Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
reuters.com443 points by bhouston 7 hours ago
443 points by bhouston 7 hours ago
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
The other article says: "OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade" [1]
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.
The changes seem based on age, which just makes it more imperative that phone manufacturers perform even /more/ reliable age verification...
The business model, incentives, and practices that led them down this road? No, those don't need to change.
Have they?
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
Maybe you know different young people now ?
I saw way more smoking 10-20 years ago. All have quit now.
I see a good amount vape but rarely see cigarettes these days
Analog cigarettes! I love how “analog” has become synonymous with everything more manual, natural, even or better.
My favorite is the “acoustic bike” instead of electric bike (the joke comes from guitars, I think)
Vaping is distinctly less harmful than smoking.
I actually do not know if this is true.
Vaping is not healthy but there is a lot less material inhaled. No fine particles which do real damage.
So vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters.
Smoking tobacco is something people have done for centuries. Pretty unlikely that we'd eliminate it in a few decades.
Europeans started smoking tobacco in 1492 and it spread super fast.
It probably can't be eliminated completely, but if they slowly make it illegal for young people to start the habit it can be reduced
smoking tobacco is bad, but smoking cigarettes is much, much worse because of all the extra shit that's added in to make them even more addictive (and more carcinogenic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarette...
If you inhale the smoke, it's quite irrelevant whether smoking an industrial cigarette, pipe or a hand-crafted cigar without additives. You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough. Smoke is always carcinogenic.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
You're not wrong about smoke always being bad--there's a reason American Spirits have to have a disclaimer about "additive-free" not meaning healthier. Tobacco takes up alpha emitters from the soil and leaves them in your body--never good.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
I don't smoke, but when I've talked to smokers a lot of it is about the ritual. Filling the pipe, cutting and smelling the cigar, or removing the cigarette from the pack, tapping it, lighting it up, the taste and smell of the smoke, it's all part of it not just the nicotine.
It’s true and smoking marijuana is arguably as harmful as cigarettes but the pro-weed crowd throws a fit any time anyone points that out.
That’s not true. The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%, not “probably” (somewhere between 15 and 30 times higher risk than a non-smoker).
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
> I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago
What country?
In a lot of the US, smoking sections still existed in restaurants then.
Just checked my home town, some bans were enacted in 2014 and existing restaurants and bars are still grandfathered in!
Interesting point. Clear and visible warnings similar to tabacco and gambling websites (at least here in NZ) would be great. A clear and explicit call out of the dangers and a direct link on how to get help would be a good place to start.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
Somehow I have no faith that these changes will be enforced, or appropriately drawn up by parties who actually have the knowledge to do so.
Yeah, they should at least pay it to the children.
For rich people, fines are just the price of doing things
The US politicians class is corrupt and captured by special interests. These 17B were already as provisions on their balance sheet. They will spend four times this in the next data center....
> META Total Annual Revenue in 2025: $200.97 billion (up from $164.50 billion in 2024).
They literally don’t care.
And while they paid a reasonable amount of tax in 2025, that was a one off. They normally pay 3-5%.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
When the threat of winning in court is reduced, you get weaker settlements. These two factors are directly related to one another.
May depend on whether their profits come from less than or more than 25% of 'children-harming'.
Yeah but politicians get to claim this is a win. Let's be honest, that's the real reason the prosecution went for a deal this small.
Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)
And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
Maybe, but I'm not sure how that might work. Meta was being sued by states in federal court, here--not the federal government. Is the theory that they would have paid more in penalties had not the White House pressured the federal court in Oakland (who aren't necessarily nominated by/beholden to Trump) to reject bigger demands from the plaintiffs? Or is the theory that the White House influenced the plaintiffs' (states) lawyers to offer/accept smaller settlements than they would have otherwise? Or that the White House pressured Meta to accept a larger settlement when they ordinarily would have fought more (in which case, I don't understand what Meta gets: they lose this case and then you theorize they'll help manipulate elections in favor of the group that forced the loss)?
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just another anti-Trump conspiracy theory?
> Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands...and your plan is to blackmail this person? [pauses, smiles] Good luck.
I dunno, I kinda feel they have to pay the price for governments not having applicable regulations on this kinda stuff.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
You can't use the word "reasonable" when dealing with companies with more power than most governments
Yeah, exactly.
Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?
So what should the law be? Don't be negligent? Don't be reckless? It already functions that way. Do we need to have statutes expressly dictating what people are allowed to do?
>Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children who use Facebook and Instagram, and enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content
So meta won.
The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
"I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how"
Wait...I'm in tech and I'm begging you to share how. Is there a way on iOS?
I've mostly just stopped using these apps.
As someone who doesn't use social media please explain. Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them? Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.
The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
> The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
>> Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
I'd argue it isn't similar in an important way, people cannot opt to not eat entirely. Overeaters must eat. People who can't control themselves with social media do not need to use them at all.
You're making an argument about self-control in a conversation that is explicitly about factors other than self-control.
