Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-jury-told-meta-google-addiction.html

by geox • 5 months ago

499 361 5 months ago

Lerc• 5 months ago

"They don't only build apps; they build traps," Lanier said, saying Meta and YouTube pursued "addiction by design," making his arguments using props like a toy Ferrari and a mini slot machine.

These are opening remarks, Perhaps we should wait until they actually present evidence.

6stringmerc• 5 months ago

Yes I’m eagerly awaiting the internal emails acknowledging the priorities of revenue over user health too!

malfist2• 5 months ago

One of the emails released from discovery already was about how Facebook deliberately trying to cultivate FOMO in teens, specifically sending mass notifications during school hours to make people not on facebook feel like they're being left out.

chinathrow• 5 months ago

Have you ever used YT shorts? No further evidence needed, your honor.

nmeofthestate• 5 months ago

My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).

squeefers3• 5 months ago

dont authors of books build traps by that same logic? or do books = good?

bitmasher92• 5 months ago

Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your product, and you focus on a data driven approach to maximize the time spent on the app, then you’ll create something not dissimilar to addiction.

embedding-shape17• 5 months ago

Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.

LiquidSky• 5 months ago

I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place

Money.

post-it2• 5 months ago

Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.

doron2• 5 months ago

in the words of Upton Sinclair "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

This affects the brightest of the bright and the less talented alike.

ecshafer• 5 months ago

Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on.

Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.

Spooky232• 5 months ago

People are motivated by money, and the aspects of the job that aren’t toxic.

komali23• 5 months ago

Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals?

Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare).

I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so).

For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.

jimnotgym7• 5 months ago

It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated.

If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

Intelligent does not mean moral.

Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

At the end of the day these brainiac innovators still just chase money and tail.

DHolzer4• 5 months ago

250k per year would make me reconfigure my internal right/wrong classifier real fast...

Imustaskforhelp2• 5 months ago

Hey emsh! So what I had written was quite long and I have been writing it since your comment was 6 minutes ago.

https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-b...

Essentially a thought dump. Hope you can read it and we can discuss it.

Have a nice day!

jerf3• 5 months ago

We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason.

Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.

ang_cire2• 5 months ago

Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.

anonymars5• 5 months ago

I believe the quote is, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

foobar_______• 5 months ago

Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.

intended3• 5 months ago

Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users.

Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call.

So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave.

The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast.

This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again.

You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.

stronglikedan• 5 months ago

Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.

gadders• 5 months ago

Reminds me of a Judge Dredd story from the 80s.

A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.

testing22321• 5 months ago

Potato chip brands spend enormous sums of money on flavour engineering for that very goal.

maurits• 5 months ago

"the bliss curve" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

incahoots7• 5 months ago

I was thinking Robocop had the relevance factor these days, though I do enjoy the aesthetics of Dredd.

parpfish• 5 months ago

So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads.

I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.

pixl973• 5 months ago

Bullshit Asymmetry.

The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.

mrweasel• 5 months ago

Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.

Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.

anthonypasq• 5 months ago

this is because people do not know how to accurately value their time and attention

myrmidon2• 5 months ago

In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted.

I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).

This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.

It is a difficult problem though.

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.

quotemstr• 5 months ago

"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant.

When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.

Forgeties793• 5 months ago

How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time = more ads = more revenue.

It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that.

Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.

This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.

incahoots7• 5 months ago

I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones.

It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is.

Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them).

Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.

incahoots7• 5 months ago

I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.

socalgal2• 5 months ago

The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.

AstroBen• 5 months ago

You can get an RSS feed here: https://hnrss.github.io/

Seems that might solve your problem

You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date

selfawareMammal• 5 months ago

No shit

DrScientist• 5 months ago

This is why we have juries.

What's amazing here is the Google and Facebook lawyers think they have a chance to persuade members of the public otherwise.

timmg• 5 months ago

It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.

I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.

I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.

ceejayoz7• 5 months ago

I think it's highly unlikely to be 100% innocent.

The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.

embedding-shape17• 5 months ago

And also, does it really matter if it was on purpose or not, the end effect is that same, purposefully designing addictive patterns meant to make people spend more time on it, regardless of the mental health of the person.

I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".

giraffe_lady• 5 months ago

The definition of innocent you two are using here is absurd to me. This is, at best, willful negligence. No one sat down and drew up a plan for the child screen addiction machine, maybe, but they noticed they were making it many times and chose to continue.

pyuser5832• 5 months ago

When you are C-suite, every comment you make is a legal statement. The big concern (usually) is misleading shareholders.

sheikhnbake• 5 months ago

Internal memos have shown that they knew children were becoming addicted and didn't take steps to reduce harm where possible, hence the lawsuit.

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.

jplusequalt• 5 months ago

I'm not sure who should be responsible.

If the lawsuit is about children getting addicted to your apps, who else could be held responsible? The children?

superkuh• 5 months ago

The jury is using words outside of their medical context in situations that do not justify the word then. In fact, most of society seems okay with this gross mis-use of the term to apply to things that don't actually manipulate incentive salience. We're going to end up with authoritarians in control of all 'screens' just because our schools have done such a bad job of explaining neuroscience. If you think handing the federal government control of all screens is a good idea in the USA you really need to look around.

I am not saying that Facebook didn't try. I am just saying that only having access to screens, they would inevitably fail. Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry (at least not any more than a sunset or any perception does). I strongly dislike the company and have personally never created a Facebook account nor used the website.

ceejayoz7• 5 months ago

The jury is using words

Mostly not. That's the lawyers' job. The jury listens.

outside of their medical context

Well, sure. It's a legal context now. The defense get to make the medical argument, if they like. I think it's a losing one.

jimnotgym7• 5 months ago

The jury is using words

How do you know what the jury are saying?

outside of their medical context

That's because medicine doesn’t own the language. People do. If the jury hear words used wrongly then, as speakers of the language, they can interpret it as they wish. They are about to hear from another attorney who will say the opposite to the first one, and they will decide which was most persuasive.

alt2272• 5 months ago

Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry

Screens are able to show you things which give you small short dopamine hits, enough to keep you engaged enough to try get more. This is exactly how addictive drugs, gambling etc all work.

skirge• 5 months ago

or tv which was fine for years.

CGMthrowaway• 5 months ago

A recommender engine that tries to capture and sustain attention in 1-2 second intervals, what else would you call it?

The traditional answer is "engagement," but there is a strong argument to me made that intentional engagement (engagement by conscious, willful choice) is not possible, repetitively, for a vast smorgasbord of content spinning by at short intervals

myrmidon2• 5 months ago

Curious how this is gonna turn out, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'd argue that we basically incentivise companies to cause harm whenever it is unregulated and profitable because the profits are never sufficiently seized and any prosecution is a token effort at best.

See leaded gas, nicotine, gambling, etc. for prominent examples.

I personally think prosecution should be much harsher in an ideal world; if a company knows that its products are harmful, it should ideally be concerned with minimising that harm instead of fearing to miss out on profits without any legal worries.

komali23• 5 months ago

"This case is as easy as A-B-C," Lanier said as he stacked children's toy blocks bearing the letters.
He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.

I gotta admit, I find this really trivial and silly that this is how court cases go, but I understand that juries are filled of all sorts of people and lawyers I guess feel the need to really dumb things down? Or maybe it's the inner theater kid coming out?

embedding-shape17• 5 months ago

It's all about putting things into the juries head that they can remember and draw back to once they're in deliberation. Word-puzzles like those tries to imprint "addicting, brains, children", so those things will be more prominent during the deliberation.

LanceH• 5 months ago

Court is about establishing fact, not discovering truth.

Fact is defined by whatever the jury believes.

ceejayoz7• 5 months ago

Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.

The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.

xg152• 5 months ago

I get the reasoning behind that kind of jury selection, but yeah it seems this would also select for the most gullible people to be in the jury - especially if you want people without domain knowledge.

saghm2• 5 months ago

Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.

In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.

My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.

jimnotgym7• 5 months ago

It is only the opening argument! The technical stuff will come later, I'm sure

Aurornis• 5 months ago

These were the opening remarks of the lawyers on one side. You’re right that it’s theater, because they’re trying to hook the jury with an idea and get it to stick.

It’s also not a great sign that they’re relying on such tricks and props to hook the jury. In stronger cases they’ll rely on actual facts and key evidence, not grand but abstract claims using props like this.

