From what I have seen, most Threads users are safe-spacers who wanted a platform with heavy moderation. So I guess these are just the growing pains they’ll have to get used to in the pursuit of their circlejerk paradise, particularly since this is Meta we’re talking about who have never been reliable or effective when it comes to moderating content.

This is a pretty clickbaity counter-article that doesn’t review the original in good faith. The New Yorker article is not titled ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ but rather ‘Has Social Media Fuelled A Teen-Suicide Crisis?’ with a lead of:

Mental-health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans, and parents and lawmakers alike are scrutinizing life online for answers.

So the implication that the premise of the article is to demonise social media is completely wrong, since it’s actually an investigation into the issue. That’s also the reason it’s long (another strange complaint from a guy whose 3000+ word response is only ever his opinions).

The “moral panic tropes” are testimony from real parents whose real children killed themselves. And these real parents think social media was responsible. It strikes me as pretty low to hand wave away the grief of these real people because it inconveniently feeds into a narrative you have some instinctual problem with.

The author tries to frame the balance of the New Yorker article as some kind of gotcha. Like it’s somehow a bad thing that this other writer took the time to consult with and quote experts who provide a different opinion. Personally I would much rather read that then something like this which was basically the equivalent of a reddit eXpOsEd thread.

Exactly. “Sparking backlash” just means these people whined for 2 minutes like they always do, before reaching into their wallet once again.

Corbyn was also good friends with Ken Livingstone, who said some very strange things about Hitler and the Jews.

It’s not that strange, I have a friend who literally said the same thing today in reference to one of his favourite channels shutting down. He preferred to call the stuff on this channel art, rather than content. I agree with the person above too, the term has always bugged me. It makes it sound so mass produced, like your job is to just produce meaningless “content” for people to mindlessly consume. And to be honest, that’s exactly what the mainstream YouTube culture is about.

More than 70% of central banks are currently researching and/or designing their own CBDCs.

“Crypto is the future” doesn’t really mean anything. Anyone can say that and never be wrong, because humans will always be looking towards the future. What I’m interested in is when this future is supposedly arriving. People have been making big claims about this stuff for nearly two decades and it’s still pretty irrelevant. Meanwhile CBDCs are actually being developed and rolled out globally. Where is crypto?

It’s a valid question, but the people asking it never seem to understand why social media is damaging for young people. They never seem to understand that designers are literally taking cues from the gambling industry to create addictive apps and algorithms, or that the brains of teenagers are still developing and are therefore much more vulnerable than an adult’s. It’s not just a moral panic about porn or cyber-bullying or kids doing something new their parents don’t understand and it’s not hypocritical for parents to want their children off social media while continuing to use it themselves. I think once you understand the technological aspect then it becomes clear that there is a problem here that needs addressing.

Marshall…?

WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL IT MALL-E?!

WHY?!

Xiaomi isn’t actually that big in China AFAIK. There is a lot of competition, not just from Apple but all the other Chinese vendors, most of whom are larger. Huawei, Honor, VIVO and Oppo all have at least an equivalent, if not larger, segment of the Chinese market.

I called them soldiers because that is the terminology the person I was replying to used.

I’m sceptical of the idea that an upvote system will actually reward genuine and interesting content, particularly considering this feature extends all the way up to channels with 500,000 subscribers. The most real YouTubers are those with like <10,000 subscribers; those are the channels I would like to have suggested.

They said “Seems unlikely [that pagers would be in the hands of doctors] considering only pagers belonging to Hezbollah had the explosives added.”

I understood that as referring to doctors unaffiliated with Hezbollah, as it has been made pretty clear that Hezbollah doctors were targets of the attack.

It is heavily implied when you’re all saying “Hezbollah” you’re talking about militants.

No it isn’t. Maybe that’s how you interpreted it, but as I said in another comment it is not just Hezbollah soldiers that were targeted.

Again, it is unreasonable to suggest that workers, including doctors and nurses, that are part of the civilian arm of Hezbollah’s de facto government are fair targets in either morality or international law.

No one has suggested that in this comment chain.

Not just their soldiers, civilian members of the organisation were also using them.

Many of the casualties were not Hezbollah fighters but members of the group’s extensive civilian operations

They went to Hezbollah, as the person you are disagreeing with said.

Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.

“The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction,” Mr Mosseri said.

In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.

Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.

Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.

In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, “because we don’t want to give teens an instruction manual”.

“So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age,” Mr Mosseri said.

The most stubborn category of “age-liars” are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.

But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.

Source.

I’m 25 now, but I still always say I was born in the 80s out of habit…

…?

I’m surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.

The article did mention ad-blockers:

Some users take back control from online ads by installing ad-blocker software. These can be free versions in the form of a browser extension, or more advanced versions with a subscription fee.

I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that’s the only way to perform a Google search.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.