Social Media Platforms Need To Stop Never-Ending Scrolling, UK's Starmer Says (reuters.com) 44
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said social media platforms should remove addictive infinite-scroll features for young users as Britain considers new child-safety measures. "We're consulting on whether there should be a ban for under 16s," Starmer told BBC Radio. "But I think equally important, the addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic to my mind. They need to go." Reuters reports: Britain, like other countries, is considering restricting access to social media for children and it is testing bans, curfews and app time limits to see how they impact sleep, family life and schoolwork. Social media companies had designed algorithms that were intended to encourage addictive behavior, and parents were asking the government to intervene, Starmer said.
[...] More than 45,000 people had already responded to its consultation on children's online safety, the UK government said, adding that there was still time to contribute before a deadline of May 26. "We want to hear from mums and dads who are worried about the amount of time their children spend online and what they are viewing," Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Monday. "We want to hear from teenagers who know better than anyone what it is like to grow up in the age of social media. And we want to hear from families about their views on curfews, AI chatbots and addictive features."
[...] More than 45,000 people had already responded to its consultation on children's online safety, the UK government said, adding that there was still time to contribute before a deadline of May 26. "We want to hear from mums and dads who are worried about the amount of time their children spend online and what they are viewing," Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Monday. "We want to hear from teenagers who know better than anyone what it is like to grow up in the age of social media. And we want to hear from families about their views on curfews, AI chatbots and addictive features."
Ban everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ban everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes it is the right and appropriate thing to do, but I'd hardly call it "first response". The Snowdrop Petition circulated after Dunblane, but not Hungerford. It took the repeated failure of government to actually do anything useful that caused society to demand a ban.
After the Traveller threre-day festival in a farmer's field, the UK government tried to ban going places for a common purpose. A man claiming to be the reincarnation of King Arthur sued on the grounds that he couldn't join up with his knights if that was illegal. The UK courts determined that he was vastly more credible and overturned the ban.
In the 1950s, when the government restricted freedom of movement, the Mass Kinder Trespass forced a right to roam act.
In short, we don't give a damn what the government wants, and never have. We know our rights and defend, whether that means increased freedom or introducing bans. The rules are decided by the public, the government has really no say in the matter and never has had.
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So do the people of the politically Blue parts of America. Covid was a great example of this.
You're talking out your ass.
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If you get near a point, make it. It's clear from your frothing that you lack one.
No more solutions. I prefer my alcohol straight. (Score:2)
You're just feeding an obvious troll. Or is it some kind of personal thing? You enjoy pointing out what an idiot the identity is?
On the story, my new Subject is another failed joke attempt from the other meaning of solution. However I really have given up on personally contributing to solutions, even in cases where the solutions seem pretty obvious. I dare say even in cases where the obvious solutions appear to have natural paths to Step 4: PROFIT.
So now I'm just looking for an existing implementation of a
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You're just feeding an obvious troll. Or is it some kind of personal thing? You enjoy pointing out what an idiot the identity is?
Gotta get some kicks somewhere.
So you're looking for a site that presents news from specific curated sources? If you can find any that still do RSS, use a RSS reader :)
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Argue? I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely concerned about someone who is afraid to "take it up the arse" for medical reasons. Prostate cancer is a killer of men.
Re:Ban everything (Score:4, Interesting)
The UK's first response always seems to ban things.
In what way? The UK has thousands of pages of law regulating addictive behaviour, especially when its directed at under 16s. Additionally the UK has enacted and threatened to expand regulations on social media platforms to such an extent that Zuckerberg has repeatedly and publicly complained.
It very much seems like this is the *last* response from the UK, not the first.
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"...a group... ban[s] everything, to the point where they have no idea about what's going on in the outside world and are left to sit in a room and wonder..."
Welcome to irony. You just described social media. The algorithm decides what you see, buries everything else as effectively as any ban, and leaves you in a cozy echo chamber wondering why everyone agrees with you, and concluding that opposing views are a fringe minority safely ignored. Congratulations... you've recreated the ban, but with engagement metrics and more societal damage.
