Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

Bingo. If more people were carefully analyzing language, they could spot earlier that people are on the slippery slope of, lets call it, anti-human beliefs; as then they may help them to correct course.

If we don't, these narratives are getting normalized. A society is on a curve of collective behavior, there is no stable point. Only direction.

GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat is doing?

> Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made

I’ve done this for all social media, and more recently deleted all social apps. I’ll go on Facebook sometime through the web browser, mainly for marketplace.

Facebook was the first app I tested disabling notifications on. This had to be about 10 years ago, I noticed they would give me a new notification every 5-10 minutes. I was addicted to checking what the notification as. Usually garbage, and the less I used Facebook the more garbage the notice. Since I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything but marketplace my entire feed is now garbage. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with me now and its former history.

Having no social apps has been a hard change to get used to. But I feel so much better not feeling like I need to scroll.

I only scroll on hacker news now… which is easy because the top page doesn’t get that many updates in a day, and after several minutes of browsing “new” I’m satiated I’ve seen all I might want to see

So after doing this for 2 years, what were the negative effects other than a few seconds spent each day?

At my college, someone got kicked out for yikyacking "gonna shoot all black people a smile tomorrow" and everyone quickly realized exactly how anonymous it really was after the guy was found a few hours later.

Thing is, there was a comma between "people" and "a smile" which made his poorly thought out joke read a lot differently. Dumb way to throw away your education.

We block a number of online properties including Snapchat and YouTube using NextDNS.

We have different profiles for different devices to allow, for example, YouTube on the television but not on kids tablets or phones.

One past thread: Thank You, Yakkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 - April 2017 (108 comments)

Lots of comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ah, a world where this is taken to an extreme might even bring back the mythical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place rapidly disappearing in the American suburb and city alike... because it becomes the only place in the community where property owners don't geofence to forbid social media use!

https://theweek.com/culture-life/third-places-disappearing

But of course, social media companies will pour incredible amounts of money into political campaigns long before they let anything close to this happen.

Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work.

Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.

Geo fencing requires constantly sharing location data.

My team at Facebook in the 2010s made many such reports.

We did that work because our mandate was to understand the users and how to serve them.

We did that with full good natured ethical intent.

We turned the findings in to project proposals and MVPs.

The ones that were revenue negative were killed by leadership after all that work, repeat cycle.

> Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear?

They hire people on the autism spectrum who are inclined to say things out loud without much regard/respect for whether they are "supposed to" say it. *cough* James Damore.

People knew smoking killed for decades. Do you think that with no policy change and no regulation, that Marlboro and Philip Morris would have let their market tank?

Advertising - banned, smoking indoors - banned, and most importantly, taxing the hell out of them (every 10% increase in cigarette prices results in a 4% decrease in adult consumption and a 7% decrease in youth consumption).

There isn't really directly comparable policy to taxing these free social media platforms., however, and the whole thing is a bit stickier. Before any policies can stick, the public needs to be aware of the issues. That is tough when most people's 'awareness of issues' comes directly from social media.

I think part of it is that social media has now been around long enough that it is becoming possible to study the long term effects on our monkey brains from being constantly exposed to the lives and opinions of millions of strangers on a global level.

for sure. but if ANY of that kind of thing gets in the way of profits, well then that's not OK. in capitalism, profit is the only thing that matters. CSAM? drugs? underage use? pfft.

until this country gets serious about this stuff - and don't hold your breath on that - this is the absolute acceptable norm.

I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough.

I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things.

This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monitoring for kids than adults, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the idea that technology platforms should be policing everyone's messages.

So I sleep just fine knowing that some kids (and adults) are going to have bad experiences. I send my kid to the playground knowing he could be hurt. I take him skiing. He just got his first motorcycle. We should not strive for a risk-free world, and I think efforts to make it risk-free are toxic.

I’ve worked there, maybe my 2 cents: at the end of the day I have mouths to feed and honestly I used to be idealistic regarding employer moral compass and so on, but coming from the bottom in socio-economic terms I will exercise my right to be cynical about it.

I have some support to the Trust&Safety team at the same period of the whole debate about the section 230; and from what I can tell Snap has some flagging mechanisms quite good related with people selling firearms, drugs and especially puberty blockers.

The thing that I can say is that a lot of parents are sleeping at the wheel with teenagers and not following what is going on with their child.

As a parent, I never failed to recognize it.

I just failed to be able to do anything about it.

You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends.

This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless.

So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down in this forum. Just imagine across the whole polis.

>> How is all this not heavily regulated?

It isn’t properly regulated because the CEO’s and founders just moan that it isn’t possible to regulate so much user generated content. I’m of the opinion that, in that case, their sites shouldn’t exist but people seem to have convinced themselves that Facebook et al provide too much value to stand up to.

I'm curious as to when was the generation that failed to recognize the dangers of invitingly large (treasure) chests. :3

(I finished watching the last episode just as you posted this comment, still giddy about it. :D

I tried to spread out watching the season for the first time over more than a week, and failed miserably...)

What exactly do you want relegated? What powers do you want Trump to have to control the speech of Americans?

You can essentially just wildcard the social network name and everything still applies. That's the status quo

The same outlet did the TikTok story:

Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform.