Teens can still talk online. Social media is an obvious poison and we shouldn't give kids access to it.

OP writes a thoughtful, evidence-based comment.

The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.

It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately, which is why many western countries are going to fall into this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and the open web forever.

This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from government (the bootleggers and politicians for more nefarious reasons of course).

> The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.

it was one person.

im writing this comment 1 hour after yours, and still only a single person has responded and you’ve called one person, a mob. you’ve declared one person commenting to be a “moral panic.”

I shall echo the comment of pibaker with one caveat.

>The exact same sentiment is widely observed across this entire website.

You do see this sentiment across this website, but this doesn't mean that it is a view held by the majority of people here, the people motivated to act can create the illusion that their opinions are more widely held than they are.

A few days ago I posted a comment which, in it's entirety reads

>Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.

>You can still criticise without being mean.

The comment sits at -4 today, and has one antagonistic response. I don't really think most people disagree with this sentiment.

The antagonistic response came from the same one person as the comment in this thread.

What an incredible mind. I wonder how many more people out there there are that have made huge contributions to humanity and very few know their name.

Six years for a country holding back the allies is not "that long" - and 6 years more since they came into power?

And as a government they'd still be in power 20 and 30 years later if they didn't start the war (judging from Franco's spain).

The Nazis were in power for years before they started WWII.

To those responding to the headline, the article seems to use the word neutral in an odd way. They aren't saying that SV is neutral, they're defining neutrality as 'working with who is in power, regardless of who is in power'. That definition may or may not be correct, but discuss the article in that context.

I would say the use of neutral there is a linguistic cop-out to avoid having to assign blame.

To be silent in the face of oppression isn't neutrality. It's implicitly siding with the oppressor.

I tend to agree. In this version of "neutrality" we'd have to believe that if MAGA is defeated in the not too distant future (whatever that means) that these people in Silicon Valley would flip to the other side. There's just no way.

They will at best "celebrate" Pride month. And for many liberals, that will be enough to move on.

It's all about communication.

> To be silent in the face of oppression isn't neutrality. It's implicitly siding with the oppressor.

That's the kind of "I took an edgy course in college" shit that makes people outside the progressive bubble think "society is getting too woke and everyday people are getting left behind."

You can draw a pretty straight line between "my uncle voted for the other guy so I disowned him" and the political/social dysfunction that led to Trump in the first place.

This article isn't for progressives. It's a plea for everyone else to realize what's happening is wrong. If you can't take the barbs out of your language, you're going to offend your audience before they'll even listen to what you're trying to say.

> That's the kind of "I took an edgy course in college" shit that makes people outside the progressive bubble think "society is getting too woke and everyday people are getting left behind."

Nah, that's the "I was raised in Austria and all my history classes where about driving that point home" take.

How did the Nazis ever come to power, one asks? Why didn't anybody stop them? It's because everybody stayed silent until it was too late.

Screw polite meekness. You're either against what's happening or you're a collaborator. It takes people actively speaking out to show others they aren't alone and that not everyone is okay with what is happening.

Collective guilt ( Kollektivschuld) was assigned to Germans after WWII. Meaning every German was labeled guilty of enabling the Nazi regime.Now everybody here can witness how it came about.

Exactly. A fragile man needed assert his authority.

You don't know the man, and you don't know all of the details and nuances of the situation he was called into. How then do you think to judge him like that? You're just stereotyping.

Those "details and nuances of the situation he was called into" become completely irrelevant once one is presented with irrefutable evidence that their actions were completely legal. What matters is his conduct after that happened, which was blatant and persistent abuse of power.

Stop justifying and excusing abuse of power, he hurt innocent people, cost the taxpayers $600k in a single incident of abusive and wrongful conduct, and he's now enjoying taxpayer-funded retirement without facing any accountability.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/how-a...

> And so did the jury who awarded them $600k

What jury? The payment happened before the trial: "five days before a trial was scheduled to begin in the case, Dallas County officials agreed to pay $600,000 to settle the case".

In fairness, people don't generally give 6 figure settlements if they think the jury will agree with them

The detail that there was no jury?

You're confusing your own assumptions with knowledge.

Are they or are you? How have you determined that they don't understand the details?

Being flat wrong is a subtle hint.

