13 ms·

Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"

297 points by Shamar 8mo ago

Shamar 8mo ago
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
- mahirsaid 8mo ago
  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.
  - idle_zealot 8mo ago
    Anyone paying attention knew. A smoking gun means that legal action is possible. Or it would be in a better time.
    - lostlogin 8mo ago
      It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.
      - jmcgough 8mo ago
        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.
      - ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
        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.
        mahirsaid 8mo ago
        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.
      - idle_zealot 8mo ago
        Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.
    - mahirsaid 8mo ago
      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.
- hansvm 8mo ago
  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?
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    Because the product is made to appeal to that particular demographic. The data doesn't really matter if you have that kind of reach.
  - iwontberude 8mo ago
    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.
  - worik 8mo ago
    > At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data I guess things are different at Google now.
sagacity 8mo ago
It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.
- idontwantthis 8mo ago
  That’s pretty much the whole purpose of government and if it isn’t doing that then it has abdicated its primary responsibility.
  - akramachamarei 8mo ago
    I think many people would disagree with you that the primary responsibility of government is to protect people from themselves.
    - idontwantthis 8mo ago
      I’m talking about protecting people from evil actors with immense power to do harm.
      - akramachamarei 8mo ago
        I don't think so. What you're saying is that kids (and maybe adults) don't have enough agency over their own usage of social media; that these social media are so addicting and harmful that we cannot trust users (in concert with their parents, teachers, etc.) not to harm themselves with them, and that we must construct government apparatus to protect them.
        idontwantthis 8mo ago
        Yes
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  American tech corps act like cigarette companies but we're still at the point where banning them for kids is considered weird, fringe and even dangerous. Crazy.
miltonlost 8mo ago
I hope that all the engineers who went along with this are able to sleep well with their stock options.
sharts 8mo ago
This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything? 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.
- worik 8mo ago
  > 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. Probably, not definitely It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    > It would be possible to put the executives in jail. In what universe would this be possible?
    - bradlys 8mo ago
      In the world where Epstein killed himself. What a world that must be.
    - expedition32 8mo ago
      China? Say what you will about the CCP they have the balls to jail and execute anyone who is perceived to stand in their way. Kids spending too much time on TikTok and not doing homework is a danger to the mission of making China number one.
  - NickC25 8mo ago
    Possibly, yes, but those executives have enough money to cut a deal to not only stay out of jail, but to also fund the re-election campaign for the DA + prosecution team, and to also give a job to the prosecutor's cousin, sibling, and/or in-law.
mikkupikku 8mo ago
I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.
- jmusall 8mo ago
  I think the possibility of banning certain sites at least for minors is being discussed, after Australia set the precedent. But this of course has downsides, too, as some form of verification has to be implemented, that would almost certainly reduce anonymity and carry risks to personal data protection. A complete ban is unrealistic since people actually like to use these platforms. Plus, it would certainly entail massive political repercussions from the US government. This is already happening when US American companies are simply fined in the EU.
  - reorder9695 8mo ago
    Does that outweigh the loss of privacy involved? I really don't think it does personally, I should not have to show anyone ID to have an Instagram account, privacy and anonymity is a feature not a bug.
    - dylan604 8mo ago
      To me, the claim of privacy is the wrong concept. Anonymous would be a better description. People are posting things on a public website to be viewed by the public.
    - mikkupikku 8mo ago
      The privacy issue is one of the reasons I favor a total ban.
- integralid 8mo ago
  The idea of banning meta or Google is indeed not serious. What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive. Admittedly there's nobody doing that in Europe seriously yet, but that's because the current unhinged head of American state has meltdown every time American bigtech get a wrist slap.
shaftway 8mo ago
I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though. 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.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  No, it sounds like youtube being fully aware of the consequences of their offering but couched in terms that allows them to pretend they were not. 'could' indeed.
- ares623 8mo ago
  Are they taking actual steps though? Or was that letting a team do the work to make them feel better but never actually implementing it.
- iwontberude 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- micromacrofoot 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - rafram 8mo ago
    No, they actually added a bedtime reminder feature for all users that they couldn't verify to be adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1pmcr04/what_the_hell_is_up_with_youtube_trying_to_make/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1pmcr04/what_the_h...
jacquesm 8mo ago
All of these guys should end up behind bars. To purposefully prey on vulnerable kids like this, it is absolutely disgusting. And here I am as a parent trying to stem the floodgates against people wielding billions of $ and armies of programmers and psychologists to harm my kids. Fuck them. And if you work for them then...
betaby 8mo ago
Meanwhile 2 billion Coca Colas are sold per day. That's over 75 million kgs of sugar/day - no one bats an eye. Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority. Social networks is a sugar for minds.
- shimman 8mo ago
  You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said that children needed better food and half the country lost their collective minds. Hard to do anything when corporations control what most legislation is passed.
  - betaby 8mo ago
    > You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said 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?
