If Meta loses this trial, Instagram and Facebook could change forever
bbc.com‘By allegedly targeting child users, Meta "chose to exploit" young people in order to hook them on its platforms, so it could grow its user base and expand its business.’
That’s been standard practice for many industries for decades. Fast food, junk food and soft drinks being the most obvious. Tobacco and alcohol products have had to become more covert. And don’t get me started on the porn industry…
I don’t think it is the same.
When I’m scrolling IG, sometimes I see violence, fights, etc. I’m most definitely not someone who likes to watch this stuff, yet I get random reels sometimes showing me this category.
It makes me question what kind of things a 10 year old is encountering.
For fast food, a responsible parent can quite easily control it. So can smoking.
> “…what kind of things a 10 year old is encountering”
10yro doesn’t know their a$$ from their elbow. They go looking for w#atEver’s and once that’s in their feed, there is no reset to that body of preferences.
Side note, I was shocked the other day when one of my Claude sessions brought up context from an unrelated chat.
They scroll right? If IG is showing me real violence on reels, what could they be inadvertently showing to kids?
> That’s been standard practice
It's still really bad and maybe this will start a precedent that can be used to disincentivize this practice more broadly.
Maybe this is the straw that broke the camel's back. It seems like a lot of reforms start by acknowledging basically what you're pointing out here, that something is common practice, but people are finally disgusted enough by it to start trying to do something about it.
Normally people use this kind of comparison as evidence supporting some opinion, but you left that part out. Are you saying "Yes, Facebook is immoral like these other industries"? But then your tone doesn't fit. Or is this intended as a "whataboutism"? But then why would you include examples where regulation is strong?
The big tech should not be allowed to exploit consumers and especially young children. They are the modern day tobacco companies but worse they are exploiting young people even more aggressively than tobacco companies did back in the day. They should be regulated and their power should be taken away.
> prohibit the creation of multiple accounts
I wonder how they are going to enforce this.
I meant, it would be great if this can be enforced without being yet another id verification scheme. ... but I am not optimistic on this one.
They made WhatsApp the barely supervised TikTok/Instagram for children. How is that not child neglect to begin with?
everything "Meta" does these days annoys the crap out of me. I laugh every time they get slapped around.
All we wanted for Facebook was a way to keep up with friends and family, not constant stream of garbage. Instagram was supposed to be about real-life photos and filters, now it's yet another eshitification and heavy handed deployment of AI and an awful Whatsapp clone.
The "think of the children" framing in all these cases troubles me. Adults experience harms from these platforms too.
We see problems with addiction, political influence, extremist rabbit-holes, fraud, and yes, buying tonnes of unnecessary crap because they're basically a non-stop stream of advertising.
Children are certainly particularly vulnerable, but my Dad's social media habits are what really worry me, and the societal implications of nations hooked on rage-bait.
I think it was Kara Swisher and guest who made the observation that the reasons social media as it currently exists may not be long for this world is that part of the reason these lawsuits and laws to restrict access to children are making traction is because adults realize that social media isn’t good for them either. But restricting access for adults is a longer more difficult process for first amendment reasons. The tobacco lawsuits took decades.
a lot of people before llms were already subcontracting their thinking to fb, instagram. with boomers mostly exposed to an echo chamber that reinforced their beliefs on fb, then younger people on insta.
to some people - if they didn't see It on insta / fb then it didn't happen.
with meta now pushing 'a.i' content on both platforms the damage from misinformation, fake products etc is incalculable.
that's without taking the effect on children & young adults - mental health.
It's high time it happened already. I'm so sick of them
the impunity to commit mass crimes against whole populations must end. The fine should be 1¢, legaly required to be paid in cash by the CEO, in person, alone and unacompanied or guarded whatsoever, failure to pay doubles the fine to 2¢, with the same conditions, and doubles again for each and every infraction of any kind in perpetuity with debts transferable to all descision makers, share holders, lenders and insurers. no more mass harms, no more impunity to cause them, no more possibility of profiting by them.