Platform Over Function
A couple decades after its launch, Facebook has been held accountable by juries for its addictive and otherwise damaging qualities. “A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta exposed minors to harmful content, including online solicitation, sexually explicit content and human trafficking under consumer-protection laws. Within 24 hours, a Los Angeles jury issued a verdict in a similar case, saying Meta and YouTube contributed to mental-health issues of a 20-year-old woman, Kaley G.M., because of the addictive nature of its products.” What is different about these cases is that instead of targeting the content on these sites which has been protected by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, plaintiffs went after the actual design of the products themselves. The damages hardly amount to a rounding error for a company like Meta, but the success of the new legal strategy will undoubtedly lead to a slew of new cases, some of which are already in progress, leading many to ask the question posed by the WSJ (Gift Article): Do Back-to-Back Courtroom Losses Herald Meta’s ‘Big Tobacco’ Moment?
+ Regardless of where you come down on the merits of these particular cases, or whether you think social media product designs can legitimately be distinguished from speech, there’s no doubt that these sites and apps are designed to use every trick and tech to compete with equally well-armed competitors to capture and hold as much of your attention (and often mis-informed outrage) as possible. While the old-school sites like Facebook have evolved into corporations that are willing to deploy addictive products because share price trumps the public good, newer products like the prediction markets have been quite intentionally built from the ground up to use every technique from Vegas to Silicon Valley to get you hooked. However these cases proceed, it’s hard not to think that what’s being fought out in courtrooms is actually yesterday’s battle, since users are already shifting their attention to artificial intelligence — and with the size of the bets corporations, investors, big banks, and others are making on this next big thing, the pressure to addict you (and the tech to do so) is more powerful than it’s ever been. Is this big tech’s tobacco moment? It may not matter. Big tech has already rolled up smokes that are way stronger, and we’re all lining up to take a puff.
+ NYT (Gift Article): What to Know About the Social Media Addiction Trials.
+ Om Malik on the political forces driving the cases, and what they might mean in terms of actual change. Meta’s May Day. “Underneath the political theater, the structural demands are real. And if a judge grants even a portion of them, they could change daily life for two billion people.” (Give or take a couple billion, that’s exactly what I feel I’ve done with NextDraft…)