I don’t know how the rest of the opening remarks went, but from the article it looks like Meta’s lawyers are already leaning into the actual evidence (or lack thereof) that their products were central to the problems:

Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
"If you took Instagram away and everything else was the same in Kaley's life, would her life be completely different, or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?" Schmidt asked, pointing out an Instagram addiction is never mentioned in medical records included in the evidence.

Obviously this is HN and we’re supposed to assume social media is to blame for everything, but I would ask people to try not to be so susceptible to evidence-free narrative persuasion like the ABC trick. Similar tricks were used years ago when it was video games, not social media, in the crosshairs of lawyers looking to extract money and limit industries. Many of the arguments were the same, such as addicting children’s brains and being engineered to capture their attention.

There’s a lot of anger in the thread about Discord starting to require ID checks for some features, but large parts of HN aren’t making the connection to these lawsuits and cases as the driving factor behind these regulations. This is how it happens, but many are cheering it on without making the connection. Or they are welcoming regulations but they have a wishful thinking idea that they’re only going to apply to sites they don’t use and don’t like, without spilling over into their communication apps and other internet use.

komali23• 5 months ago

Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.

I feel like this must be an indication of an inherent flaw with a society designed around the idea that litigation originates in an individual's singular harm received from a company, outside of I guess class action lawsuits, which to be fair, I don't know much about. But I'm reminded of the McDonald's coffee case, when McDonald's was able to leverage their incredible capital power to make that woman look like such a crazy litigious hysterical lady that people to this day use it as an example of how Americans are just inherently trivially litigious, when in reality, that coffee was just way too hot.

Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.

trimethylpurine• 5 months ago

I blame the consumer, but I think it's really different from the video game cases. Those lacked a social component and came with a warning and a rating system, and only simulated interactions.

Social media technology, according to former employees, is intentionally engineered to capitalize on dependency, unbeknownst to the user, came with no rating system or warnings, and hosts real interactions not simulated ones.

I think they have a much better case here.

mentalgear2• 5 months ago

It's how media works, not a representation of the jury's mental capabilities. For media, you need to have the simplest idea in a visual form if you want to have any chance to make it stick - especially when you're fighting against a trillion dollar attention-addiction industry with billions of lobbying dollars to defend their cash cow.

pyuser5832• 5 months ago

That sort of "ABC" simplicity is just good rhetoric.

biophysboy• 5 months ago

Its an oral speech - needs to be memorable. Mnemonics do that.

hearsathought• 5 months ago

> He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.

I thought it was Always Be Closing.

I guess feel the need to really dumb things down?

Or making things simple, emotional and memorable?

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

If engineering addiction for children is illegal, it should obviously be illegal to target adults too?

Spooky232• 5 months ago

That’s the thing that is so ridiculous. Why is it magically OK to drive harmful compulsive behavior on your 18th birthday.

The interns at work talk incessantly about gambling. It’s just weird and wrong.

pixl973• 5 months ago

The answer to that is 'it depends'. We know certain substances like alcohol and tobacco can be/are addictive and yet the product still sells with warnings.

elevatortrim10• 5 months ago

In the case of alcohol and tobacoo, I do not think these products are engineered for addiction, they are engineered for taste and addiction is a side-effect. If they could be produced to have the same short-term (< a few hours) effects while avoiding the long term effects (addiction), the companies would (hopefully) choose to do that. I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.

social media platforms however, ...

bitmasher92• 5 months ago

It’s a good point, but crimes against children are a higher priority because children are more vulnerable and the law exists in part to protect our most vulnerable.

creaturemachine• 5 months ago

I suggest you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. As much as it is damaging to adults, it's much more so to children in early development all the way through puberty.

https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/

dana3212• 5 months ago

Anything where you scroll through posts or endlessly watch short videos is highly addictive.

