There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?".
Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your product. Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
> Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
No, but unfortunately I can very easily imagine people saying it, just like the people who made loads of money from pushing those products did. Also just like the people who are profiting from the spread of gambling are saying now.
Why would someone choose to do a thing if it harms them? There are good arguments against laws that restrict personal freedoms, but this isn't one of them.
But what if we're talking about a product that you're giving away to children? I agree that for adults, cigarettes are fine. But in this case, you're actively designing to maximize tweens and teens engagement and the end result is them saying that they wan't to stop but can't.
Though to be fair, I was mostly pointing out the fact that this was a pretty dumb thing to say for a case like this, especially in a jury trial.
Yes, I agree with you, I think that regulation is needed here and that this was a dumb thing to say. I'm just saying that my reaction to Zuckerberg saying that people must love his product if they use it a lot is exactly what I'd expect him to say. It's also exactly why other parties must step in.
Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. I don't think it's fair to ask children to resist social media through sheer willpower when there are legions of highly educated adults on the other side trying to increase engagement.
It should be no surprise that children can be manipulated by highly intelligent adults.
I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger.
Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never prioritized actual lab research or clinical advancements.
> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult.
This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.
Meta is not blameless here. Responsibility can be shared when Meta (and others) are essentially preying on children. It’s an uphill battle for parents by Meta’s design.
I would prefer Meta make their products less addictive for children, with the side-effect that they're perhaps less stimulating for adults, than for Meta to keep their products the way they are, gatekept behind a system that allows them access to even more of my personal data.
I understand why they would want the opposite. They can f*ck right off.
We already have a distinction because it’s been known for decades already that some things are addictive purely through reinforcement psychology and some things lock people into a chemical dependence.
Based on the fact that many people here disagree about fundamental things, as well as the fact that “liberal” is a highly overloaded term, I think it should be obvious that it’s not obvious what you mean.
Specifically when it comes to children, we need to show more restraint in giving them the liberty to partake in potentially addictive substances.
It's one thing if an adult smokes and gambles, it's another thing if a child does. It seems to me that stuff you do in youth tends to stick around for life.
If something compels behavior vs. behavior remaining a free choice, a liberal society can and should treat it like any other source of compulsion.
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I thought the actual physiological cause of addiction was similar in both nicotine and gambling: you crave the predictable release of dopamine.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
You’re being downvoted, but there’s an interesting point you’re trying to make. Dopamine-chasing is truly selective in the behavior and chemical sense.
There is a particular hard drug that I could be easily addicted to if it were cheaper and more accessible. Nothing else like it gives me irresistible craving for more. Not nicotine, ADHD meds or speed, benzos, and not even opioids have the same effect.
So after I discovered this about myself, I went on a little journey to self test myself other possible addictions.
Social media? Nope. Video games and tv? yes. Gambling, hoarding, shopping: No. Sex: yes. Exercise: yes
Right, there's a difference between a chemical that will addict most people simply because of the changes the chemical makes to the brain (even if the person doesn't even really like doing the thing that causes them to consume it), vs. an activity that gives you dopamine hits and can be addictive, depending on the person.
One is physical addiction and the other is psychological.
But I'm also feeling a parallel here to people who think that mental health issues aren't real medical problems and that people can just "get better" whenever they want. And that's concerning. We shouldn't be more lenient on things that are "only" psychologically addictive.
It's predictably addictive under common circumstances (a lack of socioeconomic support and a lack of alternative means to occupy one's time). If those circumstances are becoming more and more widespread in a society (which they are in this one), it behooves experts to consider that "typical" and "this particular cohort" might become harder and harder to distinguish, to the point where what would have been targeted interventions need to become general.
You seem to be differentiating between physical and psychological addiction, and saying that only physical addiction meets the technical definition of addiction?
Ah OK. Yes I agree, there can be a blurry line between something a person does compulsively/addictively and something that he just enjoys doing. And it's different for different people.
We already have a category called addictive personality disorder where someone is much more prone to being addicted to pretty much anything.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.
Dark patterns are real. Deceptive advertising is real. So-called prediction markets amount to unregulated gambling on any proposition. Many online businesses are whale hunts and the whales are often addicts.
I feel like people use the word “addiction” to refer to both chemical addiction and behavioral addiction, and that people understand that the latter is (usually) far less serious than the former.
I don't think you can put them into buckets like that. All addiction is driven in persuit of a reward. The magnitude of reward can be estimated with brain scans and stuff but to my understanding isn't universal in all humans.
Can we definitely say gambling addiction is less serious than alcohol addiction when there's individuals who find the former harder to quit than the latter?
Be aware, the vast majority of people who have ever smoked cigarettes occasionally never became addicted. They were not labeled as “smokers”. A non-trivial number of people today continue to smoke cigarettes on occasion. I like to have one on my birthday. Then again, I’m able to eat a chip and not consume the entire bag.
I’m not convinced of these social science studies, and when digging into individual studies I’m sure the replication crisis comes into play.
Tobacco may be the most* addictive delivery method, but nicotine alone is also addictive. To say its not is misinformation. Consistent use of nicotine still leads to upregulation, which does cause irritability, brain fog, cravings when you stop.
* I'd even change this to say modern nicotine salts in vapes are likely to lead to dependency faster than tobacco. A 5% nicotine salt pod will contain as much nicotine as a full pack of cigarettes, and so vapers tend to consume far more nicotine in a single sitting than they ever could with a cigarette. That combined withe constant availability means users of nicotine vapes & pouches (aka, no tobacco) are likey to have a more difficult time quitting than cigarette smokers.
Bottom line, its still dangerous to dismiss nicotine's addictive potential with or without tobacco as a delivery method.
How does that work when nicotine products that are every bit as addictive as tobacco exist, maybe you're just not aware of them? Sitting here with non tobacco snus (Swedish nicotine pouch) under my top lip, something I have been utterly unable to quit. I believe "nicotine free" tobacco would be completely non addictive.
tobacco contains MAO inhibiting compounds, which potentiate nicotine and increase addiction potential. that doesnt mean nicotine on its own isnt insanely addictive, i have no idea what the guy youre responding to is talking about. however, MAOIs were withdrawn as antidepressants for a good reason - they have a terrible withdrawal all on their own.
Mmhmm those are words. Words that are hand wavy pretexts for conservatism rather than liberalism; as a lover of liberal society you hope it acts conservatively!
This just comes off as poorly obfuscated self selection. You own a bunch of Meta, Alphabet and other media stocks?
Yeah, Zuck is really being a bit of d** there. You can't spend decades hiring the best engineers in the world and give them millions of dollars worth of resources with the sole aim of creating products specifically designed to retain attention and then simply shrug and say "if you don't like it, leave it". That's just not a fair fight.
The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.
it's especially galling because he (or at least his wife) also funds neuroscience research at Stanford and elsewhere, and should have been well informed of the science behind addition, dopamine, and the reward pathways in the brain
How much personal responsibility should we expect children to have? Genuine question. Because there was a time where some people believed that it was ok for kids to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.
At least even money that an appellate court throws this verdict out entirely. Reminder that the US is the only developed country that uses juries for civil trials- everywhere else, complex issues of business litigation are generally left to a panel of judges. It's not that hard to rile up a bunch of randomly impaneled jurors against Big Bad Corporation. The US is kind of infamous for its very large, very unpredictable civil verdicts. There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable. Not even close to the final word in the American judicial system.
Edit to include: I mean this is coming the same day as the Supreme Court throwing out the piracy case against Cox Communications 9-0. Remember that this case originated with $1 billion dollar jury verdict against them! Was reversed by an appeals court 5 years later and completely invalidated today. Juries should not handle complex civil litigation, I'm sorry
The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you.
Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… being mad at the world she was born into?
> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies.
I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and the Wikipedia article gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... . Yes, the plaintiff received horrific third degree burns when she spilled the coffee on herself, but lots of products can cause horrible harm if used incorrectly - people cut fingers off all the time with kitchen knives, for example.
I find the headline "Woman sues McDonald's for their coffee being too hot" a completely accurate description of what happened, with no hyperbole and no "ridiculousness" at all.
>There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable.
You might be blaming the wrong people. Looking at a lot of those "shockingly large verdicts", in that they would have bankrupted the company and forced it to be dissolved and reformed as perhaps a less objectionable version of itself: cool, shoulda done that. Sad we didn't.
Are we conflating matters of merit with matters of judgment, here?
Also at least partially explained by being priced in. The trial was known about and given the conditions described in GP it's not surprising that the verdict went this way.
Maybe if most people would agree the corporation is big and bad and should have penalties, it’s more democratic to go with that decision that the decision nine unelected philosopher kings come up with.
Yeah there are so many reasons this could be reversed on appeal. Whether the judge correctly held questions of section 230, and the First Amendment, is not obvious.
I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create.
If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims).
Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature
> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling.
Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.
It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.
Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.
Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.
Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?
I guess I just don’t see humanity awakening to transcendent egolessness any time in the near future (if ever). Based on my experience, the average person is fairly constrained by their biological reality. We often like to pretend that this isn’t the case, and pretending may work for a while, but eventually sufficient stress causes the illusion to unravel forcefully.
Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.
It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species
Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP.
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about.
> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
Youtube shorts will come back but you can just click the row each time to show less.
Otherwise if you really don't want to see them on the desktop at least a browser extension works well.
There should be a law to require the ability to disable algorithmic customization of content. If these apps are so compelling it shouldn't take a Spark cluster riffing on my private viewing habits to come up with content for me.
I don't recall a lot of complaints about Facebook or Instagram when it was actually your friends' content. But now it's force-feeding everybody their own "guilty pleasure" viewing material 24 hours a day. It's fucking sick.
one of the benefits of being on android and being able to sideload apps. Look up "revanced youtube" and you'll be able to turn off shorts.
ublock origin for blocking them on desktop. If you're on an iphone... uninstall youtube?
my quality of life has increased substantially... although sometimes the app bugs out and shorts still make it on my home page. I spend like 10 minutes scrolling through shorts and get a weird shock "how the fuck did I end up here?", restart the app and boom shorts gone again.
Perhaps we need more social activism (remember that?) to stop people falling into this kind of addiction. I remember anti-drugs campaigning , they were everywhere. Phone addictions are not taken nearly as seriously.
People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? And only the ones that were included in the war on drugs (not nicotine, alcohol, caffeine)? So it was a success.
Don’t forget WhatsApp. Kids are allowed to have WhatsApp as messaging but they get fed videos there too. There is no way to really disable them . Also this be allowed as parental supervision, not something that kids can override.
In before someone says ‘blame the parents’ and not the multi-billion dollar companies who’ve spent decades targeting children for lifelong addiction, ignoring the negative effects on their mental health.
The guy who made the drugs is guilty. The guy who sold the drugs to kids is guilty. But parents who failed to warn kids about drugs and to oversee them properly are also guilty...
Generally in an article about arresting or sentencing a drug dealer, people don't bring up that the drug users are actually to blame.
Now if we're in a discussion around the cartels, plenty of people do bring up (and there's also those that get annoyed by it) that the drug users are actually the ones funding the cartels via their drug use.
Along these lines, I think another fun comparison might be opioid use and Purdue.
I think that that is actually an oversight. One needs to consider the entire chain. For example, with proper parenting, there would be a lot less youth demand for drugs. It doesn’t make what a drug dealer does any less bad, nor does it make the efforts of the police to arrest the drug dealer any less important. But it’s suboptimal to consider a small piece of a system, without thinking of the whole.
That is a fair point, I did not attempt to make a complete list, of course, but you are right, there are more layers that could be named. All valid. The point I was making is that parents are also responsible.
eg: I grew up in a very nasty place. My neighborhood had a few pregnant 13 year old girls and a lot of drunks and smokers, including kids in their early teens. My parents kept me away from it all, while also both having full-time jobs. They put a lot of work into filtering whom I could be friends with and where I was allowed to be. THAT is the job of a parent.
The thing is, it should be both. Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children, often also guilty of same vices. Issue is, these addictions are way more destructive to young forming mind than to adults. Nobody having small kids now had fb or instagram access when they were 5, did they.
Maybe you don't do this. Certainly I don't. But when looking around, its much less rosy and... lets say in blue collar families its too common to drug kids with screens so parents have off time. Heck, some are even proud how modern parents they are. Any good advice is successfully ignored, and ideas of passing some proper time with kids instead are skillfully avoided. People got lazy and generally expect miracles from life without putting in any miracle-worth efforts.
Companies just maximize their profits till laws allows them (and then some more), and expecting nice moral behavior by default is dangerously naive and never true.
Consider that the insane growth in the cost of living - especially childcare - combined with wage stagnation means that now the vast majority of families have 2 parents with full-time jobs, keeping them away for their families for much longer than before. Consider that childcare is much, much harder to even get into now than in decades past. Consider also that "EdTech" means that nearly every child needs to be on an internet equipped-device at all times.
But sure, "Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children", that's definitely it. Parents just hate their kids! What a useful perspective you've brought to the discussion.
Read the book “Careless People” if you have a chance - according to the book, social media companies figured out they have real leverage with politicians since they can influence elections. As a result they are actively pushing for far right candidates to reduce their own taxation and regulation.
That book was so lame and the author leaves out how she profited millions and then only complained after she was fired.
Its also funny how they “discovered” they were influencing elections after they influenced the 2008 and 2012 elections.
How did the author not know this when she sought out and joined the company in like 2013!
The parts about playing Settlers of Catan with Zuckerberg was funny. I wonder what his side of the story was and if people were really letting him win.
This just seems ripe for selective enforcement if not codified in law. I agree the algorithm they use can be addicting, but it's because it's simply good at providing content the user wants to consume.
Besides a general 'don't be too good' I'm really not sure what companies should do about it. It just seems like it'll lead to some judges allowing rulings against companies they don't like.
Television's goal was always viewer retention as well, they were just never able to target as well as you can on the internet.
I see it as similar to the public health crisis created when protonated nicotine salts made their way into vapes along with flavors allowing 2-10x more nicotine to be delivered and the innovation that made Juul so popular with children.
The subsequent effects - namely being easier to consume and more addictive - eventually resulted in legislation catching up, and restrictions on what Juul could do. It being "too good" of a product parallels what we're seeing in social media seven years later.
Like most[all] all public health problems we see individualization of responsibility touted as a solution. If individualization worked, it would have already succeeded. Nothing prevents individualization except its failure of efficacy.
What does work is systems-level thinking and considering it an epidemiological problem rather than a problem of responsibility. Responsibility didn't work with the AIDS crisis, it didn't work on Juul, and it's not going to work on social media.
It is ripe for public health strategies. The biggest impediment to this is people who mistakingly believe that negative effects represent a personal moral failure.
> I'm really not sure what companies should do about it
disassemble the intentionally addictive properties they built into their platforms to maximise engagement and revenue at the cost of the mental health of their users.
Companies that sell products to the public have managed this for a hundred years. Some are good at it, some are not, some completely disregarded their obligations. This is not all that new.
When I was a kid, tv commercials were heavily censored and the tv channel could and would be fined immediately if something inappropriate was shown.
How is it that these days social media can circumvent all these safeguards and then somehow blame the parents if a kid is watching something inappropriate on an app designed for kids (like YouTube kids)?
