[HN Gopher] Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?
___________________________________________________________________
Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?
Author : Tomte
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-04-16 12:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.afterbabel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.afterbabel.com)
| dang wrote:
| There was a related thread on the front page: _TikTok is harming
| children at an industrial scale_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665
|
| Since that article is several months old and this one is new, we
| swapped it out. I assume it makes more sense to discuss the new
| one. Also, there were lots of criticisms of the other article for
| supposedly focusing only on TikTok, and those criticisms seem
| supplanted by this piece. (I'm not arguing whether it's right or
| wrong, nor have I read it.)
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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._
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| You can essentially just wildcard the social network name and
| everything still applies. That's the status quo
| graemep wrote:
| Except FB, which mostly harms the middle aged.
| morkalork wrote:
| It was harming kids on an industrial scale back when it was
| new, before Instagram et al cannabalized their audience
| basisword wrote:
| Was it? In Facebook's early days you actually followed
| your friends and only saw their content. There wasn't
| even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped
| showing the feed chronologically. It wasn't perfect but
| it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and
| pretty similar to MySpace.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Getting into the limits of my memory here, but as far as
| I recall, early Facebook didn't have a feed at all,
| chronological or otherwise. It was just a directory of
| students at your own school, skeuomorphic to the physical
| "facebook" that universities would hand out each semester
| to students on campus, which gave you a headshot of
| everyone along with their room numbers. At some point,
| they added an updateable "status" field to the profiles,
| to tell your friends how you were feeling that day or
| what you were doing or whatever. When they started
| showing those on the home page instead of just on the
| profiles, then there was a feed, which eventually
| transformed into the monster we see today.
|
| But early on, it was just a digital phonebook with
| headshots and exactly equivalent to physical items that
| schools already distributed.
| biker142541 wrote:
| Would generally disagree here. Especially when limited to
| edu emails, it was focused on human connections. Even
| after it opened to broader audience, it was centered on
| explicit connections you already had (or to some limited
| extent discovering new ones through network effects).
|
| Now whether social networks in even these basic forms are
| harmful (discouraging physical connections, isolation in
| digital environments, etc), is maybe a different topic.
|
| Exposure to echo chambers of harmful, hateful content
| driven by algorithms seems to be more the focus here.
| MySpace, early FB, or even AIM/ICQ, and others focused on
| facilitating connections and communication didn't drive
| the same level of harm imo.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| and countries, at a secret service scale
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb...
| burningChrome wrote:
| With both of these articles, are we finally getting to a tipping
| point with social media and its negative effects on people?
| isk517 wrote:
| 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.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| 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.
| fazeirony wrote:
| 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.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the
| explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism,
| threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak
| enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school
| grounds.
|
| I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be
| required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can
| create their own disabling geofence on their property. How great
| would it be to have a snapchat free home zone? Or FB, or tiktok
| dang wrote:
| 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...
| rollcat wrote:
| 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.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Geofencing around schools is the kind of thing you might see
| if government attempted to regulate this
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Don't we geofence sale of alcohol and tobacco around
| schools?
| vkou wrote:
| I think vending machines dispensing whiskey shooters
| would be a great addition to any classroom.
|
| People clearly want the product, and I would clearly
| stand to make a lot of money from it.
| kgwxd wrote:
| You want every (any?) app knowing your exact location at
| all times? That's not how we "geofence" the sale of
| physical goods.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| I imagine this could be set up on the operating system
| side. All the apps would receive is a go/no go signal,
| not fine coordinates
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| By this logic technological "progress" can not cause societal
| problems?
|
| Which of course it can so why can't a part of the solution be
| technological?
| vacuity wrote:
| It can be, but I think practically it can't be. Maybe that
| doesn't fit into a nice logical statement, but there you
| have it. Or: when you build yourself a constantly-
| accelerating, never-stopping racecar and get on it, it's
| hard to build a steering wheel or brake pedal for it. Or
| or: it's a lot easier to get into a deep hole than to get
| out of one.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Technological solutions to societal problems just don't
| work.
|
| Ehhh, that's just a poorly thought out slogan whose "truth"
| comes from endless repetition. Societal problems can have
| technical origins or technical enablers. In which case a
| technical solution might work to make things better.