If you think its not and just "similar to addiction", just try blocking these sites in your browser/phone and see how long you last before feeling negative effects.

jeffbee3• 5 months ago

I really have never understood this. Short form videos are no more or less interesting to me than any other. I also do not find the YouTube main page very compelling, and rarely follow the things that are suggested at the ends of videos. I certainly do not feel ill if I forget to use YouTube for a week.

direwolf209• 5 months ago

I've been using YouTube for a long time, and the suggestions are usually things I find interesting.

dana3212• 5 months ago

The trouble with short form videos is that they lower your attention span if you are continuously watching them over a period of time, which then leaves you not wanting to watch the long-form videos any more, or do anything that requires concentration - leaving you to be a doomscrolling zombie.

BeaverGoose• 5 months ago

People aren't customers anymore. They are the resource to be mined. Advertisers are the customers.

rPlayer6554• 5 months ago

Ignoring what I think of the case itself, I hate how many headlines now are just the talking points for one side or the other in a dispute. At least try to pretend you’re being a neutral reporter rather than regurgitating what someone with an agenda says.

kklisura• 5 months ago

The interest of corporations, the interest of capital is above the interest of society at large. Nothing will pan out of this trial.

rzerowan• 5 months ago

Will there be any outcome to remedy the situation from this even if actual harm is proven to the letter of the law?

Seems not so far back the Sacklkers were proven(?) to have profited and fueled the oiod crisis while colluding with the healthcare industry - and last i heard they were haggling over the fine to pay to the state. While using various financial loopholes to hide their wealth under bankrupcy and offshore instruments.

What then the trillion dollar companies that can drag out appeals for decades and obfuscate any/all recommendations that may be reached.

incahoots7• 5 months ago

And before that, it was the crack epidemic—and cigarettes before that. None of this is new tho, just the medium.

I recall Philip Morris pivoting their main business when it began hemorrhaging money. Essentially this pivot came in the form of becoming the largest “box-to-mouth” food producers in the world, of course applying the same addictive principles that fueled their tobacco empire to maintain profitability.

I doubt, however, social media corps like Meta will follow suit today—mostly because accountability feels more like a suggestion these days.

lukah• 5 months ago

I'm not at all familiar with the American justice system, but would the fact that this case specifically describes the targeting of minors with such addictive tactics change things at all?

incahoots7• 5 months ago

Not really, cigarette companies targeted minors, same with alcohol, they got slapped on the wrist. Worth mentioning this happened during the rise of a neoliberal policy order of checks & balances.

kayo_20211030• 5 months ago

Is this a replay of the comics and video games are doing irreparable harm arguments from not too long ago?

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with both sides of the argument - a yes-but-no position.

conartist65• 5 months ago

They're not afraid of the idea of programming people.

When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company.

One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible.

It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains.

Atlas66710• 5 months ago

To me this is simply a consequence of the capitalist mode of production.

jerf3• 5 months ago

Yes, because governments are so restrained in their use of propaganda.

What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them.

pmontra• 5 months ago

Capitalism or consumerism, a never ending offer and demand for goods, material or immaterial?

seberino• 5 months ago

That may be true but I think the unspoken assumption in your comment is that somehow, without capitalism, greed magically melts away. How do you explain the constant extreme rampant corruption in communist and socialist countries over 100 years if not from GREED?

bodge5000• 5 months ago

I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo.

Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is

3vidence• 5 months ago

I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.

Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.

People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.

conartist65• 5 months ago

You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.

toast0• 5 months ago

Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.

Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.

hibikir• 5 months ago

It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.

While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.

tantalor• 5 months ago

https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/12/tech-on-toilet-drivin...

nostrademons3• 5 months ago

It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.

The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.

xnx• 5 months ago

https://testing.googleblog.com/search/label/TotT

RegW• 5 months ago

Did you take a copy of that flyer? I would be interested to see it.

conartist65• 5 months ago

I looked and I do not have a photo

cm20125• 5 months ago

Another way of describing this - they find people lose interest almost immediately, and so if you want to actually show a consumer something new, you have to get to the point with your ad.

WarmWash• 5 months ago

...which has been known for at least a century

Teever• 5 months ago

I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of a policy that promotes ads that hook the user within the first 200ms.

200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms.

That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural.

