> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
I've always found the notion of "stochastic terrorism" to be elastic, effectively transforming "speech a given person dislikes" into "danger" so censorship looks like virtue.
Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been happening with world leaders these days, it should be a central consideration.
You are worried about the “what if” fallout over the multiple world leaders actually engaging in it. Their followers enact violence on their behalf while the leader maintains plausible deniability/enough perceived distance from the act they can never be explicitly blamed.
You can be worried about more than one thing but clearly one is a bigger issue than the other right now.
I never said "multiple". Just the leader in the jurisdiction you live in.
And I'm genuinely not sure how to interpret your last sentence. In the US we have a President that is increasingly going after people for their speech, in quite a few cases by using the laws and policies put in place to go after dissent. He is going after colleges and businesses who have "bias against whites" using policies put in place to punish hate speech against minorities and women.
I agree with that all that. That is why I am surprised you’re downplaying the idea of “stochastic terrorism” and discouraging the term’s usage. I don’t really get it.
It’s also important to note that the MAGA movement doesn’t care what restraint is shown when they’re out of power, they simply use every tool in their toolbox and bury the sword to the hilt every time.
Yes - and the point I'm making is that their toolbox has a few additional, nasty tools for censorship because they were originally enacted with the belief that only good, honest people would use them.
"Not thrilled with that" is also something they exploit to manipulate you.
Seeing this in black-and-white terms like "robs people of any notion" makes it easier to turn your dislike into a false choice, like any half-decent stage magician, between comfort and "not thrilled".
Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.
And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
The guidance I offer is only these:
1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
While assuming absolutely zero bad will on your part, I would nevertheless find it fair if you were legally on the hook for whatever happened after the sale, unless you could prove that you provided reasonable means for the users of your extension to perform their due diligence on the new owner of the extension.
This is of course easy to say in hindsight, and is absolutely a requirement that should be enforced by the extension appstore, not by individual contributors such as yourself.
I wouldn't find that fair at all. Bad actors should be legally responsible for their bad action. If I sell you a taxi business, and then all of a sudden you decide to start robbing the customers - it's not my fault is it? And just to be clear, I had no idea if my extension was used for nefarious purposes, but in hindsight it probably was.
Customers were sold[1] a lifetime subscription to Honest Guy's taxis, and then Honest Guy does a secret deed to sell his taxi joint to Bad Guy[2] without telling any customer about it. Then customers start getting ripped of in all manner of ways, that some of them would have known to avoid if they knew their taxis were being run by Bad Guy.
[1] Of course, the issue here is that no contracts were signed.
[2] In the specific case I was replying to, there was no malice or intent to hide from you as seller. Yet, a better outcome could have been achieved by advertising the sale to those impacted.
I don't think there is any legal support for what I describe above, but in principle whenever a user signs up for Good Thing, and then gets baitswitched to Evil Thing, the main victim is the user, and it is fair to hold responsible everyone involved in the bait-and-switch maneuver.
Replace Honest Guy with local hospital or care home and bad guy with vulture capital, and you will find that this happens all too often; any time there's an established and captive audience, you will find vultures circling all around it.
What is fair and what is legal are very different concepts. I agree in principle with what you're saying but there is no legal basis for it - as you recognise.
No, how it should work is each extension is associated with a private key that is registered with a specific individual or legal entity and implies some kind of liability for anything signed with that key - and if/when the key changes (or the associated credentials), users will be explicitely alerted and need to re-authenticate the plugin.
If the old owner gives their key to the new owner, then they should be on the hook for it.
I was thinking of this yesterday, as I think this is also how domains should work.
How does this safe guards against having the extension under a company and selling that company off. Still the same entity, different owners, different "incentives".
I suffer from the same behavior, ever since I moved from Ubuntu to Debian.
An interactive system that does not interact (terminal not reactive, can't ssh in, screen does not refresh) is broken. I don't understand why this is not a kernel bug.
On my system, to add insult to injury, when the system does come back twenty minutes later, I get a "helpful" pop-up from the Linux Kernel saying "Memory Shortage Avoided". Which is just plain wrong. The pop-up should say "sorry, the kernel bricked your system for a solid twenty minutes for no good reason, please file a report".
Was it ever actually accused of crimes? Was it raided? Was there a list of charges?
It always seemed to me that TikTok was doing the same things that US based social networks were doing, and the only problem various parties could agree on with this was that it was foreign-owned.
American companies held liable for crimes include Bank of America ($87B in penalties), Purdue Pharma (opioid crisis), Pfizer for fraudulent drug marketing, Enron for accounting fraud. Everyone on hn should know about FTX, Theranos, I mean come on.
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
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