>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them?
Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).
Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.
But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.
And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)
And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.
And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.
And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch
People who don't use social media to catch up with distant friends and family just ... phone or video call.
No addiction, no infinite scroll, no exhaustion, no casino-like mechanics, no endorphins, no political rage, no AI companions, no random posts, no influencers.
Or e-mail, or chat in a video game, or a shared photo album, or blogs, or so many other things that the Internet still makes quite easy.
HN is also social media :)
but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...
also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.
and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)
the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...
HN is social media only in strictly technical sense of the term.
HN isn't optimized daily for engagement like FB and IG are. There isn't a single image, or video on website. Ads (for YC companies) sometimes show up and are rare. Color scheme-wise it is very plain (and should stay like that). HN is not hidden behind login wall. It is not tracking you. You can access HN fully anonymously, and create throwaway accounts for posting.
there's no need to "optimize" it already has the basic loop. stochastic reward (interesting news, interesting comments/replies), gamification (points go up!), and no real social interaction. (no connection, some performative elements, ie. comments are written not just to one known person or a small group of people you know.)
the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.
HN isn't social media at all because it doesn't have a social graph (you can't follow people here).
Sure you can. Click a user, see their comments, submissions.
I would say hn is in a group of systems that include Facebook.
It's true that contemporary commercial social media tends to be associated with these big corporate services that have already been thoroughly enshittified.
But they didn't start out that way - and alternatives are possible and desirable (hn, lobste.rs, many niche forums, IRC channels, discord servers[d] etc are proofs by example).
Maybe a loose definition would be communication system that leverage the network effect?
And good social media aligns with the end-user, and bad aligns with user-hostile forces?
[d]: (I don't particularly like discord, but it is much closer to a tool that does what I want: connect with people - than something like tick-tock or Facebook as it exists today)
I beleive I deleted facebook in 2013ish.
If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.
For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.
I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local <whatever> only posts updates on <app> so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO. I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.
Facebook is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible. It's not just FOMO, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
I deactivated Instagram about 6 months ago and while there are definitely benefits I also miss out on a lot of local events and updates. It can be a useful tool if done right.
That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.
Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008
You fall out of society, basically. In my circles, most people expect everyone our age to have Instagram, even though it's been blocked by the government since 2022.
As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.
In some countries there is no alternative. News, events and many businesses only publish on social media
Yeah, I currently live in one of those countries where businesses only post on facebook. I do fine without it. If I need something I google it and it shows up on google maps. I only see what I want to see instead of being inundated with unwanted ads from irrelevant businesses.
it may be possible for some people, I don't know.
does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.
so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.
that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.
Nope.
in more detail: Largely no.
Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.
This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.
The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.
A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.
It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.
Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.
Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.
Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.
> This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.
They do not want to give you the best digital experience you can have, they want to give you the most addictive and exploitative digital experience they can legally get away with because they value the money that brings in more than they value anything else. They'll be content to see you hurt or killed if it makes them more money. They've knowingly been hurting and killing people, including children, for money. Meta, and the corporations like it, have leveraged all of their vast resources against the average person and the average person is always going to lose in that situation.
Yup - “best”.
As in an experience so tuned to our hind brains that we are enraptured, past our ability to be concerned or switch off.
I’m being minimal in my invective and generous in my choice of words.
There is no fair fight against a corporation for an individual.
the only thing I'm asking for is better control over my cigarettes. Let me remove all the carcinogens, addictive substances and dont let me inhale things that are hazardous for my health. And do this by default on all cigarettes!
> The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media
Filter-tipped instead of unfiltered cigarettes basically.
"So meta won."
Unless we make sure in print to specify "Meta, the company found to have harmed children, …".
Facebook has a "feeds" (or something like that) view, that is exactly your subscriptions in chronological order.
As for restricting nighttime usage and imposing daily limits, somehow my mom managed to do that (for video games) without any corporate features in the 90s, while being a single working mother. One time when I was particularly uncooperative she just went to the electrical panel and shut off the power to my room. That worked like a charm. Today, there are all kinds of parental control features instead.
However, how can you expect people to do parenting, when grown adults are apparently not even capable of basic self-regulation?
All the recent evidence (https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5736553/fast-food-scree...) is that people who are best at self-regulation don't do it by surrounding themselves with tempting things and will-powering themselves not to indulge in them, they do it by changing their environment so the tempting things aren't an option. They're changing the environment via the courts and the ballot box. The people with no self-regulation are the ones complaining about the possibility of having their dopamine toys taken away.
It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.
The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.
I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.
What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".
I think you are conflating "the best data we have" with "sufficient data to prove something".
I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.
It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.
So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom". Also screw social media, it's bloat on society.
Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.
This is completely different to my experience and my reading of the research. Please link me to any of this research you are talking about.
Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...
I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.
Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.
I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.
I know that it's hurting me. Hard to imagine that children are any less affected by it.
Society is not some science experiment that you can run for 20 years and hit the reset button.