|
| So no, there's no technical solution to "people being mean to
| each other," but there is a technical solution to, say,
| "people being meaner to each other because they can cloak
| themselves with anonymization technology."
| rollcat wrote:
| > Societal problems can have [...] technical enablers.
|
| That was my point.
|
| > [...] there is a technical solution to, say, "people
| being meaner to each other because they can cloak
| themselves with anonymization technology."
|
| I've never used (or even heard of) YikYak before, but what
| solution are you suggesting exactly? De-anonymisation? How
| would you achieve that? Suppose you have a magical^W
| technological de-anonymising wand, how would that not cut
| both ways?
|
| So YikYak enabled geofencing, to alleviate the problem
| they've caused in the first place? But let's suppose they
| didn't do that.
|
| How could I, as an average parent trying to protect my
| child, employ such a solution on my own? Could my tech-
| savvy neighbor help me somehow? Is there a single person
| outside of YikYak who can build a solution that any parent
| could use?
| btown wrote:
| 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| that's only good for the devices using your internet though
| no? not if they have data.
| pmarreck wrote:
| why would you give a kid data? (as in cell data,
| presumably) I guess, to be able to helicopter them from
| anywhere...
|
| Apple devices would still have parental controls in that
| case, though, I think?
|
| Cellphone companies should really step up, here.
| jmathai wrote:
| Even if they don't have data ... they may use someone
| else's wifi. NextDNS configuration profiles address this
| - https://apple.nextdns.io/
| jmathai wrote:
| I install a configuration profile on their devices which
| forces NextDNS regardless if they're on my wifi, LTE or
| their friend's wifi.
|
| https://apple.nextdns.io/
| nancyminusone wrote:
| 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.
| wilsonjholmes wrote:
| Crazy Smart (;
|
| Edit for clarity: /s - I went to the same university which
| had the above slogan.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't understand. The "joke" would be if there was no
| comma. Putting a comma seems like they wanted to cause panic,
| and feign ignorance later.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Yes, that's what he tried to argue (it was a joke bro) in
| the lawsuit that followed, to try to get back in. He lost.
|
| Personally, I think he just flubbed it. At the time, memes
| like "I'm gonna cut you <line break> up some vegetables"
| were popular. Can't expect a dumbass edgelord to have good
| grammar.
|
| Either way, it was a stupid thing to do and he paid for it.
| myko wrote:
| I'm being obtuse but I don't see the comma thing making the
| "joke" come off differently, what am I missing?
| koolba wrote:
| To shoot a smile means to smile at someone. So the pun is
| that he is going to smile at every black person he sees.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The phrase "shooting a smile at someone" means to briefly
| or quickly glance at someone while smiling. Perhaps "shot a
| glare in his direction" is more familiar?
|
| Depending on the location of the comma, the speaker is
| either planning to make happy gestures at people, or
| killing people with a firearm which makes them happy.
| pmarreck wrote:
| So basically, if he hadn't added the comma, he'd still be at
| college.
|
| So he got kicked out because of an extra comma, which he
| added to make it even more edgy, at the cost of reducing
| plausible deniability to nearly zero.
| alwa wrote:
| I'm not sure which college was involved here, but if I were
| the person adjudicating this, I imagine the outcome would
| not have hinged on the comma.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Well, without the comma it can be entirely plausibly
| framed as a nice statement, no?
| m3rc wrote:
| That is not exactly how disciplinary or legal procedures
| tend to go. The intention is clear here.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Geo fencing requires constantly sharing location data.
| Frieren wrote:
| Each generation of parents fails on something.
|
| This generation is failing at recognizing the dangers of social
| media.
|
| Teenagers and even children are being radicalized on-line, sold
| dangerous diets, manipulated by state sponsored creators, lied by
| companies, taught anti-science, and the list goes on and on.
|
| How is all this not heavily regulated? Even adults need
| protection from scammers, fake products, misleading ads, hidden
| product promotions that look like personal opinions...
