
U.S. senators introduce social media bill to ban 'dark patterns' tricks - thefounder
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tech/u-s-senators-introduce-social-media-bill-to-ban-dark-patterns-tricks-idUSKCN1RL25Q
======
sbov
Not a single "news" article I can find links to the actual text of the bill.
Here it is:

[https://www.scribd.com/document/405606873/Detour-Act-
Final](https://www.scribd.com/document/405606873/Detour-Act-Final)

~~~
jjcm
Thank you, was the first thing I looked for.

While the intention of the bill seems good, I worry that this will become the
next cookie popup. From the text of the bill:

"Any large online operator that engages in any form of behavioral or
psychological research based on the activity or data of its users shall
disclose to its users on a routine basis, but not less than once each 90 days,
any experiments or studies that user was subjected to or enrolled in"

Based on their definitions of behavioral research, simple analytics would fall
under the purview. This means that every site that has over 100m MAU will have
to have a popup disclosing that they're running analytics and A/B testing
(because honestly this won't stop any of them from doing it - these things are
industry standards).

I don't need to be informed that Facebook tracks what links I click on their
site. I don't need google to tell me that they have a history of every search
I've made, and that they tailored those results based on my past searches.
We're trying to create a safe space web at the detriment of UX. I support a
lot of the stuff around younger kids, but I think the stuff for adults is just
going to become a nuisance.

~~~
awinder
Given historical relevance it’s hard to imagine a time when someone would make
a comment like “Regulations on human psychological experiments, what are we, a
bunch of delicate flowers?!” But I have a hard time believing it would be
seriously novel to conflate what goes on online with group psychological
experiments. I’m not sure which side of the debate I would land on, but I do
think it’s a reasonable enough thing for a deliberative body to consider, and
certainly reasonable enough for a healthy debate without trying to sandbag it
as “safe space”

~~~
gradys
Framing it as "human psychological experiments" evokes famous psych
experiments like the marshmallow test and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Tech
companies run these kinds of experiments occasionally (I believe Facebook is
known to have tried to manipulate mood with a Newsfeed change), but I feel
like this way of describing it masks the fact that 99% of large scale A/B
tests are things like

\- We slightly changed the color of the submit button

\- The forward button was removed from the context menu on chat bubbles

\- An infrastructure change reduces the load time of the comments on articles
by 10ms

\- The weekly ad relevance model update is being certified, yielding a
0.000001 increase in CTR for small segments of the market.

On average, much more mundane than "human psychological experiments".

~~~
slavik81
In academia, those sorts of tests would still need to be approved by the human
experimentation ethics board. There are no exceptions for trivial tests.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> In academia, those sorts of tests would still need to be approved by the
> human experimentation ethics board. There are no exceptions for trivial
> tests.

That's the point. It's like requiring a report to be filed whenever there is a
"use of force" but then applying that rule using the Newtonian definition of
force. Sat in your chair? File a report. Stand back up? File a report. Filed a
report? File a report.

Worse, this kind of thing can happen retroactively. If you discover that your
numbers are different than expected, but you hadn't declared any experiment,
comparing what changed before and after _is_ the experiment. But you hadn't
notified those users that you were doing an experiment because you hadn't
expected to have any reason to, so now you can't even have the people with the
before and after data communicate with the people who know what changes were
made to the system in that time frame because comparing that information would
constitute doing the experiment.

It's like telling a car company they can't see their sales data when deciding
which models to continue producing because it would constitute doing a
psychological experiment on what kind of cars people like.

(On the other hand, it sounds like the law would only apply to entities the
size of Facebook, and screw those guys in general. But it really is kind of a
silly rule.)

~~~
chongli
We can all talk and be flippant about how trivial it is to change the colour
of a button or whatever, but the sum total of all these changes is something
different.

These services are running huge numbers of experiments in order to maximize
engagement. Then everyone wonders what happened when tons of people on
Facebook end up depressed and tons of people on YouTube end up radicalized by
extremist rabbit holes.

It's death by a thousand cuts.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
That's a separate problem though. The solution for that isn't to do something
at the level of the individual experiments, it's to do something at the
agglomeration level where the trivial individual harms are actually
accumulating.

If you have some food which is infected with salmonella, you don't pick it
apart with a microscope at the level of individual cells and try to separate
it back out, you just throw the whole thing away and eat something else.

In this context the contaminated food is Facebook.

~~~
chongli
To continue with your analogy, Facebook is just one tainted chicken breast in
the meat counter. We need to examine the entire meat packing and inspection
infrastructure that gave rise to this mess.

------
baron816
> The bill would bar companies from choosing groups of people for behavioral
> experiments unless the companies get informed consent.

Wait, does this refer to A/B testing?

~~~
flukus
> Wait, does this refer to A/B testing?

I hope so.

Experimenting on your customers is about as user hostile as you can get.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Are you even serious? We're not talking about A/B testing prescription drugs
with placebos. We're talking about testing different images. Different colors
for buttons.

Settle down.

