State attorneys general in 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta today. The move comes after the conclusion of a multistate probe launched in 2021, where a bipartisan coalition of state enforcers began examining how Facebook and Instagram features are designed to allegedly addict and harm kids.
Back in 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office led the multistate probe investigating “Instagram’s impacts on young people” after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was “toxic” to teen girls but downplayed risks to the public. In a press release today, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell accused Meta of “deliberately” exploiting “young users’ vulnerabilities for profit.”
Everyone liked that.
I fail to see how that is deceptive or illegal.
jgfenix,
I don’t use facebook or instagram, but I hate all of those features. Take the infinite scroll on youtube, it was clearly designed to work with relative scrolling (scroll wheel or touch screen), but if you’re a scrollbar user it’s downright buggy with very unexpected jumping around and loosing your place. I’ve learned to compensate by intentionally overshooting and then backing up so that chunks stop being loaded around the position I am trying to browse.
As for autoplay, I’ve tried to block it in the browser, for whatever reason though mozilla appears to whitelist sites including youtube for autoplay and I hate that. I think mozilla are copying chrome’s behavior, which is obviously developed for google’s benefit, but as a user I really feel my choice to never autoplay videos should be respected. I can only block autoplay on other websites, but not for google websites, ugh! BTW youtube has an autoplay button that defaults to on and doesn’t persist if you regularly clear tracking cookies, so you have to disable it over and over again after auto play has already started. To be fair, the inability of FF to block autoplay is more mozilla’s fault than google’s.
I wouldn’t miss the disappearance of these “features” at all, good riddance I say! That said though, I think the notion that they be “illegal” is way too extreme. The law shouldn’t work this way and I don’t want legislative policymakers dictating the direction of technology and website design. That kind of micromanagement oversteps the line IMHO. Although I agree that society has become addicted, I think those looking for features to blame are really using them as a scapegoat without addressing any of the root causes for social behaviors.
@Alfman
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/
This should help. 🙂
Zayn,
Thanks for the tip. Does it work for you? I’ve tried so many addons like this. This looks like a very nice addon, but unfortunately as of today it doesn’t work for me under FF 115.3.1esr (64-bit).
There are many commenters in the reviews saying the plugin worked great but broke for them 4 days ago. It might just be a case of the developer having to constantly apply updates after google make website coding changes.
What I find frustrating is that of virtually all of FF plugins I’ve tried, they all work by changing the website’s programming, which is fragile against site updates. None of them have worked by changing firefox’s behavior itself such that autoplay could be forcefully disabled by the browser. This is likely because FF doesn’t expose an API for it. At first it’s encouraging that firefox actually has its own setting to disable autoplay (yay), but as I mentioned, it looks like mozilla decided to whitelist google/youtube (boo). I suppose it may be the case that I’d have to change the browser source code to forcefully block autoplay everywhere like I want.
I algo hace infinitesimal scroll (in other apps/websites since I don’t use FB/IG). It’s frustrating when the page is reload for whatever reason (in Android it happens a lot if you use another app while browsing) and you want to return to the point you were. Page 1/2/3…/676 is more user-friendly.
theses kids don’t have parent?