    - reaperducer 8mo ago
      The way I read it, he takes issue with your assertion that "nobody bats an eye" at sugar in Coke. 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.
      - betaby 8mo ago
        > you may not actually have first-hand experience Sigh ( in canadian )
        reaperducer 8mo ago
        Thank you for proving my point. Unless Obama was also president of Canada. I may have missed that.
RajT88 8mo ago
And why not? 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. 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.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  > And why not? 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.
  - RajT88 8mo ago
    My exact point. Our current moment seems to be us being happy to expand societal harms for whatever reason. I'd hazard a guess it's our political system getting more and more susceptible to lobbying money.
- draw_down 8mo ago
  [dead]
- michaelt 8mo ago
  > Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else? I’m pretty sure we do, in fact, ban under 18s from tobacco, alcohol, and real-money gambling.
  - sidrag22 8mo ago
    > real-money gambling this is doing a lot of heavy lifting for how loose we have become with under 18 questionable products.
jackdoe 8mo ago
Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc
- guerrilla 8mo ago
  Awesome song. Gives me chills. Wish I believed in a just God like that.
  - jackdoe 8mo ago
    you are made either of reason or of faith, but the choice what you are made of you can not make nor with reason nor with faith reason can not choose reason, and faith can not choose faith
skirge 8mo ago
"make customer come back" - every (good) car dealer
dxuh 8mo ago
I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them. 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?
benoau 8mo ago
Not just teens, addiction has been weaponized and monetized relentlessly - the whole concept of "whales" is contingent on fostered addiction.
pembrook 8mo ago
This reads like an Onion headline. 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.
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - pembrook 8mo ago
    Social media is a marketplace business. Both parties are your customer.
    - AlexandrB 8mo ago
      Only one party is paying anything.
socalgal2 8mo ago
Where are the smoking guns? All I see is normal talk for how to get customers. A smoking gun would be "Teens love posts about X even though we know X is really bad for them. Let's promote lots of X". But I don't see any of that. I just see market research etc. 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?
- rustystump 8mo ago
  We know teens love endless feeds but we know endless feeds is bad for them so we give them endless feeds…
  - rustystump 8mo ago
    To be clear social media is not as clear cut bad as the endless news/for you feeds which are designed to keep you scrolling vs seeing what friends are doing
- stubish 8mo ago
  A key feature of many platforms being banned is algorithmic feeds. Nobody has to choose what to promote. The algorithms automatically promote what results in the most engagement. The most addictive content ends up being force fed due to natural selection. And platforms choose to keep them, even if they would otherwise avoid the growing age restrictions, because they are profitable.
eimrine 8mo ago
Why Zuckerberg is any better than the jeevacation? 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?
- Throwaway12907 8mo ago
  He's arguably even worse if we consider just how much harm social media has done to teens and kids, but I'm sure the Meta folk here would prefer to believe that that's not the case. "Just following orders", right?
alamortsubite 8mo ago
The "weird" thing about YouTube Shorts is no matter how many times you hide them (by clicking "Not Interested" or "Show fewer of these", however they label it), YouTube will continue to show them to you in your feed. I've hidden that crap 100 times and no doubt it'll be back soon.
- jimvdv 8mo ago
  I started using an extension called “social focus”. Allows me to hide all kinds of distractions on social media and YouTube, can highly recommend
- CamelCaseCondo 8mo ago
  What I find strange about an advertising company’s video service is that when I open my smartphone in a region with a different language my youtube ads also change language.
- phatfish 8mo ago
  Revanced YouTube app, turn off all the crap. Sometimes I open the official YouTube app to check my subscriptions and wonder how anyone uses it. If Google wasn't so ghastly and YouTube Premium had all the features of Revanced I would happily pay for it. 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.
  - irae 8mo ago
    Dumping Gmail is a long process. I've had people sending to my old address for 5 years. Better start sooner than later.
commandlinefan 8mo ago
This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.
- stubish 8mo ago
  This is all relatively new in human timescales. My parents as children saw the start of modern advertising, with ads targeted at them. But they did not see entertainment engineered to sell them product. I think in the 60s you started seeing bands manufactured and aggressively marketed to youths (such as The Monkeys), because companies wanted their share of Beatles money. And 70s, when George Lucas and Kiss realized how much money was in branded merchandise. And late 70s, when He-Man reversed things and media was created specifically to sell merchandise. On human timescales, the results are starting to come in on this experiment.
buckwheatmilk 8mo ago
By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term. 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.
takklob 8mo ago
[flagged]
akramachamarei 8mo ago
This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here. 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.
tsoukase 8mo ago
Not only teens but the whole population, from birth till death. The teens are just the easiest and most addicted target group. They don't want yoy to press anything out of their f browser tab.
indubioprorubik 8mo ago
Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.
1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
Snap and TikTok have been willing to settle 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
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBxDVuD1l-Xqswgpr7XaFA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBxDVuD1l-Xqswgpr7XaFA Example of high quality, low viewcount
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
I think the solution is to ban social media networks from being ad-based and force them to be subscription based. 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)
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
Big Tech of 2020s is like Big Tobacco of the 1990s. May they meet the same fate.
4d4m 8mo ago
Gross, creepy, and sleazy behavior that if any other industry targeting such a vulnerable population would be regulated out of existence