But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us.

tremon2• 5 months ago

So, in order to put a more neutral spin on this practice, you immediately reduce all people to "consumers"? Aren't you just confirming the GP's characterization that all platform users are seen as prey?

chasemp• 5 months ago

Users as prey is a terrifying but not unrealistic narrative. Thanks for sharing.

doron2• 5 months ago

The only business that call customers "users" are software development and drug dealers :)

Gud• 5 months ago

Don’t be evil

webdoodle• 5 months ago

The public got a peek at it with Cambridge Analytica creating hundreds of thousands of personality profiles, they then used to create Trump's MAGA army of flying monkeys. The Democrats could have done something about it, and made it illegal, but instead they just decided to build there own armies of flying monkeys. Why? Because both sides are bought and paid for by the same rich parasites trying to reprogram us.

direwolf209• 5 months ago

did democrats create flying monkey armies? I haven't seen anywhere near as much Democrat propaganda as Republican, which is probably why they keep losing. Only recently, once Republican policies came into effect and people experienced their consequences, did Republican votes decline.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Alright. I may object to the wording, but ... isn't what you described also a good website? I am aware of how much propaganda Google uses too, e. g. "engage the user" - you see that on youtube "leave a like". They are begging people to vote. Not for the vote, but to engage him. I saw this not long ago on Magic Arena by Wizards of the coast. They claim "your feedback is valuable" but you can only vote up or vote down. That's not feedback - that is lying to the user to try to get the user to make a reaction and tell others about it. I just don't really see the difference. You describe it that they manipulate people, but ANY ad-department of a company uses propaganda and manipulates people. Look in a grocery, how many colours are used in the packaging. Isn't ALL of this also manipulative?

direwolf209• 5 months ago

Google doesn't beg you for likes. Channels beg you for likes because it's one of the metrics they are stack–ranked by. Someone will lose, and they don't want it to be them.

6510• 5 months ago

isn't what you described also a good website?

No, good software is and feels empowering. It should scream the developer understood what YOU want to do at that specific point. Most notable, the faster the job is DONE the better.

Putting up flyers in the toilet isn't to enhance your toilet experience. It is the opposite, if we want to enhance the flyer engagement the easiest way is by de-optimizing all parts of the toilet UX. Say we remove all but one toilet rolls and make the side a bit wet. If some of the locks don't work we could dramatically enhance the number of walls and doors people look at. Ideal would be to lock everyone in the stall until the next prey arrives. Should release them just early enough that they don't inform the next victim.

intended3• 5 months ago

There is an entire agency that focuses on Food and Drugs in America, and its similar around the world. We have many rules on food.

Food is actually a great place to think about social media, because there was a time where the FDA didnt exist. Its need was felt after cities grew larger and the food supply chain became longer. At that point food could be adultered and the old systems which people relied on to know the provenance of their food failed.

Some of the things that changed this was when people started doing indepedent testing and finding out exactly how much adultery was actually taking place.

Eventually we got rules about what was to be done, which we don't consider anymore since its part of daily life.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

Facebook employees may be the easiest "prey" to program

If something as crude as flyers in bathroom stalls is effective

dylan6042• 5 months ago

It also says a lot if that's the most effective way vs normal ways of disseminating the info.

danny_codes2• 5 months ago

FB uses its addict money to pay those employees. I assume the pay is what’s effective. Actually a good business model. Pay employees to improve how addictive your drug is, get more money from addicts, and use that to pay your employees more money, completing the loop.

But then drugs being profitable isn’t really news

SpaceManNabs2• 5 months ago

feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds

Is this even possible??? It takes me *at least* 2 seconds to see if a video game clip is interesting to me. That is kinda crazy.

ludicrousdispla• 5 months ago

> on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out

I wonder if anyone considered the bias of this communication channel towards women, or did they also post them above the urinals?

QuercusMax3• 5 months ago

If this was Google, Testing on the Toilet and similar flyers were both above urinals and in bathroom stalls.

crystal_revenge• 5 months ago

I'm always a bit surprised by the degree that non-tech people don't understand how much they're being openly and transparently manipulated in various ways. Most of my work has been statistical/quantitative in nature from complex A/B testing setups to dynamic pricing algorithms. Yet so many of the most benign parts of my work in the past unnerve some people.

