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Comment by Shamar | Hacker News Reader

The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.

“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years

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How did that work mechanically though? At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data, even if we only suspected they might possibly not be an adult -- no A/B tests, no ML, no ad targeting, no nada. Did leadership design a system where those sorts of things would happen anyway? Were there just enough rogue teams to cause problems?

Because the product is made to appeal to that particular demographic. The data doesn't really matter if you have that kind of reach.

For business, government, and religion: achieving scale and centralization necessarily leads to corrupt outcomes. This is also where Marx’s legitimate criticisms of capitalism turn into a solution which is essentially its doppelgänger, a scaled system of corruption with absolute authority with the rhetorical veneer of democracy.

> At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data

I guess things are different at Google now.

Are people surprised by this. Clearly this was a tactic widely used in the tech industry. Their aim is to keep people on the platform specifically teens. Why else would you need curated algorithms for users.

Anyone paying attention knew. A smoking gun means that legal action is possible. Or it would be in a better time.

It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.

Tobacco paid billions of dollars, and we've heavily restricted where it can be used, where it can be advertised, and who can buy it.

Companies don't necessarily have to suffer when restrictions are placed on them.

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 can only imagine what it's like right now in schools. I can't see how anybody arguing the point that student are allowed to use social media in school is an okay activity. I know there are some countries banning the use of such activities in Europe and some others i can't think of right now.

Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.

Indeed, I've been paying attention to the market share of the biggest companies in advertisement, its clear that Google and Meta are the largest share by a large margin. Almost not even comparable to other players other than Reddit recently. which it's exposure is dependent on Search engines like Google and Bing for that matter. users within the platform are a different story. I personally think the internet is not being utilized wisely when it comes to current context. There is still so much to be done and innovated and there are gate keepers keeping this from happening.

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