~~~
ixtli
Saying that A/B testing is just different colors for buttons is intentionally
ignoring the past 10 years of facebooks development process. Every single
aspect of the platform is AB tested and that platform has a big effect on
peoples lives.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I'm still confused about why I'm supposed to be upset that Facebook A/B tests
their features on their users. It seems to me that if they're allowed to do
either A or B, they're allowed to measure the influence of A vs B. I don't see
where the outrage is.

~~~
ixtli
As I said in another comment this is about consent.

It's not that the testing the conversion rates of button a versus button b is
in and of itself immoral, it's that experimenting on people without their
informed consent, under any circumstances, is. I'm intimately familiar with
FBs platform as a developer and a user and its my intuition that 9/10 people
aren't aware of the degree to which they are being experimented on via
multivariate testing and I think a reasonable person would say they have a
right to be informed of this.

Another note is that after years of using the platform I can tell that when
non-technical people DO become aware of the fact that their experience using
the application is sometimes fundamentally different from others because
they're in a non-control bucket they generally react pretty negatively to the
notion. Sure, some of this is the standard "users always hate every UI change
no matter what it is" syndrome but I've noted a lot of "this is creepy and i
wonder how much it's been happening before" which is, imo, a super legitimate
response, and shouldn't be disregarded because its inconvenient for fb to get
consent.

~~~
travisoneill1
Consent only applies for things you wouldn't be allowed to do without consent
in the first place. What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of
their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that
require advance consent? Clearly it wouldn't because there is no law against
bad service. The fact that the click whores who call themselves journalists
(who are also competitors of FB) call it "psychological experiments" to scare
non-technical people is irrelevant.

~~~
rapind
"What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude
to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? "

To me, this could definitely qualify as "psychological experiments" if it were
intentional as you describe. Most likely a failed and useless experiment
though, but that's due to the medium and the difficulty to implement correctly
(how would you guarantee none of your greeters step out of line? What if you
wanted to quickly evolve and modify the experiment?).

The fact is that it's much easier to run these sort of experiments on a web
site than it is in meat space. It can also be much subtler and far more
specific. It would be impossible to manipulate the variations in the real
world as efficiently (or at all) like you can online.

The ability to actually do this stuff efficiently and at scale is pretty
recent, and we ought to consider and deliberate over the consequences.

------
hn_throwaway_99
It's as if millions of "Only 2 left!!" banners cried out in terror and were
suddenly silenced.

------
crsmithdev
Zero confidence that any part of the US congress is even remotely capable of
producing a bill for this that isn't a complete disaster. Unfortunately,
they'll probably try anyway.

One of those moments I'm glad that our government is so broken at this point
that it can't really drive significant change.

~~~
iscrewyou
Congress produces pretty decent bills when they are bipartisan. Most recent
example is the criminal justice reform.

~~~
bhelkey
This bill is, or at least appears to be, bipartisan.

> U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Deb Fischer (R-NE) have introduced the
> Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction (DETOUR) Act.

[https://www.scribd.com/document/405606873/Detour-Act-
Final](https://www.scribd.com/document/405606873/Detour-Act-Final)

~~~
iscrewyou
And I feel better knowing that these two representatives haven’t been in the
news for their views or for scandals. I’ll have to read the bill to know
better.

------
RandomGuyDTB
I'm pessimistic on this bill passing- Silicon Valley has also reached its
fingers into lobbying. See:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/03/silicon-v...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/03/silicon-
valley-politics-lobbying-washington)

~~~
daniel-cussen
Silicon Valley started going to congress back in the late 80's in response to
East Asian (Japanese in particular I think) competition in semiconductors.

------
justinmk
Government (and its cheerleaders) has the same solution to every problem: ban
it, or declare that it can't exist. Which is the same solution a child could
come up with.

Fixing a problem sounds good, so it's easy to market. Defining what the
problem is and avoiding unintended consequences is hard.

~~~
kodz4
Its not that complicated to define.

Lots of people have done it from Tim Wu, to Jaron Lanier to Clay Shirky to
Tristan Harris. The problem definitions and solutions are almost 10 years old
now.

It's just that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter didn't give a shit. Plus all
kinds of side show debates about free speech, privacy, anonymity and half a
dozen other things have taken focus away from the fundamental change social
media introduced into the way humans as a group communicate.

That fundamental change is these systems attach a publicly visible number next
to every thing anyone says.

Whether it is a like/view/upvote/click/follower/retweet count it has an effect
on how people think and behave.

Whether it is the President, a Journalist or a 10 year old the numbers have an
unasked for influence.

There is no good psychological/sociological reason for these numbers to be
publicly visible in real time.

Engagement and Recommendation systems can still collect these numbers and
continue to do their jobs without publicly displaying any of these numbers in
real time or not at all.

These changes can't be rolled out instantly because a large part of the
population are hooked and need to be slowly weaned off.

------
darawk
Thank god, finally we'll be able to regulate user interface design. Surely
needing to get your designs approved by the department of web design standards
will be good for innovation.

