Tobacco-like warning label for social media sought by US surgeon general who asks Congress to act
Tobacco-like warning label for social media sought by US surgeon general who asks Congress to act
In an opinion piece in the The New York Times, Dr. Vivek Murthy said that social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people.
No but there should be "Malicious by Design" stickers for:
- non-optional/on by default telemetry
- non-optional/on by default advertising
- vendor lock in
- DRM (Digital "Rights Management"/Digital Restriction Malware)
- Rootkits/root lockout
- premanantly locked bootloaders
Im aware this would pretty much require all commercial tech products to carry one of these labels. To that I say good. Large tech firms have been weaponizing the computer illiteracy of the average smartphone user so they can normalize corporate malware. It's so bad they've even made up new names for types of malware to make it sound okay:
- spyware became telemetry
- adware became targeted advertisements
- vendor lock-in became walled-gardens
- bootloaders and root permissions were perminantly locked "for security"
- Rootkits where pushed under the guise of DRM, or even Anti-Cheat. Including google pushing rootkits installed by default to the most popular OS on the planet (Android/Google Play)
I got a good idea. Let's put warning labels on gun owners. "Warning: potential school shooter".
Regardless of how you feel about gun control, guns don't actively work against the people who buy them.
They can certainly be used or kept in dangerous ways that lead to tragedy, but they do exactly what you tell them. They even come with a manual full of warnings, and a big giant label that says something to the effect of "READ MANUAL BRFORE OPERATING." Many of them even have it etched into the firearm itself.
That is not the case with EULA washed legal malware.
what a stupid idea... actually regulate them you fucking cowards.
What an absurd, ignorant notion. Of course social media has a negative impact on developing minds, but forcing sites to display warnings would have zero positive impact. Browser extensions would immediately pop up to hide those warnings, and if anything, the presence of such warnings would increase kids' use of social media, since the danger is something even adults had a hard time understanding and kids love to rebel against oppressive systems. The warnings would turn into memes.
The only answers to this problem are to break up and ban social media companies (not possible) or get parents to actually be parents and teach their kids about the pitfalls of social media.
It's pr. Same usual political dumb shit that doesn't do anything but make a dipshit look good to dumbass.
The benefit of the doubt is that they might mean well but they probably don't.
get parents to actually be parents and teach their kids about the pitfalls of social media
Also not possible
Exactly - such labels would be ignored even more than the ones on cigarettes are, especially by the addicts. And it's so much easier to completely hide them too - adblockers already hide a lot of content people don't want to see, this would just become another line in the filter list so fast...
Except many advertisers don't want to be associated with damaging things. So this has an impact on advertising revenue for social media companies and they would absolutely view this as a blow to their public image.
We need to break them up, and legislate against their practices for the future but this is something that can happen right away and hit them in their pockets
If you're gonna do that, you're gonna have to start labeling other media. And people.
Aaaah, I would love it if people had to carry a visible law-mandated label saying "May contain bigotted and un-read-up (i.e. dumb), toxic opinions about all things" unless they pass some psychological exam.
Brave new world.
On one hand great, on the other, has the "Confirm you're an adult" prompt ever stopped a curious young man who just learned the word, "boobs" from viewing adult imagery?
What's great about it?
What’s great about it?
the boobs, of course
Isn’t social media just a distillation of the interactions innate in society? If exposure to social media is damaging that’s indicative of deeply flawed and damaging society.
The key difference is its sorted by an algorithm designed to increase your engagement and view duration. And quite often the easiest way to do that is by generating negative emotional responses, etc
Even with perfect algorithms I think it’s reasonable to expect problems within society to sharpen.
I mean if there was some theoretical social media entity completely disconnected from optimization for its own benefit then the people using that system would still have been provided the tools to do all their social relations faster, more often and with more intensity.
That’s gonna, and maybe I’m giving away the game here, uh, heighten the contradictions.
So, let California be a lesson to you: excessive PSA warnings of things that cause health problems (e.g. Known to the state of California to cause cancer ) leads to the public generally ignoring the PSA warnings.
Putting a warning on social media like the warning on tobacco products will weaken the efficacy -- and veracity -- of the labels already on tobacco products.
This won't affect tobacco in anyway. The only reason its in the conversation is because of the term "Tobacco-style label".
Youll have to connect the dots better on how social media popup warnings would cause people to smoke more.
Well, the California example is about too many PSA warning labels. So many things are known by the State of California to cause cancer that no-one takes heed of the labels anymore. Similarly Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign (and Tipper Gore's parental advisory music labels) only encouraged kids to do more drugs and listen to angrier music.
So it's not that kids will smoke more (or much more) it's that the labels will be more easily ignored when the government fails to be sparing in their use.
In an non-government example, when everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin.
Can we put one on Congress?
"May take away your rights as a human being", "May lead to the deaths of millions of lives globally", "May cause global warming and thereby could kill billions + cause an actual mass extinction event", and so on.
"extremely interested in your genitals"
That too. Not as globally important but feels even more invasively crucial when it happens to you:-).
May suspend your rights to support a foreign country.
When I was a kid they just called modern Music and Pokemon the products of Satan. They didn't have to dress it up in pseudoscience to justify it. I bet Vivek Murthy got butthurt on reddit and is now trying to take the ball home.
Get away with it to. No one ever gets punished for a moral panic. Janet Reno tortured a confession out of a 17 year old during the daycare panic and had a long fruitful career.
I don't know about you but I'm going to have to keep my daughter away from social media! It'll rot her brain and make her a tankie! (We are taking about Lemmy, right? /s)
This has the same vibes as old people complaining about things kids do. “Why don’t they listen to the radio and play with sticks in the woods like I did? Kids these days are just listening to rock music and reading comic books.”
Social media is here to stay and putting warning labels on it won’t do a damnest. Kids will still use it because the option would be not to be included in their friend groups.
It's tabacco-like in that it's a warning. It's not tabacco-like in that there's no science demonstrating definite cancerous harm.