Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case
nytimes.com173 points by mrjaeger 2 hours ago
173 points by mrjaeger 2 hours ago
There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?".
Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your product. Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
I also hope the reasons are obvious.
We already have a distinction because it’s been known for decades already that some things are addictive purely through reinforcement psychology and some things lock people into a chemical dependence.
For example see the glossary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
I feel like people use the word “addiction” to refer to both chemical addiction and behavioral addiction, and that people understand that the latter is (usually) far less serious than the former.
I don't think the reasons are obvious. Where do you put gambling on the spectrum?
If something compels behavior vs. behavior remaining a free choice, a liberal society can and should treat it like any other source of compulsion.
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I thought the actual physiological cause of addiction was similar in both nicotine and gambling: you crave the predictable release of dopamine.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
I don’t gamble, but if I did, I am fairly certain it would release little to no dopamine for me, win or lose.
I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.
We already have a category called addictive personality disorder where someone is much more prone to being addicted to pretty much anything.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.
You seem to be differentiating between physical and psychological addiction, and saying that only physical addiction meets the technical definition of addiction?
I’m saying society should tread extremely carefully in attempting to regulate citizens’ potentially psychologically addictive behaviors.
Dark patterns are real. Deceptive advertising is real. So-called prediction markets amount to unregulated gambling on any proposition. Many online businesses are whale hunts and the whales are often addicts.
> I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
Be aware, the vast majority of people who have ever smoked cigarettes occasionally never became addicted. They were not labeled as “smokers”. A non-trivial number of people today continue to smoke cigarettes on occasion. I like to have one on my birthday. Then again, I’m able to eat a chip and not consume the entire bag. I’m not convinced of these social science studies, and when digging into individual studies I’m sure the replication crisis comes into play.
> Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
That is a very strong claim to make when the current scientific consensus strongly disagrees.
How does that work when nicotine products that are every bit as addictive as tobacco exist, maybe you're just not aware of them? Sitting here with non tobacco snus (Swedish nicotine pouch) under my top lip, something I have been utterly unable to quit. I believe "nicotine free" tobacco would be completely non addictive.
At least even money that an appellate court throws this verdict out entirely. Reminder that the US is the only developed country that uses juries for civil trials- everywhere else, complex issues of business litigation are generally left to a panel of judges. It's not that hard to rile up a bunch of randomly impaneled jurors against Big Bad Corporation. The US is kind of infamous for its very large, very unpredictable civil verdicts. There's an incredibly long history of juries racking up shockingly large verdicts against companies, only for an appellate court to throw the whole case out as unreasonable. Not even close to the final word in the American judicial system.
Edit to include: I mean this is coming the same day as the Supreme Court throwing out the piracy case against Cox Communications 9-0. Remember that this case originated with $1 billion dollar jury verdict against them! Was reversed by an appeals court 5 years later and completely invalidated today. Juries should not handle complex civil litigation, I'm sorry
Thanks for this take. Also explains why this did not result in much stock price movement today
Also at least partially explained by being priced in. The trial was known about and given the conditions described in GP it's not surprising that the verdict went this way.
I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create.
If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
This sounds like the original internet.
Before adtech took over.
It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad.
Getting back to community is key.
I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species
Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP.
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;)
(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible
Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't).
The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
Read the book “Careless People” if you have a chance - according to the book, social media companies figured out they have real leverage with politicians since they can influence elections. As a result they are actively pushing for far right candidates to reduce their own taxation and regulation.
I don't think this accelerationism/fascism hobby of many tech bros is going to age well.
This is the kind of stuff that is causing them to push for mandatory identity verification laws. If they are being held liable for the the desires of their users, they're being forced micromanage the affairs of their customers, which preclude anonymous usage.
A good time to (re-)recommend the movie "The Social Dilemma".
Notably a different case from the other one in New Mexico:
Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms
And one with much deeper implications on how they operate. It's easy for Meta to just hire more moderators or treat reports of exploitation with higher priority; if this verdict stands, I think they have no realistic choice but to abandon usage targets.
Realistically they will hire expensive lawyers, pay out hundreds of millions to billions in settlements, fire lots of people (workforce is predominantly American), etc.
Even if they do what you're saying, lots of people who've used any Meta property in the last 15 years has a potentially viable case, and no future work can swat those away
I believe social media is on a collision course with an iceberg called Section 230.
Broadly speaking, Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms. A platform is like Geocities (back in the day) where the platform provider isn't liable for the content as long as they staisfy certain requirements about havaing processes for taking down content when required. A bit like the Cox decision today, you're broadly not responsible for the actions of people using your service unless your service is explicitly designed for such things.
A publisher (in the Section 230 sense) is like any media outlet. The publisher is liable for their content but they can say what they want, basically. It's why publishers tend to have strict processes around not making defamatory or false statements, etc.
I believe that any site that uses an algorithmic news feed is, legally speaking, a publisher acting like a platform.
Example: let's just say that you, as Twitter, FB, IG or Youtube were suddenly pro-Russian in the Ukraine conflict. You change your algorithm to surface and distribute pro-Russian content and suppress pro-Ukraine content. Or you're pro-Ukrainian and you do the reverse.
How is this different from being a publisher? IMHO it isn't. You've designed your algorithm knowingly to produce a certain result.
I believe that all these platforms will end up being treated like publishers for this reason.
So, with today's ruling about platforms creating addiction, (IMHO) it's no different to surfacing content. You are choosing content to produce a certain outcome. Intentionally getting someone addicted is funtionally no different to changing their views on something.
I actually blame Google for all this because they very successfully sold the idea that "the algorithm" ranks search results like it's some neutral black box but every behavior by an algorithm represents a choice made by humans who created that algorithm.
Huge if upheld. This was the bellwether case for thousands of other similar cases.
Will they also find liable all the companies that produce addictive food by injecting sugar into everything?
What about the "infinite" broadcasts found on all television channels?
This is ridiculous and pathetic.
In other countries that's the case so I don't know why it shouldn't be applicable in the US?
People provide proof that other companies apply punitive damages to food companies knowinly adding sugar to food
"Libertarian demands companies have unlimited freedom until a corporation with unlimited freedom repeatedly eats their face with no consequences, wonders why the face eating leopards they voted for are actually allowed"
I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc.
Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of profit compared to what they provide to the average person that makes people squirm.
But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? It's like saying cable television is responsible for people who binge watch TV.
It's hard to square this circle while sports gambling apps and Polymarket / Kalshi are tearing through the landscape right now with no real pushback
>But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction?
Yes? Is there an algorithm or not?