297 points by Shamar 8mo ago

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

mahirsaid 8mo ago
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.
- idle_zealot 8mo ago
  Anyone paying attention knew. A smoking gun means that legal action is possible. Or it would be in a better time.
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.
    - jmcgough 8mo ago
      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.
    - ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
      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.
      - mahirsaid 8mo ago
        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.
    - idle_zealot 8mo ago
      Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.
  - mahirsaid 8mo ago
    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.
hansvm 8mo ago
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?
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  Because the product is made to appeal to that particular demographic. The data doesn't really matter if you have that kind of reach.
- iwontberude 8mo ago
  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.
- worik 8mo ago
  > At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data I guess things are different at Google now.

sagacity 8mo ago

It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.

idontwantthis 8mo ago
That’s pretty much the whole purpose of government and if it isn’t doing that then it has abdicated its primary responsibility.
- akramachamarei 8mo ago
  I think many people would disagree with you that the primary responsibility of government is to protect people from themselves.
  - idontwantthis 8mo ago
    I’m talking about protecting people from evil actors with immense power to do harm.
    - akramachamarei 8mo ago
      I don't think so. What you're saying is that kids (and maybe adults) don't have enough agency over their own usage of social media; that these social media are so addicting and harmful that we cannot trust users (in concert with their parents, teachers, etc.) not to harm themselves with them, and that we must construct government apparatus to protect them.
      - idontwantthis 8mo ago
        Yes
mikkupikku 8mo ago
American tech corps act like cigarette companies but we're still at the point where banning them for kids is considered weird, fringe and even dangerous. Crazy.

miltonlost 8mo ago

I hope that all the engineers who went along with this are able to sleep well with their stock options.

sharts 8mo ago

This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything? 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.

