33 AGs sue Meta for 'exploitative and harmful acts' against American children Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is facing another multi-state lawsuit, this time from 33 attorneys general who say the site knowingly - and by design - harms the mental wellbeing of children and teenagers. We'd argue it harms the mental wellbeing of adults too, but let's take what we can get. According to the massive 233-page lawsuit …
What is the betting that Meta will plead the constitutional right to free speech on most of this?
Sadly we have been harming children for ages with air pollution, discrimination and abuse (I doubt that 'Child X' who was knocked off his bike by a police van for playing with a brightly coloured toy water-pistol, will be having a good night's sleep any time soon*). There may be some actual breaches of the law, but sadly making something psychologically addictive is going to be very difficult to prove as there are the precedents of 'cliff-hanger' serialisations in magazines, on the radio and on TV, all designed to get you to tune in same time, same station next day / week etc. And as for sugary / salty / fatty food, most 'western' countries are full of it: chocolates, burgers, ice cream etc.
It will be interesting to see if this ever gets anywhere close to a hearing in court.
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/19/met-rammed-boy-13-playing-with-water-pistol-off-bike-and-pointed-guns-at-him
Everything they say Instagram does, news programmes do in abundance. They depress people daily with endless misery, war, suffering and cruelty and keep them hooked with breaking news apps and the promise of ephemeral fame on phone ins, not just on radio but on BBC TV now too. Oh, and you could say the same about politicians. Nothing has depressed me more over the last ten years than the Conservative party, its policies and the consequences of those policies. Hoping for a happy ending at the election, watching them get comprehensively wiped out at the polls.
Ironically, the one thing online that makes people happy, at scale, on a regular basis - adult websites with free content - politicians want to ban or restrict.
It's a false equivalence. News programmes do try to draw you in, but it's not even in the same ballpark. Instagram, et al. have their algorithms finely tuned to keep you scrolling for hours and show you personally what they think will keep you on the site. The news is broadcast (same for everyone) and is just not the same. You've got the ones "doing it in abundance" the wrong way round.
Not that I don't have my problems with the BBC, but the pattern is currently people are tuning OUT of the BBC and broadcast TV and are switching ON to FB / Insta / TikTok / YouTube / etc.
How about parental responsibility, if you give your kid a smartphone, full access to apps, and unrestricted internet access and zero education on the darker things they might find , you're to blame.
If they're getting addicted and depressed, take it away. Oh sure they'll use their friends to access it, but that's still far less than they would otherwise.
Come off it.
Most parents just aren't tech savvy enough to be able to understand what they have put into their kids hands.
I, myself am struggling to limit my children's screen time (two of them are adult children). It's a daily battle. And we talk about it A LOT. And they all agree it's a problem. And promise to limit. And then slip back into it again. Many adults I know too.
Don't blame the parents. They might take some of the responsibility, but it's the tech companies who have deliberately designed these things to be knowingly addictive, and knowingly damage the mental health of children (and adults).
I'm not sure what the solution is though. Massive fines will just be part of the cost of doing business. They need to put in limits perhaps. But the turkeys aren't going to vote for Christmas, are they?
I don't believe that only children get harmed by this. I'm not even certain that it's mostly children that get harmed by this. I see plenty of adults who have a very poor relationship with social media, and most of them had no Internet or smartphones while growing up.
I also don't believe that this is the right solution. The charges are generic and ambiguous, and I doubt they'll stick. Any legislation that would make them stick would also most likely damage free speech in an unacceptable fashion.
I don't know what a solution could be, or even whether it exists. Ultimately, I hope that society adapts to a point where this is a problem, but not so much of a problem.
So many adults are dain bramaged by Facebook (Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Fox News, Daily Mail, etc) - you can easily tell the ones who use them as their primary sources of information if you have to talk to them, as their mouth gapes repeatedly like a goldfish and what comes out is 'HURRR derp hurrr durrrrr barghle warrrgharble'.
However, the law (in the UK, US, and many other places), generally has a fiction that an adult is well educated, sound of mind, and is perfectly informed and can make all the right decisions even though the companies have a million times more specific relevant info and the rich have armies of analysts and accountants. Because the law is for the rich, by the rich, of the rich. So if you want to go after some bad guys you have to go after them for their crimes against 'the chiiiillldruns!' because there are actually laws against that.
Facebook, though, has been very obviously malicious for two decades to anyone who was paying attention. The real question is what took them so long?
....this smacks of yet another Satanic Panic / Parental Advisory / Blame anything else.
The real issue is you have a social culture that ACTIVELY encourages greed and violence.
When the kids are surrounded by negative news, programming and print media that CONSTANTLY says in order to be happy you need to be rich, no matter who you shit on to get there, is it any wonder the kids (and adults) left behind are depressed. Throw in the huge cultural , economic and political polarisation that is getting worse year on year and you have all the makings of a broken society
Want to be rich?
Work 100 hour week and throw morals out the window.
Want to get the perfect partner?
Get Botox, your teeth whitened and straightened, go to the gym for 8 hours a day and don't forget the spray tan.
Which way do you think? You can only think OUR way. Everything else is wrong.
My advice I give to my kids (it took me almost 50 years to find this out).
If you want to be happy, do what you want, not what others expect. Be who you want to be, not the person others want you to be. You can be rich, but what good is being rich if you hate yourself and everyone around you.
A good parent would allow a kid eat junk food a little, but the rest would be high quality meals.
Social media must be obliged to serve high quality educational content exponentially the more time a user spends online. A little popular garbage content a day is OK, but then good content frequency will increase.
The goal is to improve society. Smarter kids means more competitive economy later on. As for content curation, this can be semi-automated with "IQ tests" and recommendation systems. "Shaking ass" videos probably correlate with bad content, so anti-recommendations should apply, the same way you would not allow your kids around other bad kids. Well, this content approach should also apply to adult users, the same way gov-funded TV stations work. But to avoid ideological issues educational recommendations should not touch political and sensitive topics. Social media are too powerful to be left to own devices. Free speech will not suffer, as content will be still available, but not as actively promoted or easily manipulated by bad actors.
"A good parent would allow a kid eat junk food a little, but the rest would be high quality meals."
How do you expect that to happen when the vast majority of adults/parents -- at least in the US -- were raised similarly (not to the same extreme, but in the same vein) and are addicted themselves? Not many can cook "high quality meals" for themselves and wouldn't even like the taste if they tried.
Also, do we need "sin taxes" for unhealthy food to balance the costs? Right now, it's so much cheaper to hit the drive-thru or carry-out pizza rather than go to even the cheapest grocery store to get ingredients for a full meal of salad and main course (entree plus sides), and "buying local" from smaller retailers -- with higher quality foods -- costs even more.
Those with the excess wealth (not income*) can afford a private chef/nutritionist that handles it all for them, and have for generations, avoiding the fast food addiction. (* Those with high income but not generational wealth often sacrifice personal health such as nutrition in the pursuit of said income.)
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