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I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
[0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
Per the article:
> Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settle...
> The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
As far as I know neither Tiktok or YT have contributed to a genocide[0] or sold their user's data for political propaganda purposes[1], so at least there's that [0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.
... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...
> The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?
In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:
> [intent to] addict young users
We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.
Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.
If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.
They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.
I feel like everyone implicitly knows the algorithm is designed to be addictive. Its like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that. Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.
Alcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.
Question is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.