Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"
techoversight.org
techoversight.org
The second one outlined for Meta is:
> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).
This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.
The first one outlined for YouTube is:
> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”
This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:
> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.
This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
And yet here we are years later without change. So we've got proof that they knew this and have done nothing. Don't need to speculate at all.
but I guess you're right, it's a little more than nothing
The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.
The issue I take with statements like that is that they are saying one thing while doing the opposite. This document [1], for instance, shows that YouTube knew as early as April 2025 that infinite feeds of short form content can "displace valuable activities like time with friends or sleep", but that hasn't stopped them from aggressively pushing YouTube shorts everywhere.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that there are two factions, one worried about the effects of YouTube in teens and a second one worried about growth at all costs. And I don't think the first one is winning.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
There are plenty of examples that the mental health people aren't being completely steamrolled. Parental controls allow you to block Shorts for your kids. That doesn't sound like a "growth at all costs" mindset.
Growth at all costs should be no one's priority.
so of course "growth hackers" (or whatever the folks responsible for growth are called nowadays... other than CFOs and CEOs), simply they are the ones whose judgement and "worldview" regarding whose responsibility is to manage the negative consequences of their increased revenue is very skewed, in other words they mostly have elaborate self-serving explanations (excuses)
and many times that overlaps various user freedom arguments, arguments against paternalism, etc...
Maybe if they actually did any of those things...
I use the Revanced patched app logged out so Google doesn't decide to ban my account on a whim. Yes, one day I will dump Gmail, its getting closer with the state of things at the moment.
The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.
That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.
Humans survived well before the internet, the telephone, the telegraph, or even international post.
It's also assuming that we're willing to abandon a technological capacity (not having to personally travel to someone's location to communicate with them) that humans have had since before Moses came down from the mountain, which seems like a fairly silly constraint to impose when there are obviously better alternatives available.
IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops. People also hang out at each others' homes. Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
You're also acting like we can't meaningfully distinguish between social media and other forms of communication and that we have to be all or nothing about it, which is a bewildering take. Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features. Facebook back when it was posting on friends' walls, no likes, comments, shares, friend/follower counts, or feeds, was fun and mostly harmless. LinkedIn was genuinely useful when the feed was nothing more than professional updates. They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems. Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems: most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
How many public discussions have you participated in at a coffee shop? If you have something to say and you go there and start trying to chat up anyone who walks in the door, what response do you expect from the proprietors?
If you go to a park which is within 10 miles of the median home, how many people do you expect to encounter there at any given time, especially in the heat of summer or cold of winter?
You need indoor spaces that don't have some private commercial operator, like community centers or hackerspaces, but those are the things that get priced out by high real estate costs.
> People also hang out at each others' homes.
You move to a new city and want to meet people. Are you expecting many strangers to invite you into their homes without introduction?
> Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media.
Social media costs time. Physical spaces cost even more time (since you need to travel there) and they cost money (to cover the rent). What happens when you then make the rent high?
> Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features.
So is e.g. Usenet social media or not? Does it matter if it provides ordering options other than search by date?
> They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems.
Because those things increase engagement and the central middle man gets paid for increasing engagement.
> Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems
It removes the perverse incentive to design things that way.
> most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
Then why is Neocities or "add a Bluesky comments section to your blog" so much less toxic than Facebook?
The primary thing driving toxicity in certain federated networks is when they get a huge influx of users after some incumbent social network gets into the news over political suppression, because then a mass of the target's partisans try to switch to something else in protest and partisans are toxic so if you get inundated with disproportionately partisan exiles you've got a problem. Which doesn't happen if you federate the whole main network containing the majority of the population including moderates and apolitical subjects rather than disproportionately one side's most excitable militants.
In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.
It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?
To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.
I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?
Have these parents tried to not let the salesman in?
The "just say no" argument, basically.
