Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"

I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though.

The second one outlined for Meta is:

> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).

This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.

The first one outlined for YouTube is:

> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”

This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:

> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.

This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.

Not only teens but the whole population, from birth till death. The teens are just the easiest and most addicted target group. They don't want yoy to press anything out of their f browser tab.

This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything?

They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.

It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.

Nothing to see here.

The "weird" thing about YouTube Shorts is no matter how many times you hide them (by clicking "Not Interested" or "Show fewer of these", however they label it), YouTube will continue to show them to you in your feed. I've hidden that crap 100 times and no doubt it'll be back soon.

This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here.

That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.

It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.

Meanwhile 2 billion Coca Colas are sold per day. That's over 75 million kgs of sugar/day - no one bats an eye.

Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority.

Social networks is a sugar for minds.

Where are the smoking guns? All I see is normal talk for how to get customers. A smoking gun would be "Teens love posts about X even though we know X is really bad for them. Let's promote lots of X". But I don't see any of that. I just see market research etc.

I could post every quote on the page and respond to it how it's not a smoking gun but not one of them seemed like a smoking gun to me. Anyone care to point to one that seems like a smoking gun to them?

Why Zuckerberg is any better than the jeevacation?

Both cases makes teens as victims, both cases was a great deal for them but only from the first look. Both cases are piramid-like schemes when the victims attract new victims to keep benefitting from the system. Is it just like in alcohol case, when having too many victims justifies a bad spirit as the new norm?

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc

Not just teens, addiction has been weaponized and monetized relentlessly - the whole concept of "whales" is contingent on fostered addiction.

I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.

This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.

By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term.

I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got.

I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc.

If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal.

2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast.

It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.

"make customer come back" - every (good) car dealer

And why not? AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive.

We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive. We seem to be fine with expanding gambling - where I live (not Nevada!) slot machines are everywhere. Nice restaurants even will dedicate corners to slot machines - not just seedy bars. Sports betting apps are all over streaming ads, and their legality is expanding even though when they are legalized in an area the divorce and loan default rates go up measurably.

Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?

The kids are just the latest victim of a long ongoing trend.

The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.

“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years

All of these guys should end up behind bars. To purposefully prey on vulnerable kids like this, it is absolutely disgusting. And here I am as a parent trying to stem the floodgates against people wielding billions of $ and armies of programmers and psychologists to harm my kids. Fuck them. And if you work for them then...

I hope that all the engineers who went along with this are able to sleep well with their stock options.

This reads like an Onion headline.

Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.

They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!

If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.

If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.

I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them.

The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?

These people need to be killed.