If so, what is your definition of addictive because it seems to differ from mine.
[0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
"Meta knew what it was doing"
In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.”
Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of 208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact, Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including:
• Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72
• Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894
• By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”
One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.”
As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.”
In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”
I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement.
The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.
We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.
Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
Leaders like Zuck, on the other hand, have no excuse.
And marketers, there's still time to save your souls and find honest work.
Neither are most adults. The current situation in the world is plenty of evidence for that.
It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU.
I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe.
It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened.
And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population.
Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.
The company will settle for a slap on the wrist, a paltry fine that is but a fraction of the profit that was made as a result of the infraction.
The company will not admit to any wrongdoing as a result of the settlement.
The company will continue their behavior but in a stealthier, more obfuscated fashion.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them.
Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase.
I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram.
Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...
> The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
Per the article:
> Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settle...
> The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.
Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?
In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:
> [intent to] addict young users
They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.
If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.
They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.
So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.
The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet.
We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on.
Those leaders own full responsibility for this.
the_real_cher•49m ago
Its like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that.
Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.
mapleoin•40m ago
So does smoking, depending on who you listen to: relaxation, pleasure, socialising, "feeling free" etc.
But this is just to emphasise your point that we change our thinking as a society on the importance of both harms and benefits.
SirMaster•5m ago
There is no way to have a healthy relationship with smoking. It's always damaging your lungs and such no matter what the positives are.
A person can absolutely have a perfectly healthy relationship with social media where there are 0 negative effects and only positive effects.
iAMkenough•39m ago
cwmoore•24m ago
topgrain2•36m ago