Are you being intentionally obstinate? I can't help but feel like you're sealioning.

An increasing number of young people get their news from social media and what is "engaging" isn't necessarily what's true. This leads to greater political polarisation, nuance is lost, tribalism increases, people treat conversations as things to be won as opposed to opportunities to share information. People spend their entire time doomscrolling because everything is "engaging" so it caters to their paranoia and attempts to keep them glued to their phone, ramping up their anxiety and paranoia because it makes them more money. People stay up late scrolling a feed that hooks them, sleep less, perform less well at work, may lose their job and all the ramifications that go along with that. Parents spend more time on their phones than with their children, a generation of babies and toddlers are having to compete for attention with these apps and in many cases fail because they're designed so well. What's worse is the babies get thrust an ipad and then are brought up by arbitrary strangers who may not have their best interests at heart and are exposed to considerable amounts of advertising at far too young an age.

I could go on but I feel like you're just going to give another one liner where you pretend that actually there's nothing wrong with this or smth.

▲

card_zero 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Eh, sorry, edited some stuff in now. I'm not a sealion, honest, we just have different points of view where what is obvious to you (to the point of irrelevance?) is unsubstantiated and crucial from my perspective.

I'm going to acknowledge "anxiety and paranoia" as something that it's particularly unethical to pander to. But I feel like that deserves a name in its own right, separate from addiction. I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment about it.

- I guess that's (automated) fearmongering and hoaxing.

▲

Quarrelsome 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I see your angle but I worry the "free will" premise sleep walks us into manipulation. People are vulnerable to the The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert B Cialdini).

My perspective might be a bit nannying but I think we're arguing the nation-building vs individualism axis and the free-will vs regulation axis.

For example, smoking has some benefits, its a cheap stimulent, helps you focus, good for people with undiagnosed ADHD. However its highly addictive and causes terrible long term health issues, so where do we fall on the line of its regulation? Should we allow everyone to persue their "free will" and advertising to be unregulated? Tobacco companies have a perverse incentive to downplay and suppress the health costs, fabricate positive research and lobby governments. Last time we allowed that everyone smoked, that might be good for free will, but is that good for society, for nation building?

I'd make a similar argument for our addictive online services, I think they should probably be age gated and increasingly regulated. While they're beneficial for the US economy they're detrimental to the nation-building of all nations exposed to them.

I would ask you to consider how the internet would look if online advertising was banned. While its an unrealistic aim, I think that view is extremely informative to the idea of _actual_ free will. If you remember how the old internet looked, its clear how the profit motive has distorted the internet beyond recognition.

To throw up a more middle ground example based on a video I saw a couple of days ago: there's a popular "health food influencer" on tiktok who gives contradictory advice based on products he's promoting and their ingredients list. In January sugar is a terrible ingredient but in March its entirely fine. He's shilling via product placement and there's no regulation of his platform. If people lack critical thinking they just blindly buy these products and learn nothing about health. You might state they're exercising their free will, but is that genuinely true? Maybe he only obtained his traffic because he had no qualms about how manipulative his content was. Did he get his early numbers via botting and then ending up towards the top of the list? Perhaps he threw $20k at another popular influencer to spam mentions and that's how he got his early traffic. An entirely unregulated system permits this. If the money wasn't there the only people talking about health foods would be people genuinely interested who gave reliable advice. The profit motive creates this distortion because its profitable to be misleading and sensationalist. There is a nuanced conversation to be had around people being able to make money on the platform and dedicate a career to it and banning advertising doesn't allow that. Somewhere there's a middle ground, I'm not sure where that is but I don't think we're anywhere near it today.

If you want a genuinely dark example then look up subliminals [0]. Its a niche community of grifter adults and tragically sad children, where the children seem to be labouring under a bizarre misconception peddled by the grifters that by repeatedly watching a specially prepared video they can become taller or have a prettier nose.

[0] - https://reddit.com/r/Subliminal/

▲

card_zero 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hey, that's a lot of assuming the conclusion. I meant that the piano-player has free will in the sense that she's not addicted. I don't want to argue for the right to use addictive drugs, I'm trying to establish whether TikTok is one.

▲

Quarrelsome an hour ago | parent [-]

and the "health food influencer" and subliminals? They're similar setups. Online advertising creates a perverse incentive and this was formerly constrained by the gatekeeping of traditional print media, but the internet does away with that constraint by making publishing a free-for-all.

We're already in a future where "news entertainment" has replaced news and journalism is inherently unprofitable because it lacks the same attention grabbing properties of not caring for the truth. The new chapter in this is that "news entertainment" doesn't need on the ground journalism, and advertising rates pay better in the developing world. This means that all the facebook grandmas and grandads as well as the children are getting hooked on foreign-based indignance mills that are not regulated in the slightest. These foreign-based "news entertainment" shows only care for impressions, so simply re-enforce the desired ignorance of their audiences and tend towards pushing bigoted world views, in some cases even encouraging racism towards the very countries that are actually producing the content! In the very worst case scenarios foreign state actors use these channels in order to push their propaganda and stir up unrest in rival nation states.

It is free will, but in the big picture, its harmful to society.

▲

card_zero an hour ago | parent [-]

Right, yeah. "Misleading", like you say. That health food guy's a shyster (like the snake oil salesmen of yore), and algorithms can sometimes send a feed into a shyster-like mode. So now we come down to terminology: addiction is the wrong word, deception is the right one. This isn't purely semantic, it's a different kind of hold over people. More cognitive.

Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.

▲

Quarrelsome 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

> addiction is the wrong word

I used that word mostly because of the name of that book "Hooked".

> like the snake oil salesmen of yore

the problem is that you could run that guy out of town in the past and his damage was localised. Nowadays he can be the biggest player in town.

> Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.

I'd go further and state that all advertising is bad, but I might be a touch too radical. Also it might be too late, given how strong "native advertising" and product placement now is. The content and the adverts have merged. LLMs might offer some brief respite as I think it will be hard to reliably advertise inside that content.

	▲	card_zero 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Defining advert is hard. Store signage saying "we sell things here" seems essential information. Standing in the street and yelling about bananas and peppers? What if I step that up and yell that I have red hot peppers for sale? People have to know what's available, and I have to be free to sincerely talk it up. Then it can get intrusive and insincere, but you can only police that at the extremes of intrusion and dishonesty.