It was pretty bad. There’s not much more to say about that. Trump was bad too, but he was bad in almost the same way 4 and 8 years ago. If I was a conservative, I’d be pretty happy about that debate.
I am hearing a lot of people who are not young discuss this topic and I would really like to hear from young social media users whether or not this would have any effect on them.
The article brings up this:
Critics of the proposed warning label seized on this point. They ask, “Where is the series of definitive scientific studies to prove that social media and phone use destroy teens and adolescents?” They want the same kind of proof that eventually jolted our public health response to tobacco: blackened lungs, cancer research and thousands dead.
I don’t agree with the critics personally, but if I were their age and I saw a Surgeon General’s warning about social media when I logged in, I might wonder why they’re doing this when there’s no conclusive evidence of harm.
I should also point out that Surgeon General warnings on cigarette packages began in 1966. You can see here that there is definitely a steady trend line downward, but it had started long before the warnings began and the warnings don’t seem to have been a big factor, since there wasn’t a huge drop once they started. It went down for women after it had been going up, but it had already been going down with men and I am not convinced there is a strong correlation with the packaging and women.
In all honesty, I knew cigarettes were bad for me when I was a teenage smoker. I didn’t care, because I thought the repercussions were so far away that there was no way to know what would happen. Similarly, I’m sure many users think they’re immune to the deception of social media.
Cigarette companies began adding trace toxins, like formaldehyde, cyanide, benzene, and cadmium to compound the addictive properties of nicotine. They enhance the feelings of withdrawal from even just one cigarette.
The addictive design of social media algorithms, fueled by psychographic profiling, is very similar. The software monitors every bit of input available, from the obvious likes, comments, subscribes, searches, and shares, to the dubious pausing videos, scrolling hesitations, zooming, screenshots, and downloads. On less secure devices, microphone and camera activation can occur, mouse or finger placement may be monitored, as well as contacts and message scrubbing.
I think your comparison is more accurate than most people understand. The US tobacco industry is worth $108B as of 2024. The US ad industry is $262B. They’re far more powerful and far less regulated.
I was the same way when I started smoking in high school in the 90s. “I’ll be fine if I quit before I’m 30.” We were under no illusions. We called them death sticks like plenty of other people who smoked. My wife used to say “glad I’m not pregnant” when she saw the pregnancy warning. Thankfully, we both quit many years ago and have not apparently suffered any long-term repercussions, but who knows in 20 or 30 years?
And that was something we knew killed lots of people.
Cancer sticks here. I also quit over ten years ago. I’m grateful I haven’t experienced any long-term repercussions.
I highly recommend these documentaries on social media psychographics, and their influence on the 2016 US election and the Brexit vote if you haven’t seen them. They’re both very accessible, and the information is coming directly from the experts who created this software and have since left the field.
It’s weird to me (and I feel old for saying it) but the warnings were already there for the internet. The biggest thing taught about it that I learned in like, 2nd grade, was
Not everything on the internet is true
And
Anything you put on the internet is there forever.
It feels like there’s a distinct lack of education on how to interact with the internet since I wanna say 2010-2015 ish. The warning labels were removed, and the internet has only gotten more insidious since.
Honestly, it seems like people my age (late 40s) and older are the ones who have trouble understanding that since we weren’t taught that in school. So maybe we are the ones who need to see these warnings.
Lead poisoning is known to make people dumber and angrier. It seems the boomers got the bulk of the lead poisoning in America. To me, this explains the behavior you’re talking about 🤷. I have no other theories. I think they’re all just brain dead from lead poisoning dude.
I originally thought that generational bullshit is stupid and, without any other influence, each generation is really the same as the last and the changes only really happen within the society itself. So I always thought it was stupid when people would say, “X generation is the dumbest!”
But then I realized that Boomers were hit with both massively spread lead poisoning and swaths of radiation through especially Midwest America throughout their developmental periods that it is fair enough to say that, should there be such thing as the “Dumbest Generation,” it would likely be the Boomers
In retail it’s always boomers losing their shit about almost nothing, and being 40 now, I recall the past 30 years pretty well, and there were also recipts with coupons, you had to pay cash and using a CC or Debit was a curtesy you couldn’t expect, banks gave you cards and pin numbers, but NOW they can’t handle it. At all.
Plus, a lot of them got Covid without a vacchine and that disease attacks your nervous system and can shave of between 3 to 6 IQ points with each infection. So they are likely even dumber now than they were before Covid.
Yeah dude I’m sure these old motherfuckers who dedicated their lives to ONE SINGLE ACADEMIC PURSUIT that is completely unrelated to science in just about every way, knows better than the EPA as to whether or not this plan is cutting air pollution.
Once again, we’ve encountered one of the many fatal flaws of our system: requiring every citizen and lawmaker to be an PhD level expert on literally every subject or else things break and people die. We’re all the ones who have to abide by their dumbass decisions when it literally kills our children. Very cool.
