You have a point here but I think there might be an analogy to selling cupcakes with undisclosed poisonous ingredients.
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Well, I had the misfortune of tangling with courts and red-tape multiple times, so I know that there are some requirements that you need to fulfull in order to win a legal case. And those were mentioned in the article, so I do not think that I am kidding myself.
Unless we are talking about a mistrial or a totally inane ruling (which can happen, this is why appeals exist, after all 
), then I tend to reserve final judgement unless I can read the actual court proceedings. But as far as I can understand those things, my previous post stands.
Yes, sugar is addicting, but there happen to be various “sugar free” alternatives for most products, usually provided by the same companies. There is hardly any legal ground to the argument that “company X added sugar to product Y to make it addictive” unless they have violated some legal limit for it.
E.g. it is a known fact that Subway had to alter their bread in their European stores because according to our standards their “original recipe” for sandwitch bread has enough sugar to classify it as a “cake” in the EU. 
…in which case things were pretty straight-forward.
Well, good for them. Meta, TIkTok and other social media are systematically preying on the minds and wallets of the younger generations. It is about high time there is some compensation in cases where the damage can be proven.
As for these…
… “legal looting” should be the actual name of “casinos and gambling enterprises” as well as the “predictive markets” or “loot boxes” (sorry, “surprise mechanics” :P) or whatever other loophole and euphemism they are using this week to avoid regulations and pray not only on the unfortunate feebleminded saps that they usually take advantage off, but also underage people.
I was watching a movie on TV with my mother a month ago and it was around 21:30 (9:30 P.M.), so it was prime-time and during the commercial break, a full ten minutes, only gambling platform ads were playing.
Garish, inane, misleading ads full of fake joy and promises of the worst kind.
Looping again and again for the impressionable minds.
If they have millions to spend on misleading ads like that, I think they they should keep some millions on the side to deal with lawsuits that will stem directly from their bad practices.
I do not underestimate them at all since I live in a kleptocracy where “legal looting” like that is not only allowed, but celebrated.
Therefore, I detest that practice in general.
However, in these particular examples, we are talking about companies that are social detractors which are actively damaging the lives of others for their own gain.
Social media “giants”? Casinos? Gambling enterprises? 
Those are in the same category as “Tobacco companies” and hardly deserve any sympathy and they can hardly argue that their existence is benefitial to society or even the market in general.
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Social media have great content, but also a lot of mediocre and addictive content. I would compare them to grocery stores that sell at the same time high quality foods, as well as drugs which are not labeled as such, and which are legal. In addition, everyone, including minors, have free and unlimited access to those grocery stores.
I understand from the article that the main issue is mental health of minors, and not addiction in general. I understand the need to protect minors, and several countries have started to ban minors under 15 or 16 from social media. On the other hand, other harmful and addictive content are accessible to all, including minors, like porn sites and some online games, so perhaps other companies should be sued first, before attacking YouTube.
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Yup, I was immediately reminded …
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of the tobacco companies that have long known about the adverse effects of smoking (at least since the1950s) and the addictive effect of nicotine (IIRC since the 1960s),
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and of the oil companies that also knew (at least since the 1950s) about how additional CO₂ would affect the climate of the whole planet.
Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg has known for more than a decade about how the use of their algorithm-driven social networks affects the psychology of users, this is very different from, for example, the Fediverse, where there are no algorithms that decide what you’re shown or not, time (i.e. chronological order) is the only factor here.
So … we need to distinguish between different types of “Social Networks”.
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Yeah, it is is frightening and very dangerous that the huge power that the “tech bros” have accumulated is not backed by actual broad knowledge, but by an extremely narrow-focused expertise that is inversely proportional to their wealth of power.
I for one would feel MUCH safer on this beautiful little planet if the things that affect EVERYONE were decided by committees of real proven experts instead of a decreasing number of increasingly dumber and increasingly richer people.
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So you think it should be allowed to make products/services more addictive (even for children) just for the sake of more profit? Why?
Especially with social media that seems odd to me, considering enshittifaction, network effects and a lack of interoperability.
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Sounds great, can we just get rid of gambling enterprises please? 
I’m all for laws that protect people from harm. Addiction harms people, and busineses whose aim is specifically to make people addicted, I think we would be better off without.
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That is fine if it is not carried to ridiculus extremes. Jack Williamson wrote the ultimate answer to the extreme form of that philosophy with his classic story, “With Folded Hands…” (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947).
The trouble is the word “addiction" is ambiguous and much manipulated. Physiological addiction, which includes the objective standard of withdrawal symptoms, is one thing, and psychological “addiction” is something else. The latter moves us into the realm of junk science. As already mentioned. it greatly undermines the principle of personal responsibility, and is therefore the modern equivalent of “the devil made me do it.”
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Initially I was surprised by the headline thinking how unlikely would be that the family of the pilots would care about something that trivial and then I read the article:
The statement caught the attention of Canada’s parliamentary Committee on Official Languages, which summoned Rousseau to “explain himself” before MPs on why his message was released in English only.
And as it was expected it was not the families, but some pencil-shovers eager to finally do something with their day, in a mostly worthless bureaucratic position.
It would have been very funny if people in Canada read the news and went “wait we have a parliamentary Committee on Official Languages? Shouldn’t we abolish that tripe and save us some money?”, but that would be too much to hope for. 
They needn’t be “gotten rid off”… just held to some standards and accountability, like the rest of the businesses.
While I agree with you on this, since I consider vast swaths of what the modern psychological/pedagogical “science” is today as quackery disguised as science, I have to point out that just because the people that claim to study an issue are using dubious methods and logic, that doesn’t mean that the issue itself is non-existent.
