The Commission’s investigation preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.
I think its too late. An entire generation had their brains fried. But yeah, better late than never.
Also the brain can actually recover. But it takes a lot of work.
For me, just reading a book is difficult now. The mind is not used to that kind of focus. My eyes go down the page, and then I realize ive been thinking of something else, and have to start over. This happens over and over again. But with practice, it gets easier.
Welcome to my life since forever
-A pre-internet ADHD person lol
Add “YouTube Shorts” to the list, and fine them, too. They are doing the same, for the same reason.
Bravo EU!!!
Anything owned by that pos Zionist Larry Ellison should be illegal
great, do facebook products now.
Meta got sued and had to pay €1,500 per user in a ruling of a supreme state court which can’t be appealed. There’s a wave of lawsuits expected to follow because this actually means every Facebook user (for now, it might be possible that non-users whose data were also collected will sue, too) can easily sue now. I remember Meta boasting to have the data of some 10M Germans for targeted advertising. Unfortunately that’s hardly robust evidence but I hope they’ll sue them to hell and back.
i keep hearing about these companies getting fined, yet here we still are. when will heads start to roll?
The fines are too good a revenue source. Ireland would be fucked without the steady stream they represent.
All I every hear is how Ireland tries to avoid taking fines or tax from them.
yeah… here we are: Europeans with right to be forgotten and opt out of data collection
let me believe this next time there is a big data leak
well then they get massive fines for any data they leak
i keep hearing about these companies getting fined, yet here we still are.
since GDPR came in TBH i haven’t heard of any EU data leaks… like sure they happen in the US all the time, but where the fines actually happen
same with australia: we’ve had pretty good privacy laws since like the 90s, and really we haven’t had a whooooole lot of breaches. there have been some high profile ones, but security is never a 100% kinda thing yknow
Let me hold my breath waiting for something actually meaningful to be done about it, more than a “cost of doing business” protection payment.
6% of worldwide revenue
For ten years, and they can’t restructure it away.
Tech companies shouldn’t have these sorts of algorithmic profiles of people. It’s manipulation.
Cool! No one’s surprised. Anyway. Nothing is gonna be done.
Lemmy has infinite scrolling too so if lemmy get big it will have the same legal issue
It can be turned off
There’s a big difference between infinite scrolling content that’s using algorithms to specifically keep you scrolling and how Lemmy does it. On Lemmy that’s a you problem not a capitalism problem.
It is subjective. I personally spend more time on non algorithmic feed than algorithm one. It is boring to keep seeing the same time of content most of the time
A social media’s algorithm would optimize for engagement not content similarity.
So why when i interact with only niche content, the algotithms still show me only popular content?
On lemmy do you mean? It doesn’t have personalized recommendation algorithms as far as I know or any content similarity algorithms. I think it’s just a simple popularity by newness algorithm.
To clarify, I meant corporate social media companies will target engagement, and they will use personalized algos (not necessarily down to a user, could be group of similar users).
So for example if a user looks at some niche wood working content for example, they may mix in popular content that drives emotional response or is entertaining if that keeps people on the platform longer.
That’s what I’m saying, it’s not about content similarity necessarily, it’s about showing whatever drives engagement / time on platform.
When you have a lot of user data, and a lot of content meta data, you can do that very well. To the point where you can trigger addictive behaviors. That’s the issue with tiktok - but also other social media companies to lesser degrees
On lemmy do you mean?
I mean on Instagram and Facebook . The algorithm is very static and hard to change
To clarify, I meant corporate social media companies will target engagement
There is a strong correlation between similarity and engagement though. No matter how much engaging the content it there is a point where fatigue happen and I am fed up with the topic . The algorithm mare hard to modify like I used to care about video games and then I got fatigue , recommendation algorithm are still suggesting content I am no longer interesting it which make me bored and close the app.
Non-algorithmic feeds can facilitate a cycle of addiction through manual variety. By following diverse communities, I can rotate through interests switching from music to politics to sport which reset my attention span and prolonging my total time on the platform.
Non-algorithmic feeds are not free of rage baiting either. There is ton of fights in the comment of certain posts that are very time consuming and very unhealthy and I fall into it
Got it. My understanding is tiktok is on another level but have never used it.
It would surprise me if no one was doing content rotation strategies for specific user segments. similarity is a signal so is dissimilarity.
then, there will be spots that the algorithms fall apart.
But, I see what you are saying and yeah I’ve experienced similar, and agreed, even something simple like ‘popular’ has issues when driven by a score, as it can just maximize broad emotional response.