The issue is that politicians are beholden to social media companies because they can literally get them or their opponent elected. After reading Careless People, I was amazed at how leaders of so many countries wanted to meet Zuck because he wields so much power.
I really hope this ruling is the beginning of the end of the free rein they've had.
Don't get me started. So many existing laws just seem to be conveniently ignored because... it's 'digital'?
In a lot of countries there are specific laws banning the deliberate targeting of advertising to children (and in contexts where you would reach children, heavily regulated), but for over a decade Meta would allow you to target within the ranges of 13 to 18 years old.
That's to say nothing of the scams and deepfake celebrity ads they let run. Imagine if a deepfake ad of Warren Buffet promoting an investment opportunity ran on TV, the network would get sued into oblivion. On Meta though, there's no repercussions.
As long as we continue to value making money for shareholders above all else, such and possibly worst perversions will continue to happen. Capital has found all sorts of ways to make all sorts of questionable things addictive to sell.
I feel, and it's obvious to most that the only way a society can truly reform is by a shared consensus over their value system. This verdict could be thrown out by the appelette court(i feel it would be), so this is not the culmination of values resulting in what many hoped for.
It does not seem to me that this is a country where consensus on what, if anything, to put above capital will come about any time soon and with capital it's always been ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
The only time true justice that happens is when the harm becomes obvious being the shadow of a doubt(e.g. smoking) that even a monkey can tell it's time, game is up.
Perhaps if one day we can look into the brains of people with the clarity of glass and the precision of electrons and tell, will that time come when we all recognize how bad of an idea social media was.
Are there any takeaways here for builders of social media applications who are not Facebook or Google? Is this a warning to not make your newsfeed algorithm "too engaging" or is it only really relevant for big companies?
I actually quit Instagram because I found it so addictive. Wild that there's a case. Parents need to just take away phones from children. Simple as that.
AIUI, this particular case is a pilot for about 2,000 similar (but not similar enough to be combined into a class action) cases. They are not actions by state or local governments for damages they have received, as was the case with tobacco.
This is the kind of stuff that is causing them to push for mandatory identity verification laws. If they are being held liable for the the desires of their users, they're being forced micromanage the affairs of their customers, which preclude anonymous usage.
Not only that, in my opinion the many positive reactions to this decision are a sign of a decline of personal responsibility and a desire of people to be managed by the government and treated like cattle. Blaming everyone else but themselves for personal problems and failures has become the default for many people.
Why is it bad to want the system to push people towards healthy behaviour but it's totally okay to want the system to push people towards unhealthy behaviour?
This is ultimately about the inherently pernicious nature of unregulated capitalism. Businesses want money. They get that by manipulating you, the consumer, to consume their services. They are "ethically" bound by (given an excuse by) fiduciary duty to pursue profit callously.
The result, in these corner cases where eating people is profitable? Shelob.
And one with much deeper implications on how they operate. It's easy for Meta to just hire more moderators or treat reports of exploitation with higher priority; if this verdict stands, I think they have no realistic choice but to abandon usage targets.
Realistically they will hire expensive lawyers, pay out hundreds of millions to billions in settlements, fire lots of people (workforce is predominantly American), etc.
Even if they do what you're saying, lots of people who've used any Meta property in the last 15 years has a potentially viable case, and no future work can swat those away
I don’t feel good about this case- on the one hand, I’m all for sticking it to big corporations. On the other hand, nobody has claimed that Meta and YouTube were doing anything illegal, so this case is different from civil suits brought after a criminal case finds someone guilty. This is a case where the jury decided they don’t like how two corporations acted, and are just giving money to one person. Why does this plaintiff in particular deserve this money?
I’ve argued in the past that the right way to create the change in corporations we want is to change the laws, and people have made valid points that Congress has basically given up on doing that. But even so, civil cases with fines don’t seem like that way to make lasting change. In the analogues to the tobacco fights, there are LAWS that regulate tobacco company behaviors as a result. The civil case here isn’t going to result in any law. So what are companies supposed to do? Tiptoe around some ill defined social boundary and hope they don’t get sued? Because apparently the defense of, “no I didn’t target that person and I didn’t break any laws” is still going to get you fined. What happens when a company from a conservative location gets sued in a liberal location for causing a social ill? Oh, we’re cool with that. But what if a company from a liberal location gets sued in a conservative location for the same thing? Oh, maybe we don’t like that as much. I’m taking the libertarian side here. I know plenty of people who don’t watch TV, don’t use Facebook, and I know plenty of people that recognized that they were spending too much time on digital platforms and decided to quit or cut back. So a healthy person can self regulate on these apps, I’ve seen it and done it. I’m just not sure how much responsibility Meta and YouTube bear in my mind. If they’re getting fined $3M plus some TBD punitive amount, are we saying that this 20 year old person lost out on earning that much money in their life or would need to spend $3M on therapy because of Meta or YouTube? It feels a little steep off a fine for one person.
If Meta and YouTube really were/are making addictive products, wouldn’t a lot more people be harmed? Shouldn’t this be a class action suit where anyone with mental trauma or depression be included?
I don’t know the details of the case, but I highly doubt that this one plaintiff was targeted specifically, and I doubt their case is that unique. I read tons of news articles about cyber bullying, depression, suicide attempts, and tech addiction. Does every one get to sue Meta and YouTube for $3M now?
If I sell you gizmo, and I know, or should know, that using the gizmo could seriously harm you, and I don't tell you or do anything about it, I am liable for damages you incur.
I’m not sure the plaintiff’s mental harm was caused by Meta and YouTube. You can be just as depressed without social media and online videos. And even if they were, other cases that are kind of similar to this have not found the corporation responsible. The parents of Sandy Hook didn’t get any money out of Remington, and their product is much more directly linked to harming people than an app. McDonald’s was not held liable in 2002 for making people fat. I am pretty sure the food at McDonald’s is more easily linked to our health outcomes than the link in this case.
Should Apple or Samsung be held liable for making the phone that the plaintiff probably used to use these apps? How much responsibility do they bear?
Further, Facebook/Instagram and YouTube are free products from the perspective of the plaintiff. These corporations didn’t sell anything to the plaintiff, so can they even be held liable? They did sell the plaintiff’s data to advertisers, which I think you might be able to hold them responsible if they misused that data, but this isn’t what the case was about.
I’m not rooting for depression or suicidal thoughts or anything, but this doesn’t feel like the right direction we need to be moving in as society. We can’t simultaneously argue for free speech and freedom of choice and also claim that we aren’t capable of making our own choices to live our lives responsibly.
I was just pointing out that the basic framework of the case is not some novel new idea, and a jury just decided to stick it to a big company out of the blue. There is a long history of this sort of case, and a jury did hear a lot of evidence from witnesses and instructions on the law from a judge.
Some of your examples are not very compelling.
In the case of Remington, there was another party that (presumably) the jury found was more directly responsible. Also, the victims of sandy hook were not Remingtons' customers.
Apple does not make you install instagram on your phone. And I doubt that you could find really compelling evidence that Apple knew in great detail the harms that were being caused, and rather then seek to mitigate them, instead made them worse in order to earn more money.
I'm not sure there a requirement that a product be paid for in order to be subject to product liability law.
I think I agree that these product liability cases are not the best way for a society to deal with these problems. I would prefer to see the democratic process arrive at some reasonable solution, based on the desires of the majority of the population. But there has been almost no movement in that direction, and I have my doubts there will be (in the US).
And I think it's important to see that this is about 16 (and younger) year old children, not adults.
I believe social media is on a collision course with an iceberg called Section 230.