There is also the education part that for some reason we are ignoring. Kids are going to be able to access drugs in locations where they are unsupervised, they are going to be subject to peer pressure, etc. The job of the parents is to prepare them for that, as they should prepare them for the negative effects of social media.
In my first message I was not targeting those parents who try to block this but can't; I was targeting those parents that use Youtube to distract their kids since they are babies, those who give unrestricted access with no control at all, those who don't care. We all know people like that.
This is just an hypothesis, but if parents were fined every time their kid accessed social media, I'm sure most kids wouldn't be on it.
Do you think a crack dealer should be allowed to hang around on the playground and every kid has to talk to him too (and its up to parents to make sure the kids know not to buy his stuff)?
I see nothing in their comments to suggest that.
They argued against the government tracking people, that's it.
"I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed."
The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.
I didn't say that "parenting is wholly on the parents", that's a straw man argument. I said that parents who don't keep their children away from digital dangers should be blamed.
Parents have a huge radius of action, they can:
- Avoid using Youtube for entertaining their babies/toddlers.
- Avoid buying tablets to their children.
- If they buy them a phone, use parental control and restrict app usage.
- Monitor what their kids do on internet.
- And the most important: educate their children to identify dangers.
Do you think a parent who does none of this shouldn't be blamed?
I want parents to embrace responsibility and act as parents. Delegating this kind of education to government is dangerous and has many negative collateral effects we will pay sooner or later.
In my state, buying cigarettes requires presenting your driver's license, which is scanned at every purchase. Not sure about alcohol.
The government can and does already track whatever they want about you. Businesses already track you unless you are extremely thorough about erasing your footprint. Adding a zero-knowledge proof through a trusted system that you are 18+ doesn't seem like the mountain people are claiming. You already have to provide ID and credit card to get ISP access, the byte patterns are traced back to your household. They already have a unique fingerprint on your browser and computer. The real harm is just the obvious encroachment that we can all see and have known about since early 2000s. They don't need a "backdoor", it feels like alarmism over a possible problem, when there is a very real harm to children and teens (suicide rates, depression, bullying, mental health, etc).
to go back to smoking / alcohol / guns, one could argue it is an infringement, but ultimately it does seem to have been the right choice for society at large, and the increased "invasion of privacy" has been pretty minor. If anything, the opt-in stuff like credit cards, cell phones, GPS, car apps, streaming services have all been far larger invasions of privacy that people willingly embrace.
Also, the fact that gov and companies are already tracking people doesn't mean we should consent to more ways of tracking.
For instance, a simple law like "Companies should take measure, even if it lowers revenue and growth, to reduce addictive behavior. They should to it more emphatically on under age users and even more on under 13 years old.". But no. Instead, they will write 40 pages of what companies should implement in their software, and than have the 40 pages be quickly outdated, partially impossible to implement and hell for developers who try to do the right thing to comply. Total crap of standards and regulation bodies that help nothing and slow down all innovation.
Solution will only come from social pressure, movements to delete the apps, parents actually educating their children to avoid adicitive features. It will take time. But Government will solve nothing.
They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.
Nothing to see here.
Probably, not definitely
It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
In what universe would this be possible?
What a world that must be.
Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority.
Social networks is a sugar for minds.
My kids were born long before Obama took the office.
What's your point again? That president can't control the quality of the food in the country under their control?
This is quite the opposite of everything I've ever seen in my entire life in America.
Or perhaps since you mention sugar, not corn syrup, and list quantities in kilograms not pounds or tons, he suspects you may not actually have first-hand experience with this.
Sigh ( in canadian )
My theory is that the food tasted less flavorful, so people compensated by adding their own.
I don't eat a lot of junk food, but for a long time after the Obama administration, when I did partake, often my immediate reaction was "Wow. These aren't as tasty as I remember."
/I'm looking at you, Cool Ranch Doritos.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768807?re...