worik 8mo ago
> 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. Probably, not definitely It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  > It would be possible to put the executives in jail. In what universe would this be possible?
  - bradlys 8mo ago
    In the world where Epstein killed himself. What a world that must be.
  - expedition32 8mo ago
    China? Say what you will about the CCP they have the balls to jail and execute anyone who is perceived to stand in their way. Kids spending too much time on TikTok and not doing homework is a danger to the mission of making China number one.
- NickC25 8mo ago
  Possibly, yes, but those executives have enough money to cut a deal to not only stay out of jail, but to also fund the re-election campaign for the DA + prosecution team, and to also give a job to the prosecutor's cousin, sibling, and/or in-law.

mikkupikku 8mo ago

I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.

jmusall 8mo ago
I think the possibility of banning certain sites at least for minors is being discussed, after Australia set the precedent. But this of course has downsides, too, as some form of verification has to be implemented, that would almost certainly reduce anonymity and carry risks to personal data protection. A complete ban is unrealistic since people actually like to use these platforms. Plus, it would certainly entail massive political repercussions from the US government. This is already happening when US American companies are simply fined in the EU.
- reorder9695 8mo ago
  Does that outweigh the loss of privacy involved? I really don't think it does personally, I should not have to show anyone ID to have an Instagram account, privacy and anonymity is a feature not a bug.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    To me, the claim of privacy is the wrong concept. Anonymous would be a better description. People are posting things on a public website to be viewed by the public.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    The privacy issue is one of the reasons I favor a total ban.
integralid 8mo ago
The idea of banning meta or Google is indeed not serious. What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive. Admittedly there's nobody doing that in Europe seriously yet, but that's because the current unhinged head of American state has meltdown every time American bigtech get a wrist slap.

shaftway 8mo ago

I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though. 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.

jacquesm 8mo ago
No, it sounds like youtube being fully aware of the consequences of their offering but couched in terms that allows them to pretend they were not. 'could' indeed.
ares623 8mo ago
Are they taking actual steps though? Or was that letting a team do the work to make them feel better but never actually implementing it.
iwontberude 8mo ago
[flagged]
micromacrofoot 8mo ago
> 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.
- rafram 8mo ago
  No, they actually added a bedtime reminder feature for all users that they couldn't verify to be adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1pmcr04/what_the_hell_is_up_with_youtube_trying_to_make/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1pmcr04/what_the_h...

jacquesm 8mo ago

All of these guys should end up behind bars. To purposefully prey on vulnerable kids like this, it is absolutely disgusting. And here I am as a parent trying to stem the floodgates against people wielding billions of $ and armies of programmers and psychologists to harm my kids. Fuck them. And if you work for them then...

betaby 8mo ago

Meanwhile 2 billion Coca Colas are sold per day. That's over 75 million kgs of sugar/day - no one bats an eye. Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority. Social networks is a sugar for minds.

shimman 8mo ago
You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said that children needed better food and half the country lost their collective minds. Hard to do anything when corporations control what most legislation is passed.
- betaby 8mo ago
  > You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said 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?
  - reaperducer 8mo ago
    The way I read it, he takes issue with your assertion that "nobody bats an eye" at sugar in Coke. 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.
    - betaby 8mo ago
      > you may not actually have first-hand experience Sigh ( in canadian )
      - reaperducer 8mo ago
        Thank you for proving my point. Unless Obama was also president of Canada. I may have missed that.

RajT88 8mo ago

And why not? 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. 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.

jacquesm 8mo ago
> And why not? 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.
- RajT88 8mo ago
  My exact point. Our current moment seems to be us being happy to expand societal harms for whatever reason. I'd hazard a guess it's our political system getting more and more susceptible to lobbying money.
draw_down 8mo ago
[dead]
michaelt 8mo ago
> Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else? I’m pretty sure we do, in fact, ban under 18s from tobacco, alcohol, and real-money gambling.
- sidrag22 8mo ago
  > real-money gambling this is doing a lot of heavy lifting for how loose we have become with under 18 questionable products.

jackdoe 8mo ago

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc

guerrilla 8mo ago
Awesome song. Gives me chills. Wish I believed in a just God like that.
- jackdoe 8mo ago
  you are made either of reason or of faith, but the choice what you are made of you can not make nor with reason nor with faith reason can not choose reason, and faith can not choose faith

skirge 8mo ago

"make customer come back" - every (good) car dealer

dxuh 8mo ago

I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them. 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?

benoau 8mo ago

Not just teens, addiction has been weaponized and monetized relentlessly - the whole concept of "whales" is contingent on fostered addiction.

pembrook 8mo ago

This reads like an Onion headline. 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.