IG 'friend' scroll (Score:2)
Wrong solution (Score:1, Troll)
The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies. It is the fault of local and national governments in failure to maintain services and failure to actually meet the costs of having a society. In the end, the price will be paid, but it has been paid through mental health.
Enough is enough. The sheer incompetence of successive administrations is a disgrace and a dishonour to this nation. The government should pay the bill for having a functional socie
Re:Wrong solution (Score:5, Interesting)
The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies.
A lot of it really is the social media companies' fault. When I look at Facebook, my feed used to be 99% stuff posted by my friends and family. Now, it is only about 20% stuff posted by my friends and family. The rest is a combination of groups that I'm in (20%), random influencers and groups and pages that are being promoted (50%), and straight-up ads (10%). There is more garbage than content. And there's no good way to get the trash out, no matter how hard you try.
And yet, that steaming pile of garbage is being shown because for some subset of the population, seeing things that drive interactions, rather than things that genuinely deeply interest the user, causes those users to come to the site more and stay on the site more.
Meta, realizing that they have hit peak user count and can't realistically grow much bigger, have to find a way to keep the stock price from cratering because of zero growth potential, so they are abusing users to try to gain more eyeball time instead. They deliberately feed the addiction of those who have short attention spans and need continuous input to stimulate them.
The moment they started chasing engagement instead of users was the point when they became a net harm to society. And all of this social media addiction stems from that. Very nearly all of the harm that they cause stems from that. It stems from sites designed to continuously route you towards content that will be more engaging to keep you on the site longer. This is not to say that there is not room for some of that on a broad scale, but doing it too narrowly leads to rabbit holes, which are a net negative.
Fixing this requires keeping companies small, and requiring that big social media companies make their networks available to smaller companies (federation) so that there is actual competition in the marketplace. But the fact that governments should have intervened decades ago doesn't mean that it isn't still the fault of the companies. They had a choice. They could have continued to do business the way they did before, knowing that their stock price would never grow. They chose to seek revenue over user happiness.
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When I look at Facebook, my feed used to be 99% stuff posted by my friends and family. Now, it is only about 20% stuff posted by my friends and family.
It's dangerous to go alone, take this [facebook.com].
Also, never use the app. Not only is it fucking stupid in general to trust Facebook to run code on your phone directly (it's not great in the browser either) but a prior version of their app copied everyone's contacts and then DELETED THEM FROM THEIR PHONES so we know conclusively that using the app is a shit plan.
The moment they started chasing engagement instead of users was the point when they became a net harm to society.
The original goal of Facebook was for Zuckerfuck to make engagement with women by tricking them into trusting him with misuse of their PII.
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If I can not use a web browser with my ad blocking etc extensions running then I will NEVER use that service.
My facebook engagement is about 1 minute a day, longer if I am blocking advertisers (no reasons given), block "follow" BS accounts, etc and kill all the "you may know these people", so 70% of the time I get a "Something went wrong" notification from facebook...so I KNOW I have done everything right... F them.
The Apps are the way social media st
Wrong Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we quit trying to attack UIs?
I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
As long as we look at these companies in terms of what they *do*, rather than what they *are*, we're never going to actually solve any problems.
If you ban this or that feature, they'll use their teams of psychologists to find something else that isn't specifically regulated and use that feature. Or they'll have a litigation of lawyers come in and argue that the thing they're doing doesn't fit the particular legislation. But we need to come to the point where we all agree that artificially trying to force someone to engage beyond the point they normally would is not "making a better product", it's just sleazy.
I get the argument that people can make choices to do what they want. I support that. But we also shouldn't collectively turn a blind eye to companies going out of their way to milk psychology and exploit people. Just because I accept responsibility for the fact that I spend more time on YouTube than I should doesn't mean that YouTube gets a pass in the matter.