Broadly speaking, Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms. A platform is like Geocities (back in the day) where the platform provider isn't liable for the content as long as they staisfy certain requirements about havaing processes for taking down content when required. A bit like the Cox decision today, you're broadly not responsible for the actions of people using your service unless your service is explicitly designed for such things.
A publisher (in the Section 230 sense) is like any media outlet. The publisher is liable for their content but they can say what they want, basically. It's why publishers tend to have strict processes around not making defamatory or false statements, etc.
I believe that any site that uses an algorithmic news feed is, legally speaking, a publisher acting like a platform.
Example: let's just say that you, as Twitter, FB, IG or Youtube were suddenly pro-Russian in the Ukraine conflict. You change your algorithm to surface and distribute pro-Russian content and suppress pro-Ukraine content. Or you're pro-Ukrainian and you do the reverse.
How is this different from being a publisher? IMHO it isn't. You've designed your algorithm knowingly to produce a certain result.
I believe that all these platforms will end up being treated like publishers for this reason.
So, with today's ruling about platforms creating addiction, (IMHO) it's no different to surfacing content. You are choosing content to produce a certain outcome. Intentionally getting someone addicted is funtionally no different to changing their views on something.
I actually blame Google for all this because they very successfully sold the idea that "the algorithm" ranks search results like it's some neutral black box but every behavior by an algorithm represents a choice made by humans who created that algorithm.
This is an opinion and I believe it's wrong. And you just have to look at the statute to see why [1]:
> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (2) Civil liability
> (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
"in good faith" is key here. Here's another opinion [2]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
So far the Supreme Court has sidestepped this issue despite cases making it to the Appeals Court. Until the Supreme Court addresses, none of us can say with any certainty what is and isn't protected.
I don't expect that to work, but who knows. Editors "rank", curate, select, present, etc content to people, and have for a long time, and it's always understood to be speech.
Remember, according to that link, 230 does not give platforms any new rights. It simply makes it easier for them to end cases faster and cheaper, that they would have already won on 1st amendment grounds.
> (c) (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
This is a protection for being a platform for third-party (including user-generated) content.
Some more discussion on this distinction [2]:
> Section 230’s legal protections were created to encourage the innovation of the internet by preventing an influx of lawsuits for user content.
It goes on to talk about publishers, distributors and Internet Service Providers, the last of which I characterize as "platforms".
By the way, my view here isn't a fringe view [3]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
This isn't good reasoning. According to your analysis, any website, ISP, or hosting provider that uses a firewall or Cloudflare is by definition a publisher, since they algorithmically shape traffic to prohibit suspicious IP addresses from accessing content.
Not at all. Intenet matters. Is Cloudfare trying to shape user behavior or push a particular position or content? No.
Just look at the Cox decision from the Supreme Court today. As long as the (Internet) service isn't designed for or sold as a method of downloading copyrighted material, the provider isn't responsible for any actions by its users. In other words, intent matters.
I find that technical people really get stuck on this aspect of the law. They look for technical compliance or an absolute proof standard because we're used to doing things like proving something works mathematically. But the law is subjective and holistic. It looks at the totality of evidence and applies a subjective test.
And intent here is fairly easy to establish. We could take an issue like Russia and look at all the posts and submissions and see how many views and interactions those posts got. We then divide them into pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine and establish a clear bias. We also look at any modifications made to the algorithm to achieve those goals.
IMO, parents share just as much blame here, if not more. Giving your kids independence doesn't mean being oblivious to what they're doing online. Too many parents confuse hands-off parenting with not parenting at all.
Have you met kids? They’re devious, tech knowledgeable, and scheming and can find ways around any rule. Plus, no matter how good of a parent you are, you’re somewhat at the mercy of their friends’ parents as well. I can block TikTok from my daughter’s phone, but can’t block her from watching her friend’s phone while she’s out of the house.
I dont think parents going up against psychologists, data scientists, product managers and software engineers with the best pay in the world is any kind of fair fight.
I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc.
Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of profit compared to what they provide to the average person that makes people squirm.
But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? It's like saying cable television is responsible for people who binge watch TV.
It's hard to square this circle while sports gambling apps and Polymarket / Kalshi are tearing through the landscape right now with no real pushback
Do more? They have not done anything. These trials have shown they have long had extremely detailed understanding of what is going on with their product, and instead of trying to mitigate the problems, they have intentionally made the problems worse in order to profit more.
> During his first-ever appearance before a jury in February, Meta's chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, relied on his company's longstanding policy of not allowing users under the age of 13 on any of its platforms.
> When presented with internal research and documents showing that Meta knew young children were in fact using its platforms, Zuckerberg said he "always wished" for faster progress to identify users under 13. He insisted the company had reached the "right place over time".
Soon there will be government IDs required to use social media sites because parent's can't take phones away from their kids.
https://archive.is/07nv5
There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?".
Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your product. Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
From what I understand the argument is, and to miss quote Marshall McLuhan it is “the medium, and not the content is addiction”.
In other words is not the posts by the influencers, but techniques such as infinite schooling, and so on.
This is why meta and google could not relay on User-Generated Content Safe Harbor (Section 230) part of the law.
> Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
No, but unfortunately I can very easily imagine people saying it, just like the people who made loads of money from pushing those products did. Also just like the people who are profiting from the spread of gambling are saying now.
Why would someone choose to do a thing if it harms them? There are good arguments against laws that restrict personal freedoms, but this isn't one of them.
But what if we're talking about a product that you're giving away to children? I agree that for adults, cigarettes are fine. But in this case, you're actively designing to maximize tweens and teens engagement and the end result is them saying that they wan't to stop but can't.
Though to be fair, I was mostly pointing out the fact that this was a pretty dumb thing to say for a case like this, especially in a jury trial.
Yes, I agree with you, I think that regulation is needed here and that this was a dumb thing to say. I'm just saying that my reaction to Zuckerberg saying that people must love his product if they use it a lot is exactly what I'd expect him to say. It's also exactly why other parties must step in.
As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
I also hope the reasons are obvious.
Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. I don't think it's fair to ask children to resist social media through sheer willpower when there are legions of highly educated adults on the other side trying to increase engagement.
It should be no surprise that children can be manipulated by highly intelligent adults.
>[There are] legions of highly educated adults [at Meta] trying to increase [child] engagement
Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life?
Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?
I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger.
Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never prioritized actual lab research or clinical advancements.
And not just a minor, AIUI it's important that at the start, she was under 16
> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult.
This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.
Or assign responsibility to…parents and legal guardians…who are not children.
Meta is not blameless here. Responsibility can be shared when Meta (and others) are essentially preying on children. It’s an uphill battle for parents by Meta’s design.
They’re not Meta’s kids, they’re freemium customers.
It would work if parents had legal course to seek justice against corporations that stalk, groom, and manipulate their children against their wishes.
Doesn't this lawsuit (essentially) prove otherwise?
I would prefer Meta make their products less addictive for children, with the side-effect that they're perhaps less stimulating for adults, than for Meta to keep their products the way they are, gatekept behind a system that allows them access to even more of my personal data.
I understand why they would want the opposite. They can f*ck right off.
We already have a distinction because it’s been known for decades already that some things are addictive purely through reinforcement psychology and some things lock people into a chemical dependence.
For example see the glossary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
> I also hope the reasons are obvious.
Based on the fact that many people here disagree about fundamental things, as well as the fact that “liberal” is a highly overloaded term, I think it should be obvious that it’s not obvious what you mean.
Specifically when it comes to children, we need to show more restraint in giving them the liberty to partake in potentially addictive substances.
It's one thing if an adult smokes and gambles, it's another thing if a child does. It seems to me that stuff you do in youth tends to stick around for life.