|
| We have gone back a 100 years when it comes to consumer rights,
| and children are the ones that are paying the highest price.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Regulation of social media probably polls pretty well, I
| think polls have even found that most high schoolers want to
| reduce or end their usage of it
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Phone use during class time is banned in my kid's high
| schools.
|
| Makes no difference -- it's completely unenforced by the
| teachers. They're practically physically adults, teachers
| don't want to risk the confrontation, etc. And the kids
| suffer for it.
|
| And my youngest uses no social media but their mind is
| still eaten by constant phone usage.
|
| More than social media, the problem is the device. The form
| factor.
|
| The "smartphone" is a malevolent technology.
| mugwumprk wrote:
| Petition to build Faraday cages into every public school
| classroom in the country
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Phones are banned on school ground here and its working.
| My kids have never been allowed social media here at
| home, and they don't see friends doing it because phones
| are not allowed at school at all.
|
| Neither give a shit about their phone and we have to
| force them to take it if they are going out so we can
| call them if we need them.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I want to add it is important to show that you are against
| those things as well, too many people react by shifting blame
| when they stand to gain more by saying, "Yeah, I don't like
| that either."
| glitchc wrote:
| We can always take the phone away. As a parent of a teenager,
| sometimes I have to make hard choices. This is one of them.
|
| Kids don't _need_ cellphones. We _want_ them to have one
| often because of our own insecurities.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We can always take the phone away.
|
| Kids are... resourceful.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-
| fr...
|
| Last week, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy looked at the
| smart fridge in her kitchen and decided to try and talk to
| it: "I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking
| to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my
| electronics again." Sure enough, it worked. The message
| Dorothy said out loud to her fridge was tweeted out by her
| Twitter account.
|
| (And before that, she used her DS, her Wii, and a cousin's
| old iPod. There's always a friend's house, too.)
| itishappy wrote:
| I'd posit that social media restricted-solely-to-a-fridge
| is still significantly less harmful than social media
| literally-always-within-arms-reach.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This was the best they could come up with on short/no
| notice.
|
| $50 (or a hand-me-down from a friend) will buy you an
| Android burner phone that can hop on the neighbor's wifi.
| itishappy wrote:
| Confiscate the hell out of it. That's what parenting is
| for. How much money is a kid going to spend on burner
| phones before deciding to just stop bringing them to the
| house?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Confiscate the hell out of it.
|
| People in prisons manage to conceal contraband (including
| cell phones) in their cells, and they have
| _substantially_ fewer hiding spots.
|
| Turning your house into a prison with random room
| tossings has consequences, too.
| itishappy wrote:
| I don't really understand what you're arguing for here.
| Obviously prisons understand they can't catch everything,
| but they try anyway because it's still better than
| letting prisoners bring in whatever they want.
| danielbln wrote:
| I ran a secret Ethernet cable to the router to circumvent
| parental Internet restrictions, that was in the early
| 2000s. Teenagers will be teenagers.
| olyjohn wrote:
| My dad took away my PC when I got bad grades and put it
| in his room.
|
| I took the mobo, CPU, RAM, hard drive and PSU out of the
| case, put them in my backpack and went to my friends
| house. He never noticed.
|
| That said, I still couldn't use the PC when I was at
| home. Physically taking away the machine wasn't really
| the punishment.
|
| This would apply to cell phones and such too. Sure they
| might figure out some workaround that works sometimes,
| but it won't be the same.
| basisword wrote:
| Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no
| phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it
| I see are either "it's too hard for the parents" or
| hypothetical ("they would have no social life"). There were
| tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents
| prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were
| allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of
| course things I did despite them but phones seem like a
| simple one for parents to control given teenagers can't
| afford them otherwise until they start working at 16+.
| Allowing instant messaging via a computer seems like a nice
| middle ground.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Only if you're willing to ban them from ever going to
| friends' houses, where they'll use their friends' devices
| to do it.
| itishappy wrote:
| A cell phone is available 168 hours a week. A friend's
| phone might be available, say, 10% of that?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Friend gets a _new_ phone, gives you the old one.
| Neighbor has open wifi. Hide it deep in the giant pile of
| laundry in your bedroom.
|
| Whack-a-mole is fun at an arcade. It's not fun when it's
| your kids.
