Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children
reuters.com
reuters.com
These are not the only two possible courses, but these will be the choices put in front of us. Get used to reading books and going on walks. The internet is almost dead.
But also I think people forget: this is not cut and dried. This is not simple. This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things. "I enjoy the product and use it a lot" and "I am addicted" is blurry and market pressure is not going to recognize that limit because it does not care about human suffering unless that suffering meaningfully impacts the bottom line.
If these companies hit regulations that effectively cap their advertising revenue per user (i.e. the "addictiveness"), they are dead. That may be totally fine, and I'm sure majority of people would rejoice hearing this. But remember: advertising dollars are earned, especially at tech company scale, by the effectiveness of the targeting to get get more $ / DAU since DAU cannot grow beyond the Earth's population and that is the scale that these companies have already achieved.
If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness. You cap the ability for small companies to connect quickly with prospective customers without being locked out because they have to spend too much to find them. Yes you also cap scammers and other nefarious actors too, but thats arguably a different issue. The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important.
My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
They are evil tho, on top of there being market pressure. Their executives are incredibly comfortable with causing large scale harm, even when they are NOT forced at all.
> If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness.
And that is OK. Not just ok, but actually good. Their effectivity and their evilness are closely related. Their effectivity and harm they cause are essentially the same thing.
> The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important.
Nice try, but no. Who benefited the most were the bad actors, conspiracy theories, weight loss programs specifically marketted to teens who posted about being insecured about their issues.
Marketing is just an arms race. It is ok to limit how manipulative and harmful it is and force companies to compete on something else.
I agree with this, and I think you are right about a lot of this being really just not market-relevant factors that are driving a lot of the downsides here. All of these should be regulated, and even the ones where regulating will have impact to markets and consumers.
And I agree -- effective advertising targeting necessitates "reward hacking" in that I can get you to buy something if I prey on your insecurities or otherwise manipulate you in a way that goes beyond "oh I know what watwut would love as a birthday gift".
But you really should be aware that effective advertising really does disproportionately benefit smaller businesses and this is generally a Good Thing. Really my only point here is that there is a baby in this bathwater and we should be careful.
Aside from a 6 month contracting stint, I’ve never worked on data related to humans, only machines. No payment data, no behavioral data, no website data. The closest I’ve come is human-provided labels.
I’ve probably made only 50% of my total earning potential compared to Data Scientists / ML Engineers who work in the advertising and retail spaces (Google, Meta, Amazon), but at least I can look my children in the eyes and tell them that I didn’t sell my soul for a dollar.
> My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
Same, but without regulations there exists no incentive for any corporation to care about whether you’re addicted to your screen. And engagement, positive or negative, only makes them richer.
Cope, specifically, because we don't want to accept the fact that this kind of stuff is addictive on its own, that we are our own worst enemy; bot armies, evil corpos, and engagement algorithms don't help but they're not required. (That is, between your two theories, I think both contribute but it's more so the latter.)
I'm a pretty easily distracted person. I don't use social media at all. Yet I've been "addicted" on some level to this site, to news sites, to browsing Wikipedia, to traditional forums. So have plenty of others.
People don't want to face the fact that humans just really like having a giant source of stuff to entertain ourselves with, and are easily drawn into online arguments. Getting rid of the corporations and such would probably make a better Internet, sure, but it's not going to cure everyone's addiction.
In principle they're comparable. In the real world, no high school kids are going to harm themselves over an argument about Mint versus Ubuntu on a 100,000 subscriber ATmosphere site. It's like comparing the Dominican cigar shop selling hand rolled cigars with Philip Morris. Unedifying.
Teenagers have been bullying each other for literal millennia. Kids got bullied on IRC and chatrooms; they get bullied today on Roblox, on SMS group chats. None of these have engagement algorithms.
Again, the corporations sure aren't helping, but we need to confront the fact that a large chunk of this is human nature. I'd like a better Internet landscape but switching from Facebook to Mastodon or whatever, while a good step, isn't going to cure all ills. A lot of people in these threads act like every Internet toxicity symptom ever arose because of evil corporations.
