Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

Core to all of this is what's colloquially become known as The Algorithm. Google in particular has sucessfully propagandized this idea that The Algorithm is a neutral black box over which we have no influence (for search). But every feature and behavior of any kind of recommendation or ranking or news feed algorithm is the result of a human intentionally or negligently creating that behavior.

So one thing most of us here should be aware of is to get more distribution for a post or a video or whatever is through engagement. That is likes, comments, shares, reposts, quotes and so on. All these companies measure those and optimize for engagement.

That sounds neutral and possibly harmless but it's not and I think it's foreseeably not harmless and no doubt there's evidence along the way to demonstrate that harm.

We've seen this with some very harmful ideas that get a lot of traction online. Conspiracy theories, antivaxxer nonsense, doxxing queer people, swatting, the manosphere and of course eating disorders. ED content has a long history on the Internet and you'll find pro-ana or "thinspiration" sites and forums going back to the 1990s.

So I think social media sites are going to have three huge problems going forward:

1. That they knowingly had minors (and children under 13, which matters for COPPA) on their platforms and they profited from that by knowingly or negligently selling those audiences to advertisers;

2. They knew they had harmful content on their platforms but hid Section 230 in particular as simply being the host for third-party content. I believe that shield is going to fail; and

3. They knowingly or negligently pushed that content to children to increase overall engagement.

One clue to all this is you see Mark Zuckerberg who wants to push age verification into the OS. Isn't that weird? The one company that doesn't have an OS thinks the OS should handle that or, more specifically, should be liable for age verification? That's so strange.

In an era where we have LLMs (and the systems that came before) that can analyze posted content (including video) and derive features about that content you don't get to plead ignorance or even user preference. These companies will be held liable for the harm caused by content they distribute.

That's why we call it addiction when folks struggle with stopping even though they can see the harm in their own actions.

There are laws enabling the judiciary to operate as it has to give plaintiffs a platform in the first place, in the absence of specific laws because legislative bodies are slow to adopt new laws for various excuses.

For example; not hard to pay off a handful of legislators to vote no. Then what? People just suck up living at the mercy of the rich?

Judiciary has leeway to allow such cases and outcomes to bubble up useful context for changes to law. Longstanding precedent and in some cases is codified in law itself.

The lack of a specific legal language banning social media actions is also irrelevant because of similarities to other situations that are enshrined in law. That human biology is susceptible to psychological manipulation is already well understood. Tiny little difference in legal context does not invalidate known truth of biology.

Society doesn't exist in your head alone and has existed for some time. Much of this is not truly new territory.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

Lots of people can get drunk once a month and suffer or cause no real harm. Some people get drunk everyday which is slightly more harmful.