“This made me angry”, does better than “this made me satisfied in life”
This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system.
I don’t think Lemmy (or any text based platform) really fits the bill
Lemmy has a ton of media tho, its not entirely text based.
But the algorithm isn’t extremely personalized or optimized towards “engagement”. In fact the only fediverse platform that comes close is Loops, and even that is light-years away from the psychological manipulation that goes into Tiktok algorithms.
100% agreed, my only quibble was calling Lemmy a text based site.
It can be text based and still contain images and video, no?
When its spread between all of them pretty evenly, is it still text based?
Wait your app isn’t like this?
Nope. I turned off infinite scroll in the settings. I use the Voyager app, which paginates the feed when configured to do so.
Did you miss the “autoplay and highly personalised recommender system”? Those are the two big major differences and what makes people so addicted to tiktok etc. in a much worse way than forums in all forms (like reddit and lemmy). Reddit and Lemmy doesn’t have any thing that curates what you see based on your habits, that’s done by yourself or not at all.
Reddit and Lemmy doesn’t have any thing that curates what you see based on your habits
I’m pretty sure Reddit curates the content of r/popular based on your browser history.
It has infinite scroll. It’s not highly personalized like tiktok, it has auto play but there’s FAR more text posts than videos, and the push notifications are far less extreme (is there even a setting to get push notifications for every upvote, like tiktok enables automatically?). Lemmy really isn’t anything like tiktok.
I don’t think the EU would ignore it if it was only infinite scroll
Are you sure? They have been ignoring virtually everything with infinite scrolling. TikTok is the extremely rare exception where they actually address it.
Not always infinite. If you set it to be the top posts for the last 12 hours for example, it isn’t that hard to get to the end, not like automatically chosen posts follow on or are inserted into that feed.
Not really, i have hit the limit 2 3 times. Maybe its a voyager feature but it definitely has a limit
Nonsense.
Well crafted counter argument
Just some guis/apps, and it’s mostly optional
And what about all their copycats? Like Instagram and YouTube that are trying to do the same thing?
Loops too. It’s the fediverse version of TikTok. Would it also be illegal?
If this case gets a closure against tiktok, it will become a jurisprudence and will allow to do the same to them
The big danger here, which these steps mitigate but do not solve are:
#1 Algorithmically curated content
On the various social media, there are systems of automated content moderation that are in place that remove or suppress content. Ostensibly for protecting users from viewing illegal or disturbing content. In addition, there are systems for recommending content to a user by using metrics for the content, metrics for the users combined with machine learning algorithm and other controls which create a system of controls to both restrict and promote content based on criteria set by the owner. We commonly call this, abstractly, ‘The Algorithm’ Meta has theirs, X has theirs, TikTok has theirs. Originally these were used to recommend ads and products but now they’ve discovered that selling political opinions for cash is a far more lucrative business. This change from advertiser to for-hire propagandist
The personal metrics that these systems use are made up of every bit of information that the company can extract out of you via your smartphone, linked identity, ad network data and other data brokers. The amount of data that is available on the average consumer is pretty comprehensive right down to knowing the user’s rough/exact location in real-time.
The Algorithm used by social media companies are a black box, so we don’t know how they are designed. Nor do we know how they are being used at any given moment. There are things that they are required to do (like block illegal content) but there are very little, if any, restrictions on what they can block or promote otherwise nor are there any reporting requirements for changes to these systems or restrictions on selling the use of The Algorithm for any reason whatsoever.
There have been many public examples of the owners of that box to restricting speech by de-prioritizing videos or restricting content containing specific terms in a way that imposes a specific viewpoint through manufactured consensus. We have no idea if this was done by accident (as claimed by the companies, when they operate too brazenly and are discovered), if it was done because the owner had a specific viewpoint or if the owner was paid to impose that viewpoint.
This means that our entire online public discourse is controllable. That means of control is essentially unregulated and is increasingly being used and sold for, what cannot be called anything but, propaganda.
#2 - There is no #2, the Algorithms are dangerous cyberweapons, their usage should be heavily regulated and incredible restrictions put on their use against people.
Illegal, certainly. Are they going to do something about it, definitely not.
Nobody uses tiktok here , except apes in the zoo
8 don’t know where you live, but over here (European country) I can easily see 5 people on TikTok when I’m on the train.
About the same as your country, the UK, 38%. This is a skewed picture based on age. Popular with teenagers and single people, ages 24 to 36, to break the loneliness. I don’t know anyone in my environment who uses this, the same goes for my daughter