Any discussion of Tesla without mentioning Musk's actions is missing the most important piece. I heard someone on this site use the term "mind share", as in before Musk decided to alienate his main customer base, Tesla had the biggest "mind share" of any company in the world. I looked forward to buying a Tesla one day. Now, with Musk licking Trumps boots and actively doing very real damage with his work in DOGE and other things, I will literally never buy anything from that company ever again. It doesn't matter what Chinese car companies are doing. It matters that he stands for everything I don't so I will not give him my money.

Explain how to nicely criticize computer software that allows for the generation of sexually explicit images of children.

I'm not sure what you are wanting here, are you actually requiring me to be a bully to affect change?

I can certainly criticize specific things respectfully. If I prioritised demonstrating my moral superiority I could loudly make all sorts of disingenuous claims that won't make the world a better place.

I certainly do not think people should be making exploitative images in Photoshop or indeed any other software.

I do not think that I should be able choose which software those rules apply to based upon my own prejudice. I also do not think that being able to do bad things with something is sufficient to negate every good thing that can be done with it.

Countless people have been harmed by the influence of religious texts, I do not advocate for those to be banned, and I do not demand the vilification of people who follow those texts.

Even though I think some books can be harmful, I do not propose attacking people who make printing presses.

What exactly are you requiring here. Pitchforks and torches? Why AI and not the other software that can be used for the same purposes?

If you want robust regulation that can provide a means to protect people from how models are used then I am totally prepared (and have made submissions to that effect) to work towards that goal. Being antagonistic works against making things better. Crude generalisations convince no-one. I want the world to be better, I will work towards that. I just don't understand how anyone could believe vitriolic behaviour will result in anything good.

If someone generates sexually explicit images of non-existent children, who exactly does that harm?

Photoshop has been around for a long time.

And canvases and paint have existed for even longer, but it needs someone skilled to make use of it.

Stable Diffusion enabled the average lazy depraved person to create these images with zero effort, and there's a lot of these people in the world apparently.

So? At the end of the day, regardless of how skilled one has to be to use it, a tool is not considered morally responsible for how it is used. Nor is the maker of that tool considered morally responsible for how it is used, except in the rare case where the tool only has immoral uses. And that isn't the case here.

I wonder what a few years of this mentality will do. Greed is never reasonable. This will have consequences.

Yep people will pay rates in "high tax" US states where you're still only paying ~40% ish total income tax and they're really nice places to live.

That would still be considered a fair and reasonable level of tax by european standards.

Obviously there is a level though - if you made it 95% then people would leave. I don't think there's any reasonable argument that the level doesn't exist, the question is where is it for a specific place at a specific time

95% on what? Income over a million dollars. Income over 10 million dollars? If you like living in a super liberal state and super liberal city like Boston, you're not going to move to Texas just because you're getting taxed higher. Rich people are still absurdly rich, I feel like that gets lost in these discussions. These taxes don't materially effect them in anyway but have massive benefits for society.

Rich people tend to actually be penny pinchers in my experience and most will object to 95% income tax out of principle.

You could say "well good riddance" but taxing $10mn of income at 20% raises a lot more useful money than taxing $0 of income at 95%

To be brutal about it the question isn't a how many more millionaires. Say Massachusetts has 10 new millionaires. That's great. What if Florida has 1000 new millionaires? Suddenly 10 doesn't sound great.

To my mind it's a revenue maximizing question. Is Massachusetts hitting that metric right? I have no clue. I do suspect that the voters and the people advocating taxes like this in Massachusetts and California are not thinking in those terms. I think they are doing this out of some sense that anyone making that much has to be doing something unfair and that an inefficiency in revenue is just money spent towards fixing that unfairness.

It has dramatically increased revenue, more than expected. Also, if you're the type of person who thinks you shouldn't pay your fair share, feel free to move somewhere else. We have the best schools in the country. We have a strong social safety net. We have a high quality of life. Shit, we live longer than almost any other state. So please, if that's not your thing, take your money and leave immediately.

I'm trying to read this with the best of intentions, but you're saying you really can not tell the difference social media and a cheeseburger in terms of access, addiction, and damage?

Cheeseburgers are everywhere, are addictive to some, and eventually eating enough will kill you.