I don't think the reasons are obvious. Where do you put gambling on the spectrum?
If something compels behavior vs. behavior remaining a free choice, a liberal society can and should treat it like any other source of compulsion.
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I thought the actual physiological cause of addiction was similar in both nicotine and gambling: you crave the predictable release of dopamine.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
You're missing the negative affect node of the Koob addiction cycle, which exists for gambling but to a lesser degree than for nicotine.
I don’t gamble, but if I did, I am fairly certain it would release little to no dopamine for me, win or lose.
I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.
You’re being downvoted, but there’s an interesting point you’re trying to make. Dopamine-chasing is truly selective in the behavior and chemical sense.
There is a particular hard drug that I could be easily addicted to if it were cheaper and more accessible. Nothing else like it gives me irresistible craving for more. Not nicotine, ADHD meds or speed, benzos, and not even opioids have the same effect. So after I discovered this about myself, I went on a little journey to self test myself other possible addictions.
Social media? Nope. Video games and tv? yes. Gambling, hoarding, shopping: No. Sex: yes. Exercise: yes
I can’t rationalize any of it.
And yet, some people find themselves compelled to continue gambling long after they’re drowning in debt.
If you don’t want to call that addiction, fine, but you can’t deny that it happens.
Right: They’re gambling addicts. That’s a distinct fact from, “Gambling is a physiologically addictive behavior for typical humans.”
Right, there's a difference between a chemical that will addict most people simply because of the changes the chemical makes to the brain (even if the person doesn't even really like doing the thing that causes them to consume it), vs. an activity that gives you dopamine hits and can be addictive, depending on the person.
One is physical addiction and the other is psychological.
But I'm also feeling a parallel here to people who think that mental health issues aren't real medical problems and that people can just "get better" whenever they want. And that's concerning. We shouldn't be more lenient on things that are "only" psychologically addictive.
It's predictably addictive under common circumstances (a lack of socioeconomic support and a lack of alternative means to occupy one's time). If those circumstances are becoming more and more widespread in a society (which they are in this one), it behooves experts to consider that "typical" and "this particular cohort" might become harder and harder to distinguish, to the point where what would have been targeted interventions need to become general.
You seem to be differentiating between physical and psychological addiction, and saying that only physical addiction meets the technical definition of addiction?
I’m saying society should tread extremely carefully in attempting to regulate citizens’ potentially psychologically addictive behaviors.
Ah OK. Yes I agree, there can be a blurry line between something a person does compulsively/addictively and something that he just enjoys doing. And it's different for different people.
To add to the confusion, sometimes I do stupid things just once. Even so, those things should be banned, for harming me.
We already have a category called addictive personality disorder where someone is much more prone to being addicted to pretty much anything.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.
Where would you put 24x7 political content?
That's more like perversion...
Dark patterns are real. Deceptive advertising is real. So-called prediction markets amount to unregulated gambling on any proposition. Many online businesses are whale hunts and the whales are often addicts.
I feel like people use the word “addiction” to refer to both chemical addiction and behavioral addiction, and that people understand that the latter is (usually) far less serious than the former.
I don't think you can put them into buckets like that. All addiction is driven in persuit of a reward. The magnitude of reward can be estimated with brain scans and stuff but to my understanding isn't universal in all humans.
Can we definitely say gambling addiction is less serious than alcohol addiction when there's individuals who find the former harder to quit than the latter?
> I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
Be aware, the vast majority of people who have ever smoked cigarettes occasionally never became addicted. They were not labeled as “smokers”. A non-trivial number of people today continue to smoke cigarettes on occasion. I like to have one on my birthday. Then again, I’m able to eat a chip and not consume the entire bag. I’m not convinced of these social science studies, and when digging into individual studies I’m sure the replication crisis comes into play.
Tobacco may be the most* addictive delivery method, but nicotine alone is also addictive. To say its not is misinformation. Consistent use of nicotine still leads to upregulation, which does cause irritability, brain fog, cravings when you stop.
* I'd even change this to say modern nicotine salts in vapes are likely to lead to dependency faster than tobacco. A 5% nicotine salt pod will contain as much nicotine as a full pack of cigarettes, and so vapers tend to consume far more nicotine in a single sitting than they ever could with a cigarette. That combined withe constant availability means users of nicotine vapes & pouches (aka, no tobacco) are likey to have a more difficult time quitting than cigarette smokers.
Bottom line, its still dangerous to dismiss nicotine's addictive potential with or without tobacco as a delivery method.
> Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
That is a very strong claim to make when the current scientific consensus strongly disagrees.
How does that work when nicotine products that are every bit as addictive as tobacco exist, maybe you're just not aware of them? Sitting here with non tobacco snus (Swedish nicotine pouch) under my top lip, something I have been utterly unable to quit. I believe "nicotine free" tobacco would be completely non addictive.
tobacco contains MAO inhibiting compounds, which potentiate nicotine and increase addiction potential. that doesnt mean nicotine on its own isnt insanely addictive, i have no idea what the guy youre responding to is talking about. however, MAOIs were withdrawn as antidepressants for a good reason - they have a terrible withdrawal all on their own.
"I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive”…"
To be sure. But still an obviously dumb thing for a CEO to say though.
> As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
The problem is that this runs directly into the evidence that is mounting from GLP-1 agonists.
A lot more things are tied to the pathways we associate with "addiction" than we thought.
Social media is addictive the same way anorexia is. If you think Anorexia isn't a form of addiction, then sure, you got your 'safety'.
Mmhmm those are words. Words that are hand wavy pretexts for conservatism rather than liberalism; as a lover of liberal society you hope it acts conservatively!
This just comes off as poorly obfuscated self selection. You own a bunch of Meta, Alphabet and other media stocks?
There’s a big distance between libertarian and liberal societies. The libertarian tendencies of corporations are what tend to cause more harm.
Yeah, Zuck is really being a bit of d** there. You can't spend decades hiring the best engineers in the world and give them millions of dollars worth of resources with the sole aim of creating products specifically designed to retain attention and then simply shrug and say "if you don't like it, leave it". That's just not a fair fight.
The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.
There's a large body of evidence on the damage that social media can do to people, and on the engineered compulsion to use it.
If people feel that smoking causes lung cancer why do they keep smoking?
it's especially galling because he (or at least his wife) also funds neuroscience research at Stanford and elsewhere, and should have been well informed of the science behind addition, dopamine, and the reward pathways in the brain
Why not make personal responsibility illegal whilst we are at it. It is egregious that an individual can be held accountable for their own behaviours.
How much personal responsibility should we expect children to have? Genuine question. Because there was a time where some people believed that it was ok for kids to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
That doesn’t answer the question.
"If people didn't like destroying the environment, why would they let lobbiests run their government"
-- Billionaires
At least even money that an appellate court throws this verdict out entirely. Reminder that the US is the only developed country that uses juries for civil trials- everywhere else, complex issues of business litigation are generally left to a panel of judges. It's not that hard to rile up a bunch of randomly impaneled jurors against Big Bad Corporation. The US is kind of infamous for its very large, very unpredictable civil verdicts. There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable. Not even close to the final word in the American judicial system.
Edit to include: I mean this is coming the same day as the Supreme Court throwing out the piracy case against Cox Communications 9-0. Remember that this case originated with $1 billion dollar jury verdict against them! Was reversed by an appeals court 5 years later and completely invalidated today. Juries should not handle complex civil litigation, I'm sorry
The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you.
Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… being mad at the world she was born into?
> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies.
I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and the Wikipedia article gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... . Yes, the plaintiff received horrific third degree burns when she spilled the coffee on herself, but lots of products can cause horrible harm if used incorrectly - people cut fingers off all the time with kitchen knives, for example.