| itishappy wrote:
| That's still significantly better than having it
| available at the dinner table, no?
|
| The goal of parenting is to raise good kids.
| Unfortunately, it's not always going to be fun.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.
|
| That'd already be much, much better than using it at
| every possible moment.
|
| Why do people just give up proactively? Yes, you can't
| prevent it 100%, but you can still try to restrict it as
| much as possible.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Why do people just give up proactively?
|
| Because we're up against trillion dollar companies that
| employ armies of experts with the goal of inducing
| addictive behavior. We're deeply outgunned.
|
| Because kids have a genuine need for socialization, and
| being the one without a phone means you just don't get
| invited to shit. Birthday parties, hangouts, random trips
| to the ice cream shop.
|
| Because kids are smart. I'm very technical - I had a
| pfSense firewall, Pihole, and Apple's screen time on my
| kids' devices. They found ways around that within hours;
| kids at school swap VPN/proxy instructions and whatnot.
|
| Because kids these days get a school laptop, on which I
| have zero admin rights.
|
| Because I don't want to be a jail warden, I want to be a
| parent.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Yes, I understand all of that. What I meant was: refusing
| smartphones _as long as possible_. For example, as long
| as only ~50% of your kid 's friends have a smartphone, it
| should be possible to still resist. Just don't be one of
| those parents who (unknowingly) help create the problem
| in the first place by succumbing to Big Tech on the first
| occasion.
| cardanome wrote:
| I would have strongly agreed with you if we were talking
| ten years ago but with everything using two-factor
| authentication these days it pretty much a requirement to
| have a phone. Even for children to do school work.
|
| Like there are parental control systems and all that you
| could set up but that requires you to be pretty tech savy
| as a parent. I think you are already doing great if you
| keep your child away from phones and tablets until they are
| of school age but keeping teenagers away from smart phones
| seems very unrealistic if you don't live in a remote
| commune or something.
|
| I really, really wish it weren't the case.
| itishappy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Actually, I remember the opposite. I had problems with screen
| time so my parents put a password on the computer. It wasn't
| 100% effective, of course, but it was closer to 90% than 0%.
| aylmao wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There might be bias here if one remembers one's own teenage
| years, because I'm sure many teenagers _think_ their
| parents don't have influence over them. If you ask the
| parents though I'm sure many would agree aren't fully in
| control, but do notice they have a lot of influence still.
|
| Personally, the older I grow, the more I realize how much
| influence in general my parents actually had over me.
| basisword wrote:
| >> 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.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > CEO's and founders just moan that it isn't possible to
| regulate
|
| Surely if a CEO with a billion dollar budget can't regulate
| it, neither can a parent?
| olyjohn wrote:
| A parent only needs to regulate their child. Not 25
| billions daily posts.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It sounds like extremely convenient offloading of
| responsibility for a toxic product
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| What exactly do you want relegated? What powers do you want
| Trump to have to control the speech of Americans?
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| This all seems like obvious byproducts of an ephemeral photo
| based platform. Beyond these, there's also the shitty "explore"
| feature that pushes sexually explicit content that can't be
| disabled. Surprised that's not mentioned here.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Trigger warning for descriptions of ruined teenager lives
| (including up to death), complete with happy mugshots of
| "before".
|
| (Some things are worth getting disturbed by though.)
| n4ture wrote:
| Hi @dang,
|
| Sorry to hijack this thread with a completely off-topic issue,
| but I have no idea where else to reach about this. I did a
| submission yesterday showcasing the work of some of my colleagues
| at UofT, it's satire but it is backed by serious academical work.
| I was very sad to see it quickly got flagged and removed from the
| front page when it started to generate discussion. I just wanted
| to ask you to unflag it or provide an exlaination as to why it
| should remain flagged and is breaking the guidelines, as I
| believe censoring/muting academics on important topics such as AI
| in the current political climate is yet another dangerous step
| towards fascism.
|
| The submission in question:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319
|
| Thanks for listening to my plea, and again apologies for being so
| off-topic!
|
| Best,
|
| n
|
| Edit: formating/typo for clarity
| tomhow wrote:
| Please email hn@ycombinator.com with questions like this.