Facebook targetted teens who posted self deprecating comments for beauty and weight loss products ads.
It was no random that facebook became a hotbed for conspiracy theories, misinformation and lies. That part is result of their own conscious choices. They made it that way, because they wanted it to be that way.
Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side of the politics in maynmar. Its own decisions made it instrumental to the events. The issues were solvable and visible, Facebook was the primary gatekeeper there due to contracts it had, but Facebook refused to do anything even after it was crear what went on.
Fourth option: product becomes less addictive and the algorithms stop optimising on "angry users click more". Less advertising profits, perhaps less engagement but probably still profits on advertising.
Fifth option: don't aim to continually increase profits and instead change the rules of capitalism to be less focused on making "profit at any price" to perhaps a more gentler form. After all, Monopoly(TM) is restarted once one player has all the money, it's about time that we do that in real life too or how many more trillionaires do we need?
So there are also grey choices here and not only b/w.
As someone who does both, it's quite lovely! You might even be happier doing that than whatever it is the modern internet has become.
Here is the order denying Meta's motion to dismiss
https://ia803204.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
I think this is a fun historical example. Ships passing through Denmark needed to pay a tax of 1-2% of the value of their cargo. They self-assessed that value.
The twist that makes it interesting was that the King could choose to purchase any cargo immediately at the reported value. If a ship underreported, they might save on tax, but they risked taking a hefty loss.
I have no idea how effective this was, but it's compelling. I wonder whether great self-regulation might need clever design like that example.
What stops ships from reporting something like "Wheat - 25 guilders per ton" when they're actually carrying diamonds?
It doesn't even solve the "It's hard for the bureaucracy to know how much stuff is worth" problem- The government still needs to know enough to decide whether or not to call BS on "Caribbean Grey Ambergris- 300 guilders per pound"
This system does have the advantage that it allows the government to make small fines without the legal burden of establishing that the merchant was lying, but that's in no way the same as self-regulation.
The cleverness of the idea is it leverages fear to prevent ships from declaring "wheat" for their ship full of diamonds. You can make some sporadic, random inspections, just enough to keep the fear up, instead of having to inspect every single ship.
Basically, for $x amount, a competitor can buy the winning car (or its engine, or similar). Where $x is the amount the group decides should be a reasonable amount to spend on building a car.
A racer is free to spend more, but if they win too much, somebody will write a check and buy the car.
In theory. In reality, plenty of people have the money to spend $x^2 and risk the loss.
Protecting children is a noble goal that I personally agree with, but it's also often used to sane-wash further erosion of privacy.
As has been discussed here and elsewhere, age verification turns out to be the complete loss of Internet anonymity due to its implementation techniques. There are proposed alternative implementations, very conveniently for some, this is not part of the discussion.
This is exactly the time when nerds like us should speak up.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
No doubt that it will be good news to gambling advertisers, but the push for age verification was already underway in 2020, well before government recommended an end to gambling advertising (2023).
It's a neat explanation, so an easy sell, but doesn't match the chronology.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...
I do know that many places in the world were worried about what TikTok and Insta were doing to their kids' minds, prior to that push. However, do you find fault in the Crikey story?
It appears that the AUS domino was the first to fall in the chain after FINCH's major push.
Companies like Facebook and Tiktok are incentivized to behaviorally modify their users in a way that's harmful to society: they make more money the longer everyone in society has their face glued to a phone. They'd be thrilled and printing money as society collapsed into every person staring into a slab of glass 20 plus hours per day.
Tax that time directly so it's no longer profitable to glue everyone to their phone.
There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.
> There's no hard evidence
There are thousands of manchildren living in moms' basements, with corkboards festooned with scraps of photographs that are connected by colored yarn and pushpins, and they would all vehemently argue to the contrary!
The facts are basically: Facebook's own researchers and independent researchers presented real harms caused by Facebook's algorithms, and they fired them, ignored them and took the datasets away and continued doing as they want.
You don't need to go to any conspiracy anything; that just makes the claims sound crazy aby unnecesary ssociation.