I 100% agree that parents need to be way more engaged, and that teens shouldn't get unfettered access to social media. But just because some parents are less engaged than they should be doesn't excuse bad behavior by Instagram / Tiktok.
Personal freedoms doesn't have to be diametrically opposed to companies being responsible. I'm all for a smaller government with less stupid crap, but if a multinational conglomerate isn't going to make right choices on its own, then oversight ends up as the only viable option.
I completely went off course with my argument, but as a curmudgeon, I stand by it.
Re:Wrong Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we quit trying to attack UIs?
I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
No, it really doesn't. What it does is:
There is literally never a situation where this is inherently the right thing to do (except for the company's ad-driven bottom line), because the quantity of data available is always finite. And the very design of infinite scrolling creates a perverse incentive to fill the feed with garbage and ads and padding and boosted posts and groups you might like and everything else under the sun, rather than telling you that none of your actual friends have posted anything new since you last looked.
More to the point, it disguises how much less actual use people are making of Facebook. And as people use it less, it requires padding the content with more and more garbage to hide the reduction in organic content, which reduces the production of organic content even more, eventually turning in a death spiral. But they'll hide that for as long as they can by packing in more and more fake engagement opportunities.
But we need to come to the point where we all agree that artificially trying to force someone to engage beyond the point they normally would is not "making a better product", it's just sleazy.
Agreed. Where we disagree is that I think infinite scroll inherently leads to that abuse. :-)
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It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
Name some. As you do think about how that use case is impacted by an ever changing content display, inability to search, being temporarily unstable and being generally uncountable, unprintable, unsavable, having no clearly defined count to the end showing no indication of progress within the content. etc.
I'm genuinely curious as to what you think is a good use-case for this, because I'm struggling to name even one.
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Historical data lookup is the first one that comes to mind.
I want to pull back data, and keep pulling back more data as I go down further. This is a context where the data has value - it's not trying to keep me on the site. I'd *love* it if my bank would do this for me.
From a purely social media perspective, you're right, there aren't really any good places for it. But I'm just saying that the concept of a UI element that grabs more data when you get to the end isn't fundamentally bad.
My initial argument
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It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
Name some.
You can't think of example uses for lazy loading of new content?
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I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
As long as we look at these companies in terms of what they *do*, rather than what they *are*, we're never going to actually solve any problems.
That's likely exactly how it will work. Infinite scroll itself won't be banned, just infinite scroll intended to be addictive. If a social media company wants to argue it in court, they can try to convince a judge that their implemented it for some reason other than to keep people on the site.
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I think my argument there is that we shouldn't be saying that what they did wrong was to "use infinite scrolling maliciously" as much as the broader concept of "creating addictive content".
Please forgive the poor comparison, but it's against the law for me to cause bodily harm to you. There might be additional laws that indicate that my reasons modify the nature of the crime, or the implements I use change sentencing, but the underlying law is about my actions and how they cause harm.
Similarly, I don't bel
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That makes sense. It should be a general law about harmful/addictive behaviour.
Typical / Infinite pagination next? (Score:3)
Stating the problem without offering a solution.
Infinite scrolling is not a problem here. It's infinite content. Ban infinite scrolling and you'll end up having infinte pagination.
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Euro-Socialism
Words detected. Useful signal missing.
Refresh button, or will they ban that too (Score:2)
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Four pages is often what it takes to get through the sponsored links.
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I used to be "sponsor" paid the money for a concert, play, art show, etc etc and there was a some but not overwhelming advertising, but the adverts did not interfere with what they had sponsored.
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In better countries the price you see on the shelf is what you pay, not just a figure that looks low that you can then add on a whole pile of taxes etc on top of knowing the majority will never be able to work out the real price.
AND, the US does NOT set th
Its not infinite (Score:2)
Infinity is longer than you think.
(Social media companies should limit scrolling to googol - 1 pages)
Meh (Score:2)
infinite scroll needs a ban (Score:2)
Its right up there with excessive sugar in breakfast cereal for things we should stop tolerating.