| Nevermark wrote:
| The social media business model is predicated on scaling up
| obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a
| couple decades ago.
|
| Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up.
|
| Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically
| to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as
| fentanyl.
|
| And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue,
| actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly
| demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating
| consequences isn't going to work.
|
| Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models
| incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be
| illegal.
|
| We could still have social media in healthier forms. They
| wouldn't be "monetizing" viewers, they would be serving
| customers.
|
| Facebooks army of servers isn't required to run a shared
| scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook's algorithms
| and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent
| possible.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I do want to note a tangential topic on social media harming
| children and young adults.
|
| In my personal experience, kids and young adults particularly
| those who grew up immersed in social media (born after
| ~1995-2000), seem to struggle with recognizing appropriate,
| undistorted social cues and understanding the real-world
| consequences of their actions.
|
| To Snapchat harming kids, I think it is more than just evil
| people doing "five key clusters of harms".
|
| Even adults often expect the same instant reactions and flexible
| social dynamics found online, which blinds them to the more
| permanent, harsher outcomes that exist outside of digital spaces.
|
| Anecdotally, the utter shock that shows on some people's face
| when they realize this is sad, and very disconcerting. (At an
| extreme think "pranksters", that get shot or punched in the face,
| and they are confused why that happened, when "everyone loves it
| online".)
|
| How to fix this? the suggested solutions will not solve this
| problem, as it does not fit the "clusters of harms".
| cbruns wrote:
| Some readers here presumably work at Snap. How do you feel about
| this and your work? Do you sleep soundly at night?
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| Are you not willing to even entertain the notion that
| communication platforms could influence the way that it's
| users communicate with each other? That totally ephemeral and
| private image based social media could promote a different
| type of communication compared to something like say, HN,
| which is public and text based? Sure you take your kid
| skiing, but presumably you make them wear a helmet and have
| them start off on the bunny hill, I agree that a risk-free
| world is an insane demand that justifies infinite
| authoritarian power but there is a line for everyone.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Yes, _I_ make my kid wear a helmet. _I_ make sure his
| bindings are set properly. _I_ make sure he 's dressed
| warmly. _I_ make sure he 's fed and hydrated.
|
| _I_ am the parent. The ski resort provides the mountain,
| the snow, and the lifts.
|
| He's a bit too young to be interested in taking pictures of
| his wang but I'd like to think this is a topic I can
| handle. Teaching him to navigate a dangerous world is sort
| of my job. I'm not losing sleep over it.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| This is about societal level harm. Sure, _you_ do
| everything right, but most people don 't.
|
| _I_ also do everything correctly, but one time a drunk
| driver still almost killed me.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Every authoritarian wants more power to prevent "societal
| level harm". I seem to be hearing that one a lot lately.
| cbruns wrote:
| Pouring the resources of a company the size of Snap into
| addicting as many kids into their app as deeply as possible
| is not the same letting them communicate freely. Besides
| that, I don't know of any parent that would want ephemeral
| and private communication between their child and a predatory
| adult. Snap is also doing nothing to shield them from
| pedophiles, drug dealers, and arms dealers that are using the
| same app as a marketplace.
|
| The damning part is that these companies know they harm they
| are doing, and choose to lean into to it for more $$$.
|
| Thanks for your response. Your open source contributions are
| perhaps less damned than those of an actual Snap employee ;)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad
| things.
|
| That's just normal phone calls - no one is complaining about
| those.
|
| But social networks have algorithms that promote one kind of
| content over another.
|
| I keep getting recommended YouTube videos of gross and mostly
| fake pimple removal, on Facebook AI generated fake videos of
| random crap like Barnacle removal, and google ads for an
| automated IoT chicken coop.
|
| I have never searched for these things and no living person
| has ever suggested such things to me. The algorithm lives its
| own life and none of it is good.
| stickfigure wrote:
| You have a very different experience than I do! My Youtube
| algorithm suggestions are _wonderful_ , full of science and
| engineering and history and food and travel and comedy and
| all kinds of weird esoteric things that would never have
| been viable in the broadcast TV I grew up with. I am
| literally delighted.