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/3/12866484/michelle-obama-childh...
in all likelihood it's just enshittification, as those big corps make more slop for the plebs to eat in the cheapest way possible
Sugar has been vilified for longer and more vociferously than social media use by kids, but that may be changing now.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-01-07/trump-admin...
[2]: https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)02461-9/pdf
Elimination of processed sugar is a good thing.
Despite this, the discussion quickly pivoted to "how dare you keep poor children from enjoying birthday cake".
Shouting extreme positions doesn't really move the conversation
Untrue
My six year old grand child made up a food related game for me to play with them that involved penalties for choosing food with sugar.
Somebody is getting to them, good
That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.
Meta and Google have not
If they lose at trial they will likely be settling thousands of cases in the future
Time will show the wiser
A jury will decide
Win or lose, going to trial means more public disclosure of what these companies do behind the scenes
Example of high quality, low viewcount
I could post every quote on the page and respond to it how it's not a smoking gun but not one of them seemed like a smoking gun to me. Anyone care to point to one that seems like a smoking gun to them?
Once you're a subscriber, there's no incentive to get you to increase your engagement (beyond the threshold that makes it interesting and useful to you so you continue to subscribe) because unlike an ad-based network you're not generating more revenue the more you use it (in fact, you're increasing costs)
Both cases makes teens as victims, both cases was a great deal for them but only from the first look. Both cases are piramid-like schemes when the victims attract new victims to keep benefitting from the system. Is it just like in alcohol case, when having too many victims justifies a bad spirit as the new norm?
reason can not choose reason, and faith can not choose faith
Europeans have been saying that for what, 20 years now? How long does it have to not work before we stop saying that it's a realistic solution?
I don't want the russian-style ban enforced by ISPs
Probably punishing companies who pay YouTube for ads would work
Or should the only outcome of the law be that the police could confiscate phones from kids? punish parents for allowing social media? Laws are not useless, at least teachers and parents will have a clear call to action. But still
And actually I think just banning them from conducting any business, accepting payments/etc, would be mostly sufficient. They could continue to operate at a loss, but it would put American corps at such a disadvantage that domestic social media might be able to compete, and enforcing regulations against domestic companies should be far more feasible.
Man it's nice to live in the country not prioritizing internet censorship
But if people keep proselytizing that nothing will happen and all is hopeless, it's going to be hard to get people together to support a change. You and others here are doing the work of social media companies by spreading that - on social media. In fact, nothing can stop the public if they want something.
I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got.
I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc.
If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal.
2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast.
It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.
We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive. We seem to be fine with expanding gambling - where I live (not Nevada!) slot machines are everywhere. Nice restaurants even will dedicate corners to slot machines - not just seedy bars. Sports betting apps are all over streaming ads, and their legality is expanding even though when they are legalized in an area the divorce and loan default rates go up measurably.
Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?
The kids are just the latest victim of a long ongoing trend.
Because it is simply wrong.
> AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive. > We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive.
Three wrongs don't make a right I guess.
I’m pretty sure we do, in fact, ban under 18s from tobacco, alcohol, and real-money gambling.
this is doing a lot of heavy lifting for how loose we have become with under 18 questionable products.
Hmm, candy flavored vapes both for THC and nicotine. Teen psychosis from THC. Popcorn lung. Not so good it seems!
https://www.lung.org/research/sotc/by-the-numbers/8-things-i...
The idea that we don't regulate things would be shocking to the anti-regulation crowd, and the staffs at the FDA, FCC, etc.
If that's not enough, in the US we created a federal level agency that oversees 3 things only. Two of those things are alcohol and tobacco. And the third thing isn't even regulated half as much as those two.
Why on earth anyone thinks these things are unregulated is beyond me.
“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years
Ask any educator what the biggest positive change was to U.S. high schools in the 1970s and they'll probably answer that it was the ban on smoking in schools.
I expect a similar response in the future regarding bans on social media.
I guess things are different at Google now.
The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?
Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.
They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.
If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.
You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.
Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.
Edit:
> They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.