I find the headline "Woman sues McDonald's for their coffee being too hot" a completely accurate description of what happened, with no hyperbole and no "ridiculousness" at all.
> Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… being mad at the world she was born into?
Nothing wrong with getting mad at the world when the world is complete and utter garbage to you.
>There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable.
You might be blaming the wrong people. Looking at a lot of those "shockingly large verdicts", in that they would have bankrupted the company and forced it to be dissolved and reformed as perhaps a less objectionable version of itself: cool, shoulda done that. Sad we didn't.
Are we conflating matters of merit with matters of judgment, here?
Thanks for this take. Also explains why this did not result in much stock price movement today
Also at least partially explained by being priced in. The trial was known about and given the conditions described in GP it's not surprising that the verdict went this way.
Maybe if most people would agree the corporation is big and bad and should have penalties, it’s more democratic to go with that decision that the decision nine unelected philosopher kings come up with.
Yeah there are so many reasons this could be reversed on appeal. Whether the judge correctly held questions of section 230, and the First Amendment, is not obvious.
I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create.
If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
This sounds like the original internet.
Before adtech took over.
The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims).
Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature
> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling.
Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.
It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.
Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.
Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.
Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?
I guess I just don’t see humanity awakening to transcendent egolessness any time in the near future (if ever). Based on my experience, the average person is fairly constrained by their biological reality. We often like to pretend that this isn’t the case, and pretending may work for a while, but eventually sufficient stress causes the illusion to unravel forcefully.
Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.
It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad.
Getting back to community is key.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species
Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;)
(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other?
I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
I mean do you remember what p2p turned into for things like downloads? "Some_popular_thing.mov.exe"
They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.
Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
> $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU
Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP.
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about.
> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans.
We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't).
The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
Apps like instagram and YouTube should be required at least to give an option to disable reels and shorts
Youtube shorts will come back but you can just click the row each time to show less. Otherwise if you really don't want to see them on the desktop at least a browser extension works well.
There should be a law to require the ability to disable algorithmic customization of content. If these apps are so compelling it shouldn't take a Spark cluster riffing on my private viewing habits to come up with content for me.
I don't recall a lot of complaints about Facebook or Instagram when it was actually your friends' content. But now it's force-feeding everybody their own "guilty pleasure" viewing material 24 hours a day. It's fucking sick.
one of the benefits of being on android and being able to sideload apps. Look up "revanced youtube" and you'll be able to turn off shorts.
ublock origin for blocking them on desktop. If you're on an iphone... uninstall youtube?
my quality of life has increased substantially... although sometimes the app bugs out and shorts still make it on my home page. I spend like 10 minutes scrolling through shorts and get a weird shock "how the fuck did I end up here?", restart the app and boom shorts gone again.
We need a return to consent. I want to be able to say "no". Not "see fewer shorts", see NO shorts. Not "maybe later", actually fucking "no".
Perhaps we need more social activism (remember that?) to stop people falling into this kind of addiction. I remember anti-drugs campaigning , they were everywhere. Phone addictions are not taken nearly as seriously.
Using the war on drugs as an example as a successful social movement is kinda hilarious
People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? And only the ones that were included in the war on drugs (not nicotine, alcohol, caffeine)? So it was a success.
Don’t forget WhatsApp. Kids are allowed to have WhatsApp as messaging but they get fed videos there too. There is no way to really disable them . Also this be allowed as parental supervision, not something that kids can override.
For YouTube, on the mobile app: Setting -> Time Management -> Daily Limits -> Shorts Feed limit
there is no option for zero
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/technology/social-media-t...
In before someone says ‘blame the parents’ and not the multi-billion dollar companies who’ve spent decades targeting children for lifelong addiction, ignoring the negative effects on their mental health.
It need not be either-or.
The guy who made the drugs is guilty. The guy who sold the drugs to kids is guilty. But parents who failed to warn kids about drugs and to oversee them properly are also guilty...
Generally in an article about arresting or sentencing a drug dealer, people don't bring up that the drug users are actually to blame.
Now if we're in a discussion around the cartels, plenty of people do bring up (and there's also those that get annoyed by it) that the drug users are actually the ones funding the cartels via their drug use.
Along these lines, I think another fun comparison might be opioid use and Purdue.
I think that that is actually an oversight. One needs to consider the entire chain. For example, with proper parenting, there would be a lot less youth demand for drugs. It doesn’t make what a drug dealer does any less bad, nor does it make the efforts of the police to arrest the drug dealer any less important. But it’s suboptimal to consider a small piece of a system, without thinking of the whole.
It's also suboptimal to jail parents for not convincing their child that drugs are bad.
So is the judicial system that is not making this illegal or don't enforce laws to prevent people targeting kids to create early dependence on drugs.
That is a fair point, I did not attempt to make a complete list, of course, but you are right, there are more layers that could be named. All valid. The point I was making is that parents are also responsible.
eg: I grew up in a very nasty place. My neighborhood had a few pregnant 13 year old girls and a lot of drunks and smokers, including kids in their early teens. My parents kept me away from it all, while also both having full-time jobs. They put a lot of work into filtering whom I could be friends with and where I was allowed to be. THAT is the job of a parent.
I agree it's the job of a parent, but two parents (and with only a single job each) is sadly not the norm in many challenging environments.
The thing is, it should be both. Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children, often also guilty of same vices. Issue is, these addictions are way more destructive to young forming mind than to adults. Nobody having small kids now had fb or instagram access when they were 5, did they.
Maybe you don't do this. Certainly I don't. But when looking around, its much less rosy and... lets say in blue collar families its too common to drug kids with screens so parents have off time. Heck, some are even proud how modern parents they are. Any good advice is successfully ignored, and ideas of passing some proper time with kids instead are skillfully avoided. People got lazy and generally expect miracles from life without putting in any miracle-worth efforts.
Companies just maximize their profits till laws allows them (and then some more), and expecting nice moral behavior by default is dangerously naive and never true.
Consider that the insane growth in the cost of living - especially childcare - combined with wage stagnation means that now the vast majority of families have 2 parents with full-time jobs, keeping them away for their families for much longer than before. Consider that childcare is much, much harder to even get into now than in decades past. Consider also that "EdTech" means that nearly every child needs to be on an internet equipped-device at all times.
But sure, "Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children", that's definitely it. Parents just hate their kids! What a useful perspective you've brought to the discussion.
Read the book “Careless People” if you have a chance - according to the book, social media companies figured out they have real leverage with politicians since they can influence elections. As a result they are actively pushing for far right candidates to reduce their own taxation and regulation.
That book was so lame and the author leaves out how she profited millions and then only complained after she was fired.
Its also funny how they “discovered” they were influencing elections after they influenced the 2008 and 2012 elections.
How did the author not know this when she sought out and joined the company in like 2013!
The parts about playing Settlers of Catan with Zuckerberg was funny. I wonder what his side of the story was and if people were really letting him win.
I thought she discussed her pay/stock, what a big deal it was to her and how that affected her decisions very openly.
I don't think this accelerationism/fascism hobby of many tech bros is going to age well.
This just seems ripe for selective enforcement if not codified in law. I agree the algorithm they use can be addicting, but it's because it's simply good at providing content the user wants to consume.
Besides a general 'don't be too good' I'm really not sure what companies should do about it. It just seems like it'll lead to some judges allowing rulings against companies they don't like.
Television's goal was always viewer retention as well, they were just never able to target as well as you can on the internet.
I see it as similar to the public health crisis created when protonated nicotine salts made their way into vapes along with flavors allowing 2-10x more nicotine to be delivered and the innovation that made Juul so popular with children.