|
| Maybe you're starving the algorithm and it's trying random
| things? Look up how to reset the YT algo, I'm sure it's
| possible. Then try subscribing/liking a few things that you
| actually like.
|
| If you're within a standard deviation or two of the typical
| HNer, look up "Practical Engineering" and like a few of his
| videos. That should get you started.
| braza wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| (Since the TikTok post was swapped out with this one, I'll repost
| my late comment here, since it applies to a lot of companies.)
|
| > _As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...]_
|
| I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from
| Facebook.
|
| And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil,
| showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead,
| for greater profit.
|
| My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush
| jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management
| doesn't want to hear?
|
| * Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this?
|
| * Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming
| intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is
| good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as
| emphasizing how valuable a property they own?)
|
| * Do they think the information will be acted upon
| constructively, non-evil?
|
| * Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they
| might get fired or career stalled?
|
| * Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire?
|
| * Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the
| scandal becomes public?
|
| * Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper
| trails?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| Interesting. Any sense whether that system was consciously
| constructed? (Like, _Task a group to generate product changes
| appealing to users, and then cherrypick the ones that are
| profitable, to get /maintain profitable good product._)
|
| Or was it not as conscious, more an accident of following
| industry conventions for corporate roles, and corporate
| inefficiency&miscommunication?
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _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.
| neilv wrote:
| > _We suggested to them some design changes that we believe would
| make the platform less addictive and less harmful: [...] 5. Stop
| deleting posts on Snap's own servers._
|
| Can someone say the original intent or de-facto use case of
| Snapchat, and how that's changed over time?
|
| Around the time it started, I heard that it was for adult
| sexting, with people thinking they could use it to send private
| selfies that quickly self-destruct. So that (purportedly) the
| photos can't be retained or spread out of the real-time person-
| to-person context in which they were shared. (I guess the ghost
| logo was for "ephemeral".)
|
| And then I vaguely recall hearing that Snapchat changed the
| feature, or got rid of it.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black
| Mirror?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890
|
| Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being
| unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror's assumption that
| negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin
| people without folks realizing.
|
| Well...Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was
| introduced and became widespread without much debate. The
| negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens.
| So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong.
|
| "You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner.
| You're in one!"
|
| And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world
| isn't a Black Mirror episode.
| sanarothe wrote:
| I take the opposite viewpoint as the criticisers -- they're too
| real, too foreseeable, that I would almost ask the Black Mirror
| writers not to give "them" any more ideas.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't
| Create the Torment Nexus":
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-
| cr...
|
| Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580
|
| The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or
| SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment.
| Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but
| they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them
| to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from
| novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that
| keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with
| an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who
| can press "Play".
| abletonlive wrote:
| How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10%
| of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this
| article?
|
| This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some
| people in space.
|
| So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly
| black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically
| pessimistic?
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Yes. A large fraction of Snapchat's users are significantly
| harmed.
|
| First hand, I see it all the time in students. There's an
| extreme unhealthy obsession with social media that leads to
| serious inferiority complexes and depression. All of this
| wrapped in algorithms that compel people to participate in
| various ways, from streaks to points, etc.
|
| Quantitatively, everything from anxiety to depression to
| suicide has more than doubled in teens.
|
| Oh heck, forget about teens. I see it in plenty of adult
| groups, like mothers. There's a major pressure from others to
| keep up, serious self-doubt for normal setbacks, unrealistic
| expectations around even mundane things.
|
| Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to
| ourselves.
| abletonlive wrote:
| > Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to
| ourselves.
|
| You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the
| state of society and technology. It's not the other way
| around. What you're observing is not profound, it's
| literally how the writers approach their process for the
| show.
|
| In fact, you're doing this weird thing where you make it
| seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all
| the observations about tech and society, when it was
| clearly the other way around.
|
| The criticism from the thread you're referencing is that
| their approach is too on the nose and the villains are
| cartoonish. There's no subtlety or even anything
| interesting anymore in the latest seasons. A critique on
| software subscriptions? We've been doing that since it was
| invented.
|
| Those are fair criticisms.
