I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
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I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage.
I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that.
I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it.
What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population.
Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...
> tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that
Actually both can be true.
Not in this case. Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians since way before tiktok was invented, so much so, that it's not even a partisan issue, all of them are equally unpopular. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and cases of death of innocent people.
So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had.
So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it.
Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania.
This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.
That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties.
They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this:
1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round.
2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner.
In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%.
With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split.
You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues.
They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Ranked choice is very similar to what you just described, has the same downsides, and is much more difficult to understand. What you want is approval voting which has all of the upsides ranked choice claims to have, none of the downsides, doesn't have multiple rounds, and is trivial to understand. On top of that approval voting has an additional benefit where voting third-party/moderates doesn't feel like throwing any vote away so you can just include them and they're much more likely to win.
>That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. [...] They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Firstly, there's many forms of elections, each with their own pros and cons, but I don't think the voting method is the core problem here.
Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?
Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
Secondly, what if that faulty election system, is a actually a feature and not a bug, inserted since the formation of modern Romania after the 1989 revolution, when the people from the (former) commies and securitatea(intelligence services and secret police) now still running the country but under different org names and flags, had to patch up a new constitution virtually overnight, so they made sure to create a new one where they themselves and their parties have an easier time gaming the system in their favor to always end up on top in the new democratic system, but now that backdoor is being exploited by foreign actors.
No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.
Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.
It's like saying ww2 started because of a few grams of lead and ended because of a few kilo of uranium
You'd be technically true but your missing 99.9% of the point, you can't dilute these complex topics in such dumb ways and use it as an argument
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore.
We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop.
I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy?
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
It's already annoying to buy drugs just because some % of people get too addicted. Now you also want to forbid doomscrolling?
Yes. To be clear, the implication of this comment is that you would like to deregulate addictive drugs...?
If ~20% of users get an addiction problem I think its not that clear it should be forbidden for everyone.
If basically everyone who takes it for a while gets addicted and dies of course it should be forbidden.
So I would argue that cigaretts should not be allowed but we could discuss cocaine.
Empathy? For the doomscrollers?
Please tell me you're trolling, Mr. 6-day-old Account, I'll feel better.
If "scrolling == heroin" is the comparison we're working with here, then SF, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC are living examples that empathy doesn't work.
Why write like this? This is what sick internet communities look like. Mocking people for their account age, advocating for hating people for the sin of being addicted to social media. This is antisocial behavior, and we should do everything in our power to eject it from the small remaining pockets of sanity on the internet.
The brain is part of your physiology. And people do go through withdrawal symptoms when they stop using social media that’s been designed for addiction.
This is unrealistic.
It's unrealistic to not install TikTok?
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
For many people, it is unrealistic to uninstall Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever the fuck else all at the same time.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
> but not everyone is like us
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
Darwinism exists at the level of nations, but I think you may have the outcome exactly backwards.
>cripple freedom to protect the weak
This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
>allow natural selection to take its course
This is hideous.
>I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction
You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
Don't put words in my mouth. I called your comment unrealistic, holistically.
> It's a phone. Put it in the trash.
Dude, it's 2025.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
> Dude, it's 2025.
Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
> Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
D'oh. But fair.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
We were literally not given the choice in the matter, in the case of $JOB. Plenty of people complained about having to use their phones to access the buildings, but that was the policy.
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
> I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
So brave.
Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.
"Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.
You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
Yes because smartphones are exactly like narcotics. DELUSION.
Are you suggesting we should require prescriptions to purchase them?
Endogenous drugs, exogenous drugs. Same effect on the brain, and in some cases the actual literal same substances. The difference is that endo-/exo- prefix, the former is made in your body, the latter is supplied from outside.
We have been learning how to induce certain experiences, which correspond to certain substances, for a long time; we're getting more competent at it; this includes social media A/B testing itself to be so sticky that a lot of people find it hard to put down; this is bad, so something* is being done about it.
* The risk being "something should be done; this is something, therefore it should be done"
Yes. The amount of emotional deregulation apparent in your response only advances my point.
The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
Or the people can decide how their society functions.
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.