Put another way: If McDonalds sees I eat 5 cheeseburgers a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me for my own health? Do they need to step in at all?

If Facebook knows I'm scrolling 6 hours a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me?

Cheeseburgers are not everywhere. I'm sitting at my desk, social media is here but cheeseburgers are not. Social media is always with me other than in the shower. Cheeseburgers are not.

I can get a cheeseburger delivered, or there's a dozen places within a 15 minute walk to get one. I can hardly leave the house without seeing an ad for one or some other fast food item on the side of a bus. I can't avoid being hungry, but I can leave my phone at home.

Sure it's a matter of degrees but I don't see a bright line between McDonald's and tiktok. Both want me hooked on their product. Both have harmful aspects. Both have customers they know are over-indulging. Why would only tiktok be liable for that?

If I had to walk for 15 minutes or pay a hefty delivery fee to access social media, my usage would be massively lower. If there was a cheeseburger in my hand all day every day I would be a lot fatter.

If people never felt full from food, food was always instantly available in your pocket, and food costed no money to obtain, I believe McDonalds and TikTok would be very equivalent. Likely McDonalds would even be far worse since people would probably be dying to it daily.

That's the bright line. The lack of any barrier to entry.

A bar has a legal responsibility to stop serving people at some point, so this obligation is not unheard of.

> Put another way: If McDonalds sees I eat 5 cheeseburgers a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me for my own health? Do they need to step in at all?

Is McDonald's adjusting the flavour and ingredients of each cheeseburger it serves you with the express purpose of encouraging you to order the next one as soon as possible?

They are constantly evolving the menu and it's entirely data-driven, so yes? It's not down to the person level like tiktok but if they could, it would be.

So compared to TikTok and algorithms the answer is no then? If they could I agree they would, but they can't target food on the same level that TikTok does.

How is the cheeseburger that you receive differently tailored to your own addiction than the cheeseburger that the following customer will receive is to theirs?

Yes, of course I understand the addictive difference. The point I'm making is: does parental decision making have any bearing on this, or can they knowingly allow their child to do something harmful and then sue because it turned out poorly.

I think we would all agree that parents bear a lot of responsibility here. Also, if I think if we look at how we treat kids in other parts of society it's very clear it's a good thing when highly addictive things are kept away from them. It's a good thing cigarette companies can't advertise to children. It's a good thing serving children alcohol or allowing them to buy weed is illegal. And now that we have this new poison, the law hasn't quite caught up yet, but this is a poison, and it's being fed to children with a ferocity and sophistication that only modern technology can provide. A kid can't make a hamburger in their bedroom. They can sneak a phone in and use it. I think it's both. I shout from the roof tops to every parent who will listen to not buy their kid a smart phone. I also think we should hold companies accountable when the knowingly get children addicted to poison.

How would you feel if some weird random strangers set up a free cookie hut outside the elementary school? Any kid can get as much free candy and cookies as they want as long as they go inside and don’t tell any adults.

I would say if the companies providing the service do so knowing it is harmful and cover that up then yes they can sue.

> can they knowingly allow their child to do something harmful and then sue because it turned out poorly

That likely depends on how that "something" was publicly marketed to both parents and children based on the company's available information. Our laws historically regulate substances (and their delivery mechanisms) which may lead to addition or are very easy to misuse in a way which leads to permanent harm (see: virtually all mind-altering substances); even nicotine gum is age-restricted like tobacco products. Because nicotine is generally considered an addictive substance, it's regulated, but few reasonable people would argue that parents should be allowed to buy their children nicotine gum so their kids calm down.

Consider how, decades ago, the tobacco companies were implicated in suppressing research demonstrating that tobacco products are harmful to human health. The key here will be if ByteDance has done the same thing.

Also, to play off your point on cheeseburgers: remember the nutritional quality of one cheeseburger versus another will vary. If made with top-quality ingredients (minimally-processed ingredients, organic vegetables, grass-fed beef, etc.), a cheeseburger is actually quite nutritious. However, in a hypothetical situation where a fast-food chain was making false public claims about the composition of their cheeseburgers (e.g., lying about gluten-free buns or organic ingredient status), and someone is harmed as a consequence, the victim might have standing to sue the fast food chain.