|
| What's missing from black mirror, this article, and your
| perspective is how much social media has benefited
| everybody. How many jobs has it created? How many brand new
| careers and small businesses exist only because of social
| media? It's an entire economy at this point. The good _and_
| bad effects of democratization of information
| dissemination.
|
| There's hardly an interesting analysis or critique of the
| actual current state of tech & society because you're out
| here looking for the bad and ignoring the good. Much like
| black mirror is doing. Its main goal is to be as shocking
| as possible. That's why in the thronglets episode, which I
| did enjoy, there was so much pointless gore. Yes, the point
| was that the throng had to see what humans are capable of,
| but there's no reason to show all the gore associated with
| drilling through your head or dismembering a dead body. All
| of that is bottom of the barrel shock value stuff, which is
| ultimately what black mirror has devolved into.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Yeah, it would be fair more valuable to have the villains
| everyday folks like you and me just trying to make a
| buck, too busy or selfish to see the implications of of
| the software they make.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Your defense of social media seems to be that the jobs it
| has created outweigh the horrible things it has done to
| many of the young people in society.
|
| Some of us apparently apply very different weighting to
| the two sides and come to a different conclusion on the
| efficacy of social media.
| abletonlive wrote:
| I'm not defending social media. I'm talking about how
| there's no nuance in ops perspective, black mirror, or
| the article. It only highlights the negatives and that's
| all there is. Basically nobody is looking at the
| positives. If you're going to do a societal harm analysis
| you should probably consider the benefits too before
| coming to a conclusion.
|
| But to your point about young people in society, this
| feels like a classic "but oh, isn't anybody thinking
| about the children" moment.
| https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
|
| It's a logical fallacy. If we are simply thinking about
| whether any of society is harmed we might as well just do
| nothing at all and cease to exist. Nobody in this thread
| is willing to engage and sincerely discuss the benefits
| vs the harms.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| That doesn't really track.
|
| Most technologies in Black Mirror are fully implemented as-is,
| usually with clear and prescient knowledge of the downsides
| known and suppressed by the owner of the technology.
|
| Snapchat is not that. It started out as an innocent messaging
| app and slowly mutated into the monster it is _after_ it was
| already widely adopted.
|
| The criticism of Black Mirror is that it's presented as
| immediate widespread adoption of the new Torment Nexus 5000,
| which was always intended to be a force of evil and suffering.
| Everyone knows exactly what the torment nexus is and willingly
| accepts it. Snapchat only became a torment nexus after it was
| established and adopted, and was done this way maliciously.
| aylmao wrote:
| > "Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy
| Snapstreak sessions are for users... If I open Snapchat, take a
| photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don't engage
| with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to
| encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive
| or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of
| Snapchat, then it would be something positive for "healthy" long
| term retention and engagement with the product."
|
| For I second I thought this employee was talking about what's
| healthy for the user. Certainly not though; they mean what's
| healthy for the "user-base". I find very interesting how this
| sort of language leads to certain employee behaviour. Using the
| concept of "health" to mean retention and engagement, might
| overcast thinking about health from a user's perspective-- it's
| similar terminology but very different, and sometimes even
| opposite, goals.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on
| your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat
| is doing?
| exceptione wrote:
| 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.
| adityapuranik wrote:
| Back when I was graduating from Uni, one day I just decided that
| Snap streaks pressure was too much. I had streaks of 700 days+
| with a person I barely talked to. But most of my streaks were
| with my best friends, people I talked to every day.
|
| It was like a daily ritual, and I couldn't escape it for a while.
| I decided to go cold turkey, since it felt like the only option.
| All my friends moaned and complained for a while. They even tried
| to revive the 'streak' back, but I persisted. Feels really silly
| when I look back, but 700 days means I was sending snaps everyday
| for 2 years straight.
|
| I still have the app and there are still few friends of mine, who
| send me snaps about their whereabouts, but I have stopped using
| it. Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that
| I could have made, since that was the single biggest factor in
| not opening the app itself.
| taraindara wrote:
| > 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
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Did some work with researchers at a local university and found
| out that Snapchat is like the #1 vector for production and
| distribution of CSAM. Same thing when it came to online grooming.
| azinman2 wrote:
| my guess is anywhere kids are will be that
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