Social media has a direct impact on dopamine and uninhibited oversharing.
The mechanism isn’t even ambiguous, which is exactly why there’s a case, about the production of a deliberately addictive substance. The chemicals and effects differ, but it’s deliberate use and production as the same exact means to an end do not.
There’s zero ambiguity here of the alignment on an end goal.
Side note: is META hiring and can you refer me?
Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.
in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them. it is not a conspiracy theory about mindcontrol.
LMAO what are you even talking about? MKULTRA is a historical fact. The CIA even admits it was real. You can't just handwave something away by calling it "discredited".
There have been congressional hearings and documents produced from it. The only reason it's poorly documented is because the CIA illegally destroyed its own documentation. The little documentation we do have was produced after the CIA said it had already destroyed all of its own documentation to prevent its employees from ever complying with congressional subpoena. They have lied at every step, and even if they were telling the truth they would still be violating the law with an aim towards covering it up.
>in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them.
thats my point. For at least a decade they have been doing the same sort of thing MKULTRA was doing. I explicitly said in my first post that there's no hard evidence that there was a relation between the two but the similarity is striking, especially since it is well documented that Facebook regularly colludes with the United States federal government. If you aren't open to even considering that it's not a coincidence then you're either a shill, an LLM, or an idiot.
The feeds are and have been for years highly random (at least one anecdote of two people who were 'married' - relationship status - on FB yet none saw the others' posts)
If you don't go on FB they really don't like it and they spam you to death
Can Zuck meaningfully claim they're not in the business of addiction, whatever else? No. His life philosophy is "dumb fucks"
Edit: Oh, and People You May know. Now everyone can friend you and you have 2000 friends... none of whose posts you'll ever see. And the psychological baggage. Is the cute girl I like looking at my profile and that's why they're on there, or is it shamelessly pulled from geolocation data?
Disclaimer: I do not have a FB account.
This is just people seeing dollar signs asking for handouts. Nothing of an real value to society. Why is it okay for FB to be sued but not say Pokemon? I think Pokemon is way more dangerous, addictive, and is basically gambling with the card packs.
Have some personal responsibility for once.
this is exactly facebook's business model ???
But not all entertainment is made equal, a simple example is single player games and microtransactions based games.
Similarly, social media as we know it abuses reward mechanism specifically to maximise engagement and screen time with complete disregard of the person's well being and proclivity for compulsive behaviour.
> Have some personal responsibility for once.
I am of this same opinion, people need to assume some level of responsibility for them to get better, but the fact is that addiction forces people to make choices they regret later. It robs the person from their individuality.
its probably a bit unrealistic to expect children to "Have some personal responsibility for once." id agree with you if a 50 year old said, "omgolly meta, you used trickery on me."
but if the evidence shows they have specifically targeted children, then i can understand the concerns.
and yes, im aware how dangerous it is to declare "lets protect the children" but we also have to recognize this is a messy situation, and one that needs to be sorted out. i dont pretend to hold the answers, but to hand waive it away as hysteria or whatever is probably not a good solution.
We literally treat minors differently under the law because they are assumed to be incapable of personal responsibility.
As in, the only form of entertainment that society should (or does) offer should be specifically designed to trigger as much addictive behavior as possible?
I can see why a person, looking at our current world, might think that. Hello Dopamine Fracking.
But is that the world we want? It certainly is not the world that existed before modern extractive capitalism started turning to extracting from the people it is supposed to serve.
Fortunately, capitalism is more efficient that state/centralized planning, so capitalism is doing a better job of turning us into their farm animals than lords ever could do for their serfs.
Sure some tech bros won't get their Lambos but I can live with that.
My personal preference would be laws to restrict ad surveillance and laws to mandate third-party interoperability to break that calculus. But absent that, I'll take massive damage awards from the legal system.
[0] Or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or...
This is fraud. Promising something you didn't deliver is fraud
As someone who grew up as OG (original geek), it's now amazing to look around and see that technology seems to be having an ever more negative impact on my everyday life.