AlexandrB 8mo ago
> 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 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.
- pembrook 8mo ago
  Social media is a marketplace business. Both parties are your customer.
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    Only one party is paying anything.

socalgal2 8mo ago

Where are the smoking guns? All I see is normal talk for how to get customers. A smoking gun would be "Teens love posts about X even though we know X is really bad for them. Let's promote lots of X". But I don't see any of that. I just see market research etc. 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?

rustystump 8mo ago
We know teens love endless feeds but we know endless feeds is bad for them so we give them endless feeds…
- rustystump 8mo ago
  To be clear social media is not as clear cut bad as the endless news/for you feeds which are designed to keep you scrolling vs seeing what friends are doing
stubish 8mo ago
A key feature of many platforms being banned is algorithmic feeds. Nobody has to choose what to promote. The algorithms automatically promote what results in the most engagement. The most addictive content ends up being force fed due to natural selection. And platforms choose to keep them, even if they would otherwise avoid the growing age restrictions, because they are profitable.

eimrine 8mo ago

Why Zuckerberg is any better than the jeevacation? 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?

Throwaway12907 8mo ago
He's arguably even worse if we consider just how much harm social media has done to teens and kids, but I'm sure the Meta folk here would prefer to believe that that's not the case. "Just following orders", right?

alamortsubite 8mo ago

The "weird" thing about YouTube Shorts is no matter how many times you hide them (by clicking "Not Interested" or "Show fewer of these", however they label it), YouTube will continue to show them to you in your feed. I've hidden that crap 100 times and no doubt it'll be back soon.

jimvdv 8mo ago
I started using an extension called “social focus”. Allows me to hide all kinds of distractions on social media and YouTube, can highly recommend
CamelCaseCondo 8mo ago
What I find strange about an advertising company’s video service is that when I open my smartphone in a region with a different language my youtube ads also change language.
phatfish 8mo ago
Revanced YouTube app, turn off all the crap. Sometimes I open the official YouTube app to check my subscriptions and wonder how anyone uses it. If Google wasn't so ghastly and YouTube Premium had all the features of Revanced I would happily pay for it. 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.
- irae 8mo ago
  Dumping Gmail is a long process. I've had people sending to my old address for 5 years. Better start sooner than later.

commandlinefan 8mo ago

This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.

stubish 8mo ago
This is all relatively new in human timescales. My parents as children saw the start of modern advertising, with ads targeted at them. But they did not see entertainment engineered to sell them product. I think in the 60s you started seeing bands manufactured and aggressively marketed to youths (such as The Monkeys), because companies wanted their share of Beatles money. And 70s, when George Lucas and Kiss realized how much money was in branded merchandise. And late 70s, when He-Man reversed things and media was created specifically to sell merchandise. On human timescales, the results are starting to come in on this experiment.

buckwheatmilk 8mo ago

By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term. 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.

takklob 8mo ago

[flagged]

akramachamarei 8mo ago

This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here. 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.

tsoukase 8mo ago

Not only teens but the whole population, from birth till death. The teens are just the easiest and most addicted target group. They don't want yoy to press anything out of their f browser tab.

indubioprorubik 8mo ago

Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.

1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago

Snap and TikTok have been willing to settle 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

1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBxDVuD1l-Xqswgpr7XaFA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBxDVuD1l-Xqswgpr7XaFA Example of high quality, low viewcount

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

I think the solution is to ban social media networks from being ad-based and force them to be subscription based. 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)

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

Big Tech of 2020s is like Big Tobacco of the 1990s. May they meet the same fate.

4d4m 8mo ago

Gross, creepy, and sleazy behavior that if any other industry targeting such a vulnerable population would be regulated out of existence