harm, and where is the line.
IE, There's no one stopping me from eating unhealthy, IE sugary foods, which are heavily addictive. I ride a motorbike, and I'd consider myself addicted to that, and it's got a high chance of harm, but we don't ban those. Ditto with gaming, social media, hobby XYZ.
I personally think the freedom to choose your vice is reasonable.
One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.
It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.
I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.
Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.
But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.
Fidelity zero is compelling, in a retirement account.
These US corporations operate outside the law - and they are protected by the orange king who is just too incompetent for anything other than pocketing away more money from the people, which is the only real skill he has.
Interesting assertion. Sounds like something that should be proven in court.
> Instead, we are debating if Instagram is bad for kids? Really?
Considering there is considerable scientific evidence that Instagram is bad for kids, and that Meta knew it was bad for kids and designed it to be addictive to kids and teens anyway, yeah. Really.
Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
fundamentally different how? Because they use your visual cortex to trigger neurons?
Have you experienced addiction before? Nicotine withdrawal doesn't make your hand move on it's own, it makes you crave a cigarette, and then you pick up a cigarette and smoke it to make the craving go away.
If you crave scrolling instagram, even when you want to be doing anything else, isn't that the same thing? Maybe you can't point at a specific molecular basis - yet (if you were to look at dopamine and other neurotransmitters, I wouldn't be surprised if social media spikes them in a way similar to other vices) - but the outcome is the same.
What?
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
This product that kills the users of it with remarkably high rates and has effectively no positive use is fundamentally different from light and sound.