The subsequent effects - namely being easier to consume and more addictive - eventually resulted in legislation catching up, and restrictions on what Juul could do. It being "too good" of a product parallels what we're seeing in social media seven years later.
Like most[all] all public health problems we see individualization of responsibility touted as a solution. If individualization worked, it would have already succeeded. Nothing prevents individualization except its failure of efficacy.
What does work is systems-level thinking and considering it an epidemiological problem rather than a problem of responsibility. Responsibility didn't work with the AIDS crisis, it didn't work on Juul, and it's not going to work on social media.
It is ripe for public health strategies. The biggest impediment to this is people who mistakingly believe that negative effects represent a personal moral failure.
> I'm really not sure what companies should do about it
disassemble the intentionally addictive properties they built into their platforms to maximise engagement and revenue at the cost of the mental health of their users.
Companies that sell products to the public have managed this for a hundred years. Some are good at it, some are not, some completely disregarded their obligations. This is not all that new.
thats the point
Lets just be honest, if you make enough money its legal in America.
Unless you hurt children, then its mostly legal and a slap on the wrist.
Nukes are the same as knives, just different in magnitude. Should one have special rules?
I think in America the second amendment makes it legal to own a nuke.
When I was a kid, tv commercials were heavily censored and the tv channel could and would be fined immediately if something inappropriate was shown.
How is it that these days social media can circumvent all these safeguards and then somehow blame the parents if a kid is watching something inappropriate on an app designed for kids (like YouTube kids)?
The issue is that politicians are beholden to social media companies because they can literally get them or their opponent elected. After reading Careless People, I was amazed at how leaders of so many countries wanted to meet Zuck because he wields so much power.
I really hope this ruling is the beginning of the end of the free rein they've had.
Don't get me started. So many existing laws just seem to be conveniently ignored because... it's 'digital'?
In a lot of countries there are specific laws banning the deliberate targeting of advertising to children (and in contexts where you would reach children, heavily regulated), but for over a decade Meta would allow you to target within the ranges of 13 to 18 years old.
That's to say nothing of the scams and deepfake celebrity ads they let run. Imagine if a deepfake ad of Warren Buffet promoting an investment opportunity ran on TV, the network would get sued into oblivion. On Meta though, there's no repercussions.
As long as we continue to value making money for shareholders above all else, such and possibly worst perversions will continue to happen. Capital has found all sorts of ways to make all sorts of questionable things addictive to sell.
I feel, and it's obvious to most that the only way a society can truly reform is by a shared consensus over their value system. This verdict could be thrown out by the appelette court(i feel it would be), so this is not the culmination of values resulting in what many hoped for.
It does not seem to me that this is a country where consensus on what, if anything, to put above capital will come about any time soon and with capital it's always been ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
The only time true justice that happens is when the harm becomes obvious being the shadow of a doubt(e.g. smoking) that even a monkey can tell it's time, game is up.
Perhaps if one day we can look into the brains of people with the clarity of glass and the precision of electrons and tell, will that time come when we all recognize how bad of an idea social media was.
Are there any takeaways here for builders of social media applications who are not Facebook or Google? Is this a warning to not make your newsfeed algorithm "too engaging" or is it only really relevant for big companies?
I'm not an authority on this matter. But if you say "I can stop any time", and it is not true, then you have a problem.
A good time to (re-)recommend the movie "The Social Dilemma".
I actually quit Instagram because I found it so addictive. Wild that there's a case. Parents need to just take away phones from children. Simple as that.
I think this is going to end up with a huge chunk paid out to state health departments for the foreseeable future.
Kind of like how tobacco companies now pay out billions every year and its a major source of funding for states.
Hopefully this means more health services available. But it will just serve like an ongoing tax.
AIUI, this particular case is a pilot for about 2,000 similar (but not similar enough to be combined into a class action) cases. They are not actions by state or local governments for damages they have received, as was the case with tobacco.
This is the kind of stuff that is causing them to push for mandatory identity verification laws. If they are being held liable for the the desires of their users, they're being forced micromanage the affairs of their customers, which preclude anonymous usage.
Meta is not pushing for mandatory age verification laws.They are pushing for age verification burdens to be pushed to the OS / App Store layer.
Not only that, in my opinion the many positive reactions to this decision are a sign of a decline of personal responsibility and a desire of people to be managed by the government and treated like cattle. Blaming everyone else but themselves for personal problems and failures has become the default for many people.
Why is it bad to want the system to push people towards healthy behaviour but it's totally okay to want the system to push people towards unhealthy behaviour?
So... should we all sue Youtube and Meta now? This is a semi-serious, follow this precedent to its logical conclusion, question.
Wow, so does this pave the way for massive class action lawsuits? Not familiar with how precedents like this play out long term.
How about optimize for engagement with people you know irl and not influencers and media?
Negligent doesn't begin to describe their behaviour.
This is ultimately about the inherently pernicious nature of unregulated capitalism. Businesses want money. They get that by manipulating you, the consumer, to consume their services. They are "ethically" bound by (given an excuse by) fiduciary duty to pursue profit callously.
The result, in these corner cases where eating people is profitable? Shelob.
Notably a different case from the other one in New Mexico:
Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509984
And one with much deeper implications on how they operate. It's easy for Meta to just hire more moderators or treat reports of exploitation with higher priority; if this verdict stands, I think they have no realistic choice but to abandon usage targets.
Realistically they will hire expensive lawyers, pay out hundreds of millions to billions in settlements, fire lots of people (workforce is predominantly American), etc.
Even if they do what you're saying, lots of people who've used any Meta property in the last 15 years has a potentially viable case, and no future work can swat those away
I don’t feel good about this case- on the one hand, I’m all for sticking it to big corporations. On the other hand, nobody has claimed that Meta and YouTube were doing anything illegal, so this case is different from civil suits brought after a criminal case finds someone guilty. This is a case where the jury decided they don’t like how two corporations acted, and are just giving money to one person. Why does this plaintiff in particular deserve this money?
I’ve argued in the past that the right way to create the change in corporations we want is to change the laws, and people have made valid points that Congress has basically given up on doing that. But even so, civil cases with fines don’t seem like that way to make lasting change. In the analogues to the tobacco fights, there are LAWS that regulate tobacco company behaviors as a result. The civil case here isn’t going to result in any law. So what are companies supposed to do? Tiptoe around some ill defined social boundary and hope they don’t get sued? Because apparently the defense of, “no I didn’t target that person and I didn’t break any laws” is still going to get you fined. What happens when a company from a conservative location gets sued in a liberal location for causing a social ill? Oh, we’re cool with that. But what if a company from a liberal location gets sued in a conservative location for the same thing? Oh, maybe we don’t like that as much. I’m taking the libertarian side here. I know plenty of people who don’t watch TV, don’t use Facebook, and I know plenty of people that recognized that they were spending too much time on digital platforms and decided to quit or cut back. So a healthy person can self regulate on these apps, I’ve seen it and done it. I’m just not sure how much responsibility Meta and YouTube bear in my mind. If they’re getting fined $3M plus some TBD punitive amount, are we saying that this 20 year old person lost out on earning that much money in their life or would need to spend $3M on therapy because of Meta or YouTube? It feels a little steep off a fine for one person.
If Meta and YouTube really were/are making addictive products, wouldn’t a lot more people be harmed? Shouldn’t this be a class action suit where anyone with mental trauma or depression be included?
I don’t know the details of the case, but I highly doubt that this one plaintiff was targeted specifically, and I doubt their case is that unique. I read tons of news articles about cyber bullying, depression, suicide attempts, and tech addiction. Does every one get to sue Meta and YouTube for $3M now?
The case was brought under product liability law.