People without understanding of science are overriding people who understand it and have data to prove it. Ideology is trumping logic and it’s going to kill us.
The justices in a 5-4 vote rejected arguments by the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states that the plan was cutting air pollution.
The court—that is 9 old people who have studied nothing but jurisprudence for the last 3 or 4+ decades —have decided that they are better qualified than the Environmental Protection Agency and the hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and experts that make it up, to judge whether or not an EPA plan to curb pollution actually curbs pollution.
This (and the other decision that just came down about the SEC) seems to indicate to me exactly how they plan to rule in the Chevron Deference case, and it does not look good.
My only (admittedly convoluted) hope is that they decided to choose a couple of the regulatory issues on this session’s docket as a handout to the Captain Planet villains that make up the GOP, so they don’t lose their shit when they uphold Chevron.
I gotta say, I recognized both of those debate performances. One of them’s the angry grandfather who’s always complaining that his foreign neighbor is stealing his trash; the other’s the nice grandpa who calls you by your cousin’s name, then gives you $5 to go to a movie.
I wouldn’t want either to babysit my kids - Trump because he’d steal my TV and throw out my avocados; Biden because he’d fall down the stairs and let the kids stay up to midnight eating ice cream.
But a President’s job isn’t really to be a subject matter expert on every policy. He’s there to assemble a good team of policy matter experts and balance the needs of normal people against the power of megacorporations. And we have the rare opportunity to judge both grandpas on their past performance: Jared Kushner, Secretary of Everything; Janet Yellen vs Steve Mnuchin; Rick Perry vs Jennifer Granholm; Jeff Sessions & William Barr vs Merrick Garland.
Ehh, I’d say he was more boringly safe, especially for a lot of his in-country policy stuff. And that’s a good thing. The presidency is not meant to be glorious, exciting, or full of media magnet bombshells. Those generally mean that something has gone wrong.
Lawyers for the families have been scrapping behind the scenes, accusing each other of trying to claim a disproportionate share of Mr. Jones’s meager assets.
For fuck’s sake, NYT. You said he and his businesses have $9 million in assets and he has $2 million a few paragraphs up.
I guess that counts as meager if you’re in New York City, but it doesn’t in Texas.
I don’t know the specific problem with that pollster but the general message of the headline still stands IMO.
Trump’s debate performance was awful, but so was Biden’s, and somehow because this country is weird as hell Biden is held to a much higher standard than Trump while also being immensely unpopular.
Frank Ian Luntz (born February 23, 1962) is an American political and communications consultant and pollster,[1][2] best known for developing talking points and other messaging for Republican causes. His work has included assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect, including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming.
This man is a propagandist. Do not use him as a source for anything. You might as well just listen to the Trump campaign if you’re going to listen to him.
Trump’s debate performance was awful, but so was Biden’s, and somehow because this country is weird as hell Biden is held to a much higher standard than Trump while also being immensely unpopular.
Trump’s performance as a debater was awful. He ignored the questions put to him, and frequently lied through his teeth. But, you could put a clip from this debate alongside a clip from his debate with Hillary 8 years ago, and not really see much of a difference.
The reason people are freaking out is that Biden’s age was on full display here. His stutter was much more visible, his voice was raspy at times, and he frequently couldn’t finish his thoughts before the mic went off. We also have a long history of his time in government to know how he used to be.
If this election turns into a referendum on Biden’s age, he loses. Even though Trump is only 3 years younger. Trump doesn’t show it.
I mean a lot of the time Biden’s sentence’s were incoherent. Reminding me of the Trump shark type blabbering. Disappointing. Although it seems he was ill.
Becoming incoherent because of a illness, that doesn’t hospitalize you, isn’t a great trait for a president.
We lost to Trump in 2016 because we ignored how relentlessly unpopular Hilary Clinton was, Republicans spent decades smearing her every chance they got.
Biden just proved their claims about his mental fitness, if we ignore that by calling it optics, we’ll lose.
And yet a senile knocking on death’s door old man is still the objectively better option than Donald Trump. I just can’t understand how people have forgotten who this guy is and what he did to screw every American for his own ego and interests.
This debate (which I didn’t watch) was a spectacle. We all know both of these farts are not fair presidential candidates for Americans. It’s disgusting and gut wrenching.
If you’re undecided, all you need to do is bypass your social media feed and biased news sources and search for Trump presidential accomplishments | Biden presidential accomplishment. You can also check Politifact to observe their lies (here’s the result from the debate) and presidential promises kept and broken - Trump | Biden.
The problem is the vast majority of people don’t care or aren’t aware of actual policy and legislation that happens in DC. They go by a vibe. And they go by who’s the best orator (see: Obama). And, yeah, Biden did not pass the vibe check last night. But he’s still that guy you work with whom you hate to be around because he’s awkward and smells bad but he’s not firable because he’s a decent keeps-to-himself dude and gets shit done better than most and your company is better with him than without him.