------
mruts
Instead of actually thinking of how the system works or how to change it, we
get this stupid law from stupid people. Classic government.

------
JadeNB
Why doesn't the article excerpt any language from the bill, or otherwise link
to it? It's hard to imagine a bill that defines, to an enforceable legal
standard, what is a dark pattern, and what is an addictive game (another thing
that the article mentions is banned).

EDIT: Thanks to sbov
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620441))
for doing the legwork the news isn't doing and digging up the text. It doesn't
seem to mention addictive games at all; maybe that's another bill?

~~~
bhelkey
> Why doesn't the article excerpt any language from the bill, or otherwise
> link to it?

This seems to be a trend among recent articles.

------
eyeareque
Funny that Facebook is for this, but it makes sense. It would stop any
startups from having the same advantage as them in regards to sketchy growth
practices.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
The text of the bill specifies that it only applies to companies with at least
100 million monthly active users.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I wish a bill would also ban the cancer that is retargeting. I’m sure I’ll get
downvoted for saying this as many entrepreneurs and SaaS companies browsing
are making their conversions on retargeting, but something has to be said
about the creepy nature of following people wherever they go without obtaining
direct consent.

------
francoisdevlin
This seems fraught with first amendment issues. Could a lawyer explain how
this could pass & hold up in court?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Courts have held that you can put a lot more restrictions on commercial
speech:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_speech)

------
wybiral
It's refreshing to see bipartisan efforts like this coming out of the current
political landscape.

------
sxates
This would only apply to online services with > 100 million active users. And
is it safe to assume that means 100 million Americans? Not sure how we'd apply
to the law to users outside the US.

How many online services have that many MAUs outside Facebook and Google? Even
Twitter doesn't have that many in the US [1]. Seems laser targeted at
Facebook, but the abuses come from many many more companies.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-
tw...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-twitter-
users-in-the-united-states/)

~~~
lostmsu
I don't know. Facebook already has everybody's data. Unless this bill will
retroactively force them to delete it unless users explicitly consent to
letting them keep it, it will restring new growing companies more.

------
mrhappyunhappy
Would love to see LinkedIn reigned in with their false notifications. They’ll
show one of those red dots then when you click it nothing new has happened.
There are a ton of other terrible dark patterns used by LinkedIn but I forget
to take note when I encounter them.

Slack needs a serious spanking for how they handle notification opt outs. As
far as I know there is no global mute everything switch which should exist.

------
lostmsu
The bill is useless, unless it also requires to reacquire consent for all the
data, that was already taken using these patterns. It should demand Facebook
and the likes to get consent to keep the data, or remove it within some
reasonable time.

Without that, the bill is more like a stick in the wheels for Facebook's
future competitors.

------
drivingmenuts
I would not limit it to “large” online operators. Just make it a rule
governing all websites hosted or otherwise based in the United States.

Little guys shouldn’t be given a pass on following the rules.

~~~
sundbry
It's called regulatory capture and forget that if Facebook, which grew to the
size it is at because in part of A/B testing, gets to now lobby for rules to
make it more difficult for newcomers to do it. We used to have anti-trust
legislation in the United States (we still do, but hardly use it). Special
regulations for the behemoth corporations is standard jurisprudence.

------
dfischer
This is just a hack and doesn't solve the real issues.

~~~
ardy42
> This is just a hack and doesn't solve the real issues.

The real issue is the incentives created by shareholder capitalism. While I
would like that solved, that solution is so far away that I'll take whatever
hacks I can in the meantime.

~~~
dfischer
The real issue is incentives created by advertising and people not paying for
products because we've become disillusioned to being the product.

------
cptskippy
Assuming they do this right, I mean they won't, but assuming they did, I'd
like to see something similar for Operating Systems.

I left my work iPhone 6 on while on vacation and returned to a dead phone.
When I charged it up and powered it back on to be met with the "we're
throttling your phone because of a power event" message. So I went on the
adventure to nope out of that. Holy crap, Apple does not want you to turn it
off once they've enabled it. And they apparently they enable it anyway they
can because the phone battery is 95% capacity and it runs like a top.

------
OrgNet
If they ban all dark patterns but also prevent the federal government from
providing free digital filling of tax returns, I am ok with it...

------
thegayngler
This legislation sounds so broad based on the article. Unless you know what
youre doing legislation can be so broad that people wind up in court for years
and no Cases are filed in civil court. I cant imagine it being effective in
any way. With that said I havent read the details of the actual law so maybe
it is solid.

------
maccio92
It's about time. The amount of children already addicted to screens is
terrifying

~~~
shdh
The addiction extends beyond age

~~~
maccio92
Not arguing that, but it's arguably more damaging at such an early age when
the brain is developing

~~~
CamperBob2
How about we conduct (and replicate!) the studies first, _then_ make the laws?

------
shmooth
dark patterns like offering health insurance...

------
droithomme
Good!

------
shdh
Insert "dark pattern expert"