If I sell you gizmo, and I know, or should know, that using the gizmo could seriously harm you, and I don't tell you or do anything about it, I am liable for damages you incur.
I’m not sure the plaintiff’s mental harm was caused by Meta and YouTube. You can be just as depressed without social media and online videos. And even if they were, other cases that are kind of similar to this have not found the corporation responsible. The parents of Sandy Hook didn’t get any money out of Remington, and their product is much more directly linked to harming people than an app. McDonald’s was not held liable in 2002 for making people fat. I am pretty sure the food at McDonald’s is more easily linked to our health outcomes than the link in this case.
Should Apple or Samsung be held liable for making the phone that the plaintiff probably used to use these apps? How much responsibility do they bear?
Further, Facebook/Instagram and YouTube are free products from the perspective of the plaintiff. These corporations didn’t sell anything to the plaintiff, so can they even be held liable? They did sell the plaintiff’s data to advertisers, which I think you might be able to hold them responsible if they misused that data, but this isn’t what the case was about.
I’m not rooting for depression or suicidal thoughts or anything, but this doesn’t feel like the right direction we need to be moving in as society. We can’t simultaneously argue for free speech and freedom of choice and also claim that we aren’t capable of making our own choices to live our lives responsibly.
I was just pointing out that the basic framework of the case is not some novel new idea, and a jury just decided to stick it to a big company out of the blue. There is a long history of this sort of case, and a jury did hear a lot of evidence from witnesses and instructions on the law from a judge.
Some of your examples are not very compelling.
In the case of Remington, there was another party that (presumably) the jury found was more directly responsible. Also, the victims of sandy hook were not Remingtons' customers.
Apple does not make you install instagram on your phone. And I doubt that you could find really compelling evidence that Apple knew in great detail the harms that were being caused, and rather then seek to mitigate them, instead made them worse in order to earn more money.
I'm not sure there a requirement that a product be paid for in order to be subject to product liability law.
I think I agree that these product liability cases are not the best way for a society to deal with these problems. I would prefer to see the democratic process arrive at some reasonable solution, based on the desires of the majority of the population. But there has been almost no movement in that direction, and I have my doubts there will be (in the US).
And I think it's important to see that this is about 16 (and younger) year old children, not adults.
I strongly doubt that "negligent" is the proper word for "carefully designed to induce as much addictive behavior".
"YouTube argued that it was not a social media company and that its features were not designed to be addictive."
Well, that's laughable.
I believe social media is on a collision course with an iceberg called Section 230.
Broadly speaking, Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms. A platform is like Geocities (back in the day) where the platform provider isn't liable for the content as long as they staisfy certain requirements about havaing processes for taking down content when required. A bit like the Cox decision today, you're broadly not responsible for the actions of people using your service unless your service is explicitly designed for such things.
A publisher (in the Section 230 sense) is like any media outlet. The publisher is liable for their content but they can say what they want, basically. It's why publishers tend to have strict processes around not making defamatory or false statements, etc.
I believe that any site that uses an algorithmic news feed is, legally speaking, a publisher acting like a platform.
Example: let's just say that you, as Twitter, FB, IG or Youtube were suddenly pro-Russian in the Ukraine conflict. You change your algorithm to surface and distribute pro-Russian content and suppress pro-Ukraine content. Or you're pro-Ukrainian and you do the reverse.
How is this different from being a publisher? IMHO it isn't. You've designed your algorithm knowingly to produce a certain result.
I believe that all these platforms will end up being treated like publishers for this reason.
So, with today's ruling about platforms creating addiction, (IMHO) it's no different to surfacing content. You are choosing content to produce a certain outcome. Intentionally getting someone addicted is funtionally no different to changing their views on something.
I actually blame Google for all this because they very successfully sold the idea that "the algorithm" ranks search results like it's some neutral black box but every behavior by an algorithm represents a choice made by humans who created that algorithm.
Please read:
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
This is an opinion and I believe it's wrong. And you just have to look at the statute to see why [1]:
> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (2) Civil liability
> (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
"in good faith" is key here. Here's another opinion [2]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
So far the Supreme Court has sidestepped this issue despite cases making it to the Appeals Court. Until the Supreme Court addresses, none of us can say with any certainty what is and isn't protected.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
[2]: https://www.naag.org/attorney-general-journal/the-future-of-...
I don't expect that to work, but who knows. Editors "rank", curate, select, present, etc content to people, and have for a long time, and it's always understood to be speech.
Remember, according to that link, 230 does not give platforms any new rights. It simply makes it easier for them to end cases faster and cheaper, that they would have already won on 1st amendment grounds.
Why do you believe that "Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms"?
Section 230(c)(i) [1]:
> (c) (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
This is a protection for being a platform for third-party (including user-generated) content.
Some more discussion on this distinction [2]:
> Section 230’s legal protections were created to encourage the innovation of the internet by preventing an influx of lawsuits for user content.
It goes on to talk about publishers, distributors and Internet Service Providers, the last of which I characterize as "platforms".
By the way, my view here isn't a fringe view [3]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
This is exactly my view.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
[2]: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/section-230-online-plat...
[3]: https://www.naag.org/attorney-general-journal/the-future-of-...
This isn't good reasoning. According to your analysis, any website, ISP, or hosting provider that uses a firewall or Cloudflare is by definition a publisher, since they algorithmically shape traffic to prohibit suspicious IP addresses from accessing content.
Not at all. Intenet matters. Is Cloudfare trying to shape user behavior or push a particular position or content? No.
Just look at the Cox decision from the Supreme Court today. As long as the (Internet) service isn't designed for or sold as a method of downloading copyrighted material, the provider isn't responsible for any actions by its users. In other words, intent matters.
I find that technical people really get stuck on this aspect of the law. They look for technical compliance or an absolute proof standard because we're used to doing things like proving something works mathematically. But the law is subjective and holistic. It looks at the totality of evidence and applies a subjective test.
And intent here is fairly easy to establish. We could take an issue like Russia and look at all the posts and submissions and see how many views and interactions those posts got. We then divide them into pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine and establish a clear bias. We also look at any modifications made to the algorithm to achieve those goals.
This is nothing like Cloudfare DDoS protection.
Huge if upheld. This was the bellwether case for thousands of other similar cases.
IMO, parents share just as much blame here, if not more. Giving your kids independence doesn't mean being oblivious to what they're doing online. Too many parents confuse hands-off parenting with not parenting at all.
Have you met kids? They’re devious, tech knowledgeable, and scheming and can find ways around any rule. Plus, no matter how good of a parent you are, you’re somewhat at the mercy of their friends’ parents as well. I can block TikTok from my daughter’s phone, but can’t block her from watching her friend’s phone while she’s out of the house.
I dont think parents going up against psychologists, data scientists, product managers and software engineers with the best pay in the world is any kind of fair fight.
I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc.
Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of profit compared to what they provide to the average person that makes people squirm.
But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? It's like saying cable television is responsible for people who binge watch TV.
It's hard to square this circle while sports gambling apps and Polymarket / Kalshi are tearing through the landscape right now with no real pushback
Do more? They have not done anything. These trials have shown they have long had extremely detailed understanding of what is going on with their product, and instead of trying to mitigate the problems, they have intentionally made the problems worse in order to profit more.
>But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction?
Yes? Is there an algorithm or not?
> During his first-ever appearance before a jury in February, Meta's chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, relied on his company's longstanding policy of not allowing users under the age of 13 on any of its platforms.
> When presented with internal research and documents showing that Meta knew young children were in fact using its platforms, Zuckerberg said he "always wished" for faster progress to identify users under 13. He insisted the company had reached the "right place over time".
Soon there will be government IDs required to use social media sites because parent's can't take phones away from their kids.