SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the price-of-liberty-is-constant-vigilence dept.
A cursory reading of the 14-page Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology bill suggests that it may apply to SoylentNews.
What do you think?
US Could ban 'Addictive' Autoplay Videos and Infinite Scrolling Online:
The Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (Smart) Act takes aim at techniques and features that, according to its author, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, are created to encourage and deepen addictive behaviours.
The bill targets "practices that exploit human psychology or brain physiology to substantially impede freedom of choice" and specifically prohibits four general practices:
Infinite scroll or auto refill, such as the Facebook newsfeed or a Twitter timeline, which automatically loads in new content when the user nears the end of the existing content, without requiring any specific request from readers.
Autoplay, when a site automatically plays music or video "without an express, separate prompt by the user", as on YouTube and Facebook. Curiously, the bill explicitly excludes autoplaying advertisements from its coverage, despite the general unpopularity of that content. It also provides exceptions for autoplaying music on music streaming services, and autoplaying from a pre-built playlist.
Badges and other awards linked to engagement with the platform. These are most notably used by Snapchat in the form of the Snapstreak badges, which mark how long two friends have exchanged daily messages. Parents have complained that the Snapstreak mechanic leads to problematic behaviour from children, who fear their friendship is at risk if the streak ends.
"Elimination of natural stopping points", a catch-all category for any website that loads more content than a typical user scrolls through in three minutes without the user expressly requesting that additional content.
Proposed US law Would Ban Infinite Scroll, Autoplaying Video, Limit Daily Use:
The technique for compliance as outlined in the bill, however, seems to be to annoy consumers into abandoning their social accounts altogether.
As described in the text, social media companies would have to limit users to 30 minutes of use per day by default. Users would be allowed to choose their own time limits for daily and weekly use, but companies would have to reset that time limit to half an hour every single month, as well as providing "conspicuous pop-up" displays at least once every 30 minutes showing how much time you have spent using a service in the past day, across all devices.
Hawley, whose website features an automatically playing video loop in the header image, said in a statement that the tech sector has "embraced a business model of addiction."
So, are we in the clear, or not?
Also at Vox, Digital Information World, Techdirt, Futurism, The Verge, TechSpot, Washington Examiner, Washington Post, Engadget, The Hill, The Washington Times & CNET.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:45AM (14 children)
Well done USA for coming up with something even more stupid than the EU Cookie law (training people to automatically click 'accept cookies' since 2011 so they didn't notice when the GDPR changed that to 'consent to sharing all my data' in 2018).
TwitFaceTubeagram will love this - they'll come up with new ploys to addict kids in no time at all, their ranks of lawyers will tie up any prosecutions for years and, if the worst happens, they'll just fish down the back of the sofa for some loose change to pay the fine. Meanwhile, any small-fry competition that might try to follow TwitBook's rags-to-riches route, or independent sites that want a comment facility will face a disproportionate regulatory burden, give up, and just create a Twitter channel.
Expect a 'Don't throw us into the briar patch' protest from Big Social Media, but don't expect them to try too hard.
NB: Soylent News isn't a social media site: its obviously a web app for information exchange (if not, then Slack, Zoom, Github etc. should be subject to a 30 min/day time limit, too)
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:56AM
Hmmm. That would probably promote more effective use of the named tools.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:07AM (11 children)
The difference being ours isn't a law, just a bill proposed by one chucklehead.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:29PM (9 children)
To distract us from...?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
His actual record, I expect. It can't be made into a big enough issue for much of anything more.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 02 2019, @02:45AM
To my eye, the bill reads like someone scratching a personal itch -- family member with internet-addiction problems, perhaps.
So obviously everyone has the same problem and we must all be frog-marched to the timer gulag.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:46PM (4 children)
More like to establish how protective of internet users the person is. It doesn't matter if it passes, it can still be used by the congressperson to promote how dedicated they are to the subject of . It can also be used as a bludgeon to "prove" that is so soft on while they are strong on .
And more to the point, this is what one gets when one takes one's political news from outlets that have no clue about politics. If a person was to worry about every single dumb-assed piece of legislation proposed you could spend the rest of your days in panic over the action of only one congressional session, literally.
One can confirm this here [govtrack.us], that shows that last Congress there were over 13,500 bills proposed and 443 laws and 774 resolutions were passed, which is under 10% of the total.
Does legislation like this have a hope in hell of passing? Nope. If passed, would it get an injunction and then be struck down as unconstitutional? Almost certainly.
Much better to worry about legislation that has traction and may actually have a prayer of passing.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:51PM
Wups. Lost my <psuedovariables>. It almost reads better that way though than <insert topic here>.
<Cauterize brain tissue to think before executing shift-comma in future.> maybe I need legislation to help with that.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday August 02 2019, @02:47AM (2 children)
Good points. However, citizens who are aware of and raise hell about crappy legislation are part of why some of the dumber ones don't get passed.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 02 2019, @03:15PM (1 child)
Well said, although there isn't the interest or support to raise Cain about every bill that passes through. Energy is better spent by calling attention to things that actually do have any sort of shot at making it, like the CASE act elsewhere. That's a story that deserves being shouted from the rafters because it is both harmful and very likely to pass. But as you say and there are such things as longshots.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday August 02 2019, @04:38PM
True, tho one has a better chance of killing dumb legislation by never letting it get out of committee, at which point it can garner wider support and becomes more difficult to stop.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:28PM (1 child)
...from the fact that "But Hillary's Emails!" doesn't seem to work as well now as an answer to every awful new headline.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 02 2019, @02:49AM
Here I was peacefully reading Hillary's emails, which scroll on and on and on, and every 30 minutes this damned popup reminded me that I was wasting my time!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:08PM
Literally! It doesn't even have any co-sponsors yet!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:26AM
We can be friends.
The fact that there are millions of people who hate what facegag is who can now never meet each other because there is no platform for people who think for themselves that has been able to grow to more than a thousand people without being subverted.
This type of measure 'protect us from ourselves by taking away freedom to do very specific things that are abused by people with mental illnesses' is a very good example of what it looks like when you are trimming the leaves of evil while ignoring the root.
It will look like our alleged representatives are getting tough, but the core mechanism of vacuuming private data and selling it to anyone who is willing to pay, is ignored and also conveniently out of the headlines for this entire discussion.
So I am suspicious of whoever posted this or suggested it, they are likely consensus crackers getting paid good fees.
So someone will have to have 2 google accounts in order to evade this dreadful daily play limit? Or will they have to identify us all individually by IP in order to make this work?
If anyone didn't think these thoughts without me having to tell you, then you might be trapped in a paper bag and not know it, or in other words, allowed to think because you don't know how.
We need to be destroying these entities and imprisoning the perpetrators who are ruining the internet and psychologically attacking society.
The question you should be asking is if we all worked together could we create enough junk data to ruin these monsters? And further thinking along those lines will be rewarded with freedom.