This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A Child is advocating for a Back Surgeon who has made a General Call? Am I reading that right?
Took me several seconds to parse that sentence as well.
“Childrens advocates “ have been backing the most egregiously unconstitutional, paternalistic, data broker friendly, moral panic, privacy dystopia bullshit bills around the country. “Childs advocates” are why we have anti pornography pearl clutching panopticon laws that require you to scan a government ID to jerk off. Fuck off with that.
I agree with all of this.
But this is none of that. This is informing people that the evidence says that excessive social media use does harm, because most people genuinely don't understand the risks.
s/country/world/: FTFY
"Think of the children" is somehow the gotcha for so many of the hard-of-thinking amongst us.
Have those warning labels been shown to work like at all? We already have awareness saturation about just how awful cigarettes are for you.
Yes. Almost no one smokes in Australia because of them
Lol no, no one smokes anymore mainly because it's a taboo and a pack of cigs is so expensive it's basically impossible to do so on the regular.
The labels don't do shit.
How do you think smoking went from something nearly everybody did to being taboo? Maybe the labels don’t do anything for the last 10% of the population who still smoke today, despite the taboo, but those labels played a big role in reinforcing public awareness of the health effects of smoking.
With the government executing this message to our youth, I think they'll work as well as the anti-piracy ones back in the day.
You Wouldn't Steal a Car
Warnings probably work better on products you're putting in your body. If you have blackened lungs on the cigarette packaging I can't imagine choosing to smoke.
On social media, you basically have to destroy my experience for me to stop using it in the same way. All effective options are terrible: ads, microtransactions, auto-playing unexpected sounds, nonresponsive interfaces.
What do you mean by work? Do they stop everyone from doing stupid things? No. Do they have a measurable effect on behavior? Yes.
John Perry Barlow was right
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Is there any hope at all left that governments might one day leave us on the Internet in peace?
I don't get why people think this idea is equivalent to stuff like internet access bans or COPPA, it's a warning label, not an "enter your ID" to access page.
They never banned cigarettes, but putting a giant warning on the box did help in vilifying cigarettes as very unhealthy and wrong.
I doubt it'll go anywhere in this age of government, but its exactly the type of thing I would have gone for if I were tasked with solving a societal issue. It's smart because it has no real effect on access, so social media companies would have a harder time fighting it, but it also gives a big bloody warning which does have a substantial psychological impact on users.
iirc someone did something similar with a very simple "are you sure?" app that gave a prompt asking if you were sure you wanted to post something or send a text. Just having a single prompt was enough for many people to reconsider their stupid text or comment.
Typical teen (and often preteen) response to be told to not do anything by adults: Say, "Yeah, right," and go off and do it anyway. Even if you block them outright, they'll find a way around it.
Yeah, because that worked so well with tracking popups.
Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning "THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!"
And I'm only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It's not even the children and teens I'm worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that language models are effective lie detectors, it's very widely known that LLMs have no concept of truth and hallucinate constantly.
And that's before we even get into inherent biases and moral judgements required for any form of truth detection.
Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning.
Is it??? Because I feel like context is a real weak point for bots and ai to figure out.
Hell, it feels like half the HUMANS don't know whats factually true. Is the covid vaccine a society saving development which saved the lives of millions? Or is it full of bill gates mind control computer chips to rule over the portion of society dumb enough to get the vaccine willingly?
Who's to say?