No, the immediate problem is that we know that people make decisions based on a vibe and who orates better and (out of all of the qualified people in the country) we still hang our hat (and the future of the country) on a poor orator with a bad vibe. It’s 2016 all over again and it seems like nobody’s learned a thing.
This shouldn’t be a hard race at all. Why are we insisting on handicapping ourselves like this?
What a rubbish! It’s awful that the enslaved Chinese workers in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China actually are bearing the burdens of Chinese cheap cars.
Guess what: Chinese cars aren’t even made in Xinjiang.
Politicians are just conflating two completely unrelated issues to drum up support for eliminating the supply of cheaper in demand products that consumers prefer over the overly expensive choices from the Western owner donors.
We agree that the ethnic cleansing and slavery in Xinjiang is absolutely abhorrent and that workers throughout China should have much better wages and conditions, but this would have no effect on the former and devastatingly negative consequences for the latter.
First, your statement is outright false, one example being the plant operated until recently by a subsidiary of SAIC-Volkswagen near Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Region. Volkswagen had to leave the joint venture with SAIC exactly over forced labour allegations.
And second, even if true it wouldn’t matter as forced labour in China doesn’t just take place in Xinjiang alone. There are many other examples across the country.
Even so, tariffs on Chinese cars won’t do anything to lessen the problem of slavery and will hurt Chinese workers and people who want to wean themselves off fossil fuels IMMENSELY.
The two issues of tariffs and slavery aren’t related and that you’re using the former as a defense department the latter is a sign that you don’t have any real reasons not to oppose such destructive protectionism.
It’s like saying that there should be a tariff on American cars because number plates are being made via penal slavery.
<a href="" rel="nofollow">@Viking_Hippie</a>First your are claiming that Chinese cars aren’t manufactured in Xinjiang. When I provide evidence that this is false, you say “even so” and repeat your opinion. It seems whatever one says, no matter if evidence proofs otherwise, you “know” it better, continuing with your false narrative and spreading your opinion. Some may find such conversations funny, I say it is waste of time.
Your points in your statement above are false again.
Nope. The location of the factories was never the point.
The point is what the effects of tariffs would be: they would help the bottom line of Western competitors and nothing else at the expense of Chinese workers and German consumers. It wouldn’t help Chinese slaves in any way.
THAT’S the point. THAT’S what matters.
It seems whatever one says, no matter if evidence proofs otherwise
Dude. You haven’t presented any evidence. You have CLAIMED that there is a car factory in Xinjiang and, rather than waste a bunch of time and energy confirming or disproving your claim, which is irrelevant to tariffs, I reiterated the important part.
continuing with your false narrative and spreading your opinion
I’m not making any false claims (with the possible exception of mistakenly thinking that there’s no car factories in Xinjiang) and the fact that the ones paying for the tariffs would be Germans buying more expensive cars as well as Chinese workers losing their jobs as their employers lose market share is just that: a fact. NOT an opinion.
To quote yourself to yourself, your points in your statement above are false again.
Their components most certainly are. Most of the inexpensive products imported from China are produced by the forced labor of the Uyghurs. Batteries, motors, and electronics for EVs are included.
That would involve having a media environment that isn’t controlled by billionaires who are highly involved in manufacturing consent for regressive policies.
I mean the betting markets are generally aligned with extravagant statistical prediction models.
After all these markets have hundreds of millions poured into them, and people are trying to win not loose. Obviously there are still problems with them, and that headline really should have included “according to bookmakers”.
If I make a $10,000,000 bet in one direction to change the betting odds to make everyone think my viewpoint is more popular, that’s a very cheap marketing campaign.
Even if I lose all that money, it’s good marketing. Especially if I’m manipulating less popular topics with less $$$$ needed to change the odds.
that’ll only change the odds on a single bookmaker. There are thousands on the election.
Also it’s highly illegal to bet on an event you are part of (although that doesn’t seem to stop trump from doing other things).
Additionally, to sway public opinion, influencing pollsters and the media (which we have objective proof of camapigns doing) is more effective. although they were mentioned in this article, they’ll be mentioned a lot less than polls.
Also it’s highly illegal to bet on an event you are part of (although that doesn’t seem to stop trump from doing other things).
Illegal to who?
FBI? Or some poor IT administrator who gives no shits about this issue?
Additionally, to sway public opinion, influencing pollsters
You’re using the fucking betting market as a poll. A system that is innately, and provably, influenced by money. Not even indirectly, but DIRECTLY influenced by money.
Then you paper over this fact by saying “but people want to make money”, ignoring the fact that these campaigns are literally spending $100,000,000+ sums, losing money throughout a whole campaign to try to change public opinion by about 5%.
I wonder if its going to be all social media or just arbitrary companies who the government decides aren’t healthy. Both sound silly. Because either we’re going to end up with warnings on almost every site with social aspects, yes including the entire fediverse, or we’re relying on the government to tell us what’s harmful and not without conclusive studies.
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