I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.
If you're on Android, install F-Droid and get one of the apps there that let you watch Youtube. No ads[1] and you can disable shorts.
[1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.
For just the ads, there's also YouTube premium.
If I pay for a streaming service, I'll compare it with other paid streaming services.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
I found a good solution. In the YouTube settings you can turn off your watch history. It’ll want you that your recommendations will not be as good. You can watch a YouTube short, but when you try to scroll to the next one, it’ll tell you that there is no next video because watch history is not enabled.
The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
You need 10 million valid Shorts views just to get monetized. That's just shows how little it's worth compared to how addictive it is.
Oh, for sure. I have to actively prevent myself from opening one cuz once I pop I really just can't stop.
Exactly. And also a way to opt-out of the comment section. It's hard for me to resist looking at the comments, and sometimes commenting.
I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of
Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
Delete your HN!
Absolutely! I had to sign out from YouTube on mobile (I was only using YouTube via browser anyway, not the app) to reduce the time I spent watching them. After signing out the shorts are so random I lost the interest in them.
I use brave browser on iOS which has a feature to block YouTube shorts. It’s clearly a cat and mouse as YouTube keeps changing the selector but works 95% of the time
Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.
>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
I don't think it's the same. People usually don't see their "relationship" with celebrities as peer-to-peer. They either look up or look down on them (i.e., idolize or hate). So the attention you get from fans as a celebrity is actually a lot more meaningful. People go to great lengths to tell you about the impact you had on their life and they don't forget you easily. The scale makes it awkward, but the emotions are real.
On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.
I always thought fandom was '3rd party.' Like, you have an actor in a high-exposure job, but the more the middleware companies boost the allure of any arbitrary celebrity, the more money they'll make. The actor may address 'the people at large' during press events, but by-and-large, don't really interface with fans all that much.
> We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.
Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. > [...] > Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
>I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
I never said that it wasn't reprehensible.
It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Social media is manipulation. Period.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put
Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.
There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.
Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.
This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”. And I personally find it to be a very lame excuse.
Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.
>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
The people building the app didn’t know any better either.
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
As someone who graduated high school just before Facebook became a thing: it's always been like this. For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram just meant you could now seek affirmation from a larger community than your local community.
While there's definitely some harm with social media (comparing yourself to a perfectly curated profile) there's also plenty of benefits (it's democratized advertising, news, made it easier for small businesses to reach customers, etc...).
when florida banned phones from schools, a gold-standard causation study found a benefit of 0.9 percentiles on standardized tests between students who were under the ban and those who could use phones freely. this is about the same impact as studying for a standardized test for 1 hour.
we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
There are of course bigger threats, but have you ever talked to one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone? My nephew is one. He has the thousand yard stare, can barely have a conversation, and has no ability to do anything off his phone. Of course, it's not everyone, but the effects of phone use are beyond obvious and clearly destructive.
> one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone?
kids today..
"of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable" - Plato
I remember being a zombie nephew, although back in those days it was the Game Boy that purportedly fried my brain. (It was entirely normal, of course, for the uncle who told me that to then leave the conversation and retreat to his armchair for his daily 3 hours of baseball watching; that's sports, you can't fry your brain with sports!)
Obviously it's not healthy to plop down in front of a TV for hours ever day. The science behind what social media is doing to young brains is very real, and to compare it to gameboy is arguing in bad faith.
personally i reject any frame of mind that makes stubborn, labeled generalizations about kids based on one or a handful of interactions. the people who conduct their business this way: they are always projecting.
Meta is capitalism. You're talking about capitalism.
Capitalism forces parents to let their kids use their phones and social media all day?
Hm, odd. I didn't know parents didn't have authority or agency. Good to know.
The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
Two hours is one hour too long if you ask me.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
Adults can’t decide for themselves?
There isn't some magical switch that's flipped on your 18th birthday where you suddenly be pragmatic and make rational decisions. Even into your 20s, your brain is still developing. My mother is in her 60s and addicted to facebook and tiktok. It takes significant willpower to overcome addictions for most people. The brain of an 18 year old addicted to social media is mashing the "do the feel good thing" button just the same as a 17 year old.
Seing how many adults have gambling addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, food addiction, and social media addiction, I will say, not so much?
You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already restricts what adults do on their phones. You can't buy drugs or look at CSAM. You can't use your phone while driving or operating dangerous machinery. You can't install apps which facilitate piracy. You can't wipe your phone when the state lawfully requests it from you. The list goes on.
>You can't install apps which facilitate piracy.
Initially read this as "can't install apps which facilitate privacy."
And that was before I got to your next sentence . . .
Are you saying that because laws exist, and it’s illegal to break the law while using your phone, that is therefore justification for making it illegal to scroll on social media for longer than an hour each day?
I didn't make that argument. I responded to the statement:
> You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already does that.
You know what point I was making, why are you being pedantic? What are you bringing to this conversation?
> You know what point I was making
Try being as generous as you demand of others