For example, the known case of Sweden going back to traditional books and pen-and-paper teaching:
If “modern pedagogy” and “modern psychology” where really serious sciences, they should have at least predicted these issues without turning generations of Swedish children into “test subjects” and suggested some caution on whether the country should lean into the “digital new way of teaching” so heavily.
Just because the people responsible of studying those things are pseudo scientists, that doesn’t mean that one method was not better than the other or, in the case that we are talking about, that certain design/algorithmic choices are addictive, while others are not (or, at the very least, are less so).
It is worthy to point out that the court didn’t order those platforms to close down or anything radical like that, but to stop intentionally trying to manipulate the users of their platforms.
That’s not too much to ask, I’d say.
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Does the term “addiction” even matter that much? The allegations are that those tech companies are making their software more harmful to adolescents (and adults) just to maximize profit. Why should that be allowed? Or do you think that’s not what is happening?
To me it seems they are recklessly pulling everey psychological trick they can, not caring about how that has negative impacts on the development of teenagers. Why do you ask those (or their parents) to show more personal responsibility for that?
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I’m not the person you asked but AFAIK libertarians think that way also, namely that everyone should just look after themselves —> a world without empathy and without care for others, it’s all “me, myself, and I, and of course also mine (i.,e. my family, my friends), and screw the others, I don’t care.”
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Actually I’m not sure I’ve heard about how libertarians view protection of the young.
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I don’t use Instagram so won’t comment on it, but what about YouTube? Is there anyone on this forum who finds it too addictive and dangerous?
On the plus side,
- YouTube has a lot of interesting educational content, music, news, etc. in many languages.
- Content which is inappropriate for children is not freely accessible.
On the minus side,
- Some influencers may spread messages that you don’t want your children to hear. And algorithms amplify the message by recommending similar videos, so we end up hearing the same message over and over again.
- Shorts and/or clickbaits can become addictive.
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I think they introduced YouTube shorts to be like Instagram reels, ie as addictive and engaging, with the idea to just keep scrolling.
However it’s also about the algorithm and the content served by it I would say. If you don’t get something vaguely interesting or watchable you become aware you’re just wasting your time and move on.
I would say something like YouTube has more or less replaced TV for me, occasionally can watch something on Netflix, but there’s enough long form content on YouTube for entertainment, documentary style things, news, comedy/satire, lots of Go content, that there’s no need to watch TV channels where you have no control over the content or the timing because they’re scheduled.
I imagine it’s much worse when you’re younger in some sense. I feel like before when you were stuck with tv schedules it’s easier to disengage because something comes on you dislike (or several things in a row), there might be limited tv channels, and then there’s enough ads cramming in the gaps that make you want to leave anyway.
While now you could probably squeeze in some amount of YouTube/Instagram into every moment you’re awake - while eating breakfast and meals, on on the side while tidying or doing homework (for a younger person).
And again, any sort of addiction damage, apart from the length of time engaging with it, can come from the content being engaged with, and that comes back to the algorithms used. If teens and youth are engaging with harmful content - something with a net effect of promoting body dysmorphia and other conditions - and then the algorithm promotes them even more similar content because that’s engaging to the demographic - that’s an issue.
It’s kind of similar to how if you start engaging with a certain type of content that might have a political leaning, YouTube will be more likely to show you more of the same content. Or you watched one too many cat videos and you get recommended cat videos etc.
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Yes you are more or less saying my points 1 and 2 in more detail. But I’m wondering if there is anyone here who thinks “I’m too addicted to YouTube, I need to stop using it”, or “YouTube is dangerous, I won’t allow my 10 year-old child to watch it”.
Personally I quickly stopped to watch Shorts and try to avoid clickbaits, so I don’t think YouTube is a bad addiction for me. When my children were in their early teens or so, I thought YouTube was OK (even if they sometimes watched stupid things like cat videos) but that was years ago and things have evolved quite a bit.
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As long as I watch enough semi-educational (like Veritasium, 3 brown 1 blue), I tell myself that it’s not a problem.
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That is also why they rarely seem to have much success in elections…
People of that mindset are less keen to run for office and less keen to actually help their constituents if they are elected. Not that most politicians are helpful, but the non-libertarian ones can pretend to care in order to cajole the public into voting them.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, then:
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/children
Youtube is far more benign than most social media for three reasons:
a) It has a much better and more trainable algorithm and it doesn’t seem to push to you things that you are not keen to watch.
b) YT shorts - as far as I can tell - rarely seem to be connected thematically, so doom-scrolling is reduced
c) As you pointed out YouTube has an incredible amount of actually good and useful content. You can learn almost anything in YT, from Go, to chiseling wood, to singing and playing instruments, to obscure DIY repairs (one of my power tool batteries is out of order and I looked into it yesterday. As you could expect there is a full tutorial on how to totally service it on your own). A real “foundation” of knowledge, easily accessible to all.
However, point a is also a bit of a curveball.
Exactly because the algorithm is so fine tuned, YouTube is a platform that can hide a lot of detrimental content in its folds, without the vast majority of the users ever realising. If you get into a bonkers echo chamber, it is just as hard to get out of it in YouTube, as it is on other social media.
And just like with other social media, there is no bottom in that barrel and you can find anything in YT, from “amusing madness” like flat earthers and religious nutjobs that think that rockets get stuck to the fimament, to actually dangerous content…
Be careful how you speak about our cat overlords. :P
I am joking of course, but there are people that take that seriously… As I said earlier, you can find all sort of mad echo chambers on the internet and in YouTube:
It is not a joke, those people are serious… there are even paywalled articles about this nonsense:
And there are even CNN articles about it:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/entertainment/hate-cats-jessie-buckley-doechii
What a time to be alive…
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