Writes Mike Masnick, in "Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For" (TechDirt).
I found that because David French links to it in "Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts." French writes: "It’s quite possible that these verdicts will be overturned or heavily modified on appeal. But that process can take years. In the meantime, there will almost certainly be many more trials and many more verdicts that will put social media companies under pressure to increase their own censorship and their own controls over free speech online."
पोस्ट्स
२२ टिप्पण्या:
We don’t allow children to legally access addictive and destructive items like alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana.
Most everything can be addictive. Alcohol, Tabacco, Drugs (both legal and prescribed), Porn, Gambling, Video Games, Running, Sex, Protesting Trump (TDS), Food, Certain Law Blogs, etc, etc. Do we sue product manufacturers & content creators when they produce something so enjoyable that we return over and over again, sometimes against our best interests? The tort bar, of course, says YES.
I suppose I should take a look at these "social" media sites and see what all the fuss is about...
A large portion of all the shorts now are pure AI. Will that content bring eyeballs? Perhaps it's an artifact of the older generation, but it being fake ruins it for me. Will younger people be addicted to fake video? It's so mush easier to make and with endless possibilities, but fake is fake. The great challenge of the newer humans will be separating truth from lies. That's always been a issue, but it's now 100 times easier to lie than ever before, and truth is harder to discern. I don't envy them. Predicting the future seems more complicated than ever.
It will be interesting to see how AI slop pushes out the insipid videos of women emoting into their cars while eating something. It can only be an improvement.
serious questions:
is this paint going to all be one color?
will different walls get different coats?
WILL there be designs?
will it just be walls? or also ceilings (or naked bodies?)
there are LOTS of unanswered questions about this paint drying channel
People make money posting these videos. The amounts are falling. At some point it won’t be worth doing any more with real people.
Imagine a drug dealer, but the only thing he sells is table salt.
Selling on the street isn't inherently harmful. It only matters because of the content it delivers.
I wonder if these arguments are just outrage at the prospect of the 'little people' being able to leverage censorship, to bring these monsters to heel. Why that's outrageous ! Only the government should be able to lean on social media giants to dictate censorship on what it finds offensive ! Why, if we let ordinary citizens have that power, who knows what could happen !
Of course not all content is as boring as watching paint dry. Some content is interesting, but the interesting ones are mixed in with less interesting ones. I remember learning in a psychology class that intermittent rewards were better at enforcing behavior than consistent rewards.
I don't see how social media is different from loot boxes in video games or blind boxes of collectibles in stores. Baseball cards and gaming cards (MTG or Pokemon, for example) are the same sort of thing.
What makes social media different from these other things is that you feel part of a group when you know the latest meme or viral content. This is the thing we share now that there are more than three or four channels of TV shows and everyone is watching something different on a different schedule.
I reject the argument that this is new because the technology is new. The basic functions haven’t changed. the editorial decision of whether to put something on the front page or bury it on the 20th page is now automated and made by an algorithm. if the editor was responsible, then you’re responsible if your algorithm does it.
Hopefully that will be overturned. Such verdicts lead to Kings ruling us. No freedom to watch a reel or TikTok.
I think it's the technology -- that is, the internet --- itself that's addictive. There's a lot going on in the world and much of it is on the internet. No site is of paint drying and none competes with paint drying.
Very sociable people might be more likely to become addicted to information about their classmates than to accounts about what's going on in Ukraine or Iran, but even without Facebook, they'd probably find something else to become addicted to.
If the internet is hard-wired for addiction and meets people who are hard-wired for addiction is Zuckerberg to blame? Then again, the government does lock up drug pushers.
Just one day after this verdict came down, I saw an ambulance-chaser ad on TV asking “Have you or anyone in your family become addicted to social media… “. That’s the real story here.
As distasteful as it is to agree with the odious French, he's right. This ruling is not just the camel's nose under the tent to end internet anonymity "for the children," it is most of the camel in the tent. That loss of anonymity is a major step in the direction of widespread censorship of the internet by the left, and of intimidating conservatives and heterdox liberals. Anyone cheering this is being very short sighted.
I spend too much time thinking about the Roman Empire. Can I sue my history teachers?
In the meantime, there will almost certainly be many more trials and many more verdicts that will put social media companies under pressure to increase their own censorship and their own controls over free speech online."
As usual, David French is full of shit. What are they going to do, say "oh, this post is too interesting, we must censor it"?
Poor David, no one reads him any more, so therefore everyone else must be censored
“ In the meantime, there will almost certainly be many more trials and many more verdicts that will put social media companies under pressure to increase their own censorship and their own controls over free speech online."
Somewhere down there, Tipper Gore is smiling.
"Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying."
Wouldn't impact me in the slightest. I don't even know what "infinite scroll" is (though it's not hard to imagine).
In case you forgot, David French was booted from National Review because he was taking Silicon Valley Cash under the table while writing ariticle's like "The Conservative Case for Google censorship".
The best thing about French in 2026, he is no longer pretends to be a conservative Republican or a devout christian. That grift is over.
If it’s addictive, the social media companies should starte charging $99.99 a month subscription.
When the topic is a ridiculous verdict against the Trump administration David French says "we have to let the law work as intended, there are appeals for a reason, these MAGA people complaining about the delay don't understand how the Rule of Law works." When it's a verdict he doesn't like he says "the appeal process may take many years" to highlight the injustice of that delay.
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