Measuring human behavior and exploiting it for some hope at profit has been an obvious part of my job description for many years. Yet I've had friends and acquaintances that are shocked when they accidentally realize they're part of an A/B test "Wait, Amazon doesn't show the same thing to everyone!?" I've seen reddit conversations where people are horrified at the idea of custom pricing models (something so mundane it could easily be an interview question). I had a friend once claim a basic statement about what I did at work was a "conspiracy theory" because clearly companies don't really have that much control.

To your point, at work the fact that we're manipulating people algorithmically isn't remotely a secret. Nobody in the room at any of my past jobs has felt a modicum of shame about optimization. The worst part is I have drawn a line multiple times at past jobs (typically to my own detriment), so there are things that even someone as comfortable with this as I am finds go to far. Ironically, I've found it's hard to get non-technical people to care about these because you have to understand the larger context to see just how dangerous they are.

I have ultimately decided to avoid working in the D2C space because inevitably you realize you aren't providing any real value to your user (despite internal sloganeering to the contrary) and very often causing real harm. In the B2B space you're working with customers who you have a real business relationship with, so crass manipulation to move the needle for one month isn't worth the long term harm.

upboundspiral• 5 months ago

I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.

And if laqmakers are silent, then publicising, collecting, and sharing this knowledge to all ends of the earth through mainstream and independent journalism, paying a few hundred dollars out of their Silicon Valley salaries to put up billboards shining a light on the misdeeds of tech companies towards their own customers and society.

Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.

derangedHorse3• 5 months ago

I think you’re misremembering. Research shows it’s 2 seconds not .2 seconds.

skizm• 5 months ago

All of these things they're saying are unethical, but not illegal, right?

bsimpson• 5 months ago

"I let an iPad raise my kid and now she sucks" is a wild lawsuit premise.

direwolf209• 5 months ago

Usually to sue someone for causing harm, they have to actually cause the harm, it can't help hypothetical. So you see lawsuits that are like "I saw this CEO speak on TV and then I relied on this information when deciding to buy the product"

Why aren't you asking: why is it possible for an iPad to raise a child? Why is the iPad keeping the child's attention for so long? Is it not because it was designed to? Why was it designed to?

InMice• 5 months ago

Is it really landmark tho? First it was nicotine and big tobacco, then the same addiction engineers designed ultra processed foods. Kraft, nabisco, etc all spun off by tobacco companies... Normalizing food addiction in children. And now it's screens and social media. It's the same fundamental physiology but it seems like society can't learn a lesson either.

I thought it was kind of pathetic how quickly they shoved ipads into schools with no real long term data, no research whatsoever. Just insane really. And now here we are yet again.

puzzlingcaptcha• 5 months ago

"But if we don't engineer addiction, China will beat us to it! It's a national interest!"

AlexandrB5• 5 months ago

Ironically, China actually mandates time limits on its addictive social media: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934

youknownothing• 5 months ago

This is just one data point, but I once talked to a person who worked for YouTube. I asked him if he had children, he said yes. I asked him if he let them use YouTube Kids and he said "no way, that's completely banned at home". That told me everything that I needed to know.

Don't consume your own product.

Upvoter33• 5 months ago

We're going to see the same kind of thing we saw with the tobacco industry - CEOs claiming they had no idea the product was engineering to be addictive. I have even less faith that this anyone will hold anybody accountable though.

doublerabbit• 5 months ago

It's like stoner logic I heard from someone once:

"I smoke weed to get high, it's not the weed that gets me high"

"Social media is addicting, it's not the social media that makes it addictive."

notepad0x902• 5 months ago

There is no law that dictates these two things:

1) You can't stalk someone deliberately and persistently, using any means, or medium; even if you're a company, and even if you have good intentions.

2) You can't intentionally influence any number of people towards believing something false and that you know is against their interest.

These things need to be felony-level or higher crimes, where executives of companies must be prosecuted.

Not only that, certain crimes like these should be allowed to be prosecuted by citizens directly. Especially where bribery and threats by powerful individuals and organizations might compromise the interests of justice.

The outcome of this trial won't amount to anything other than fines. The problem is, this approach doesn't work. They'll just find different ways that can skirt the law. Criminal consequence is the only real way to insist on justice.

qnleigh• 5 months ago

The probably with 2 is you then need someone to be the arbiter of truth, and the truth is often a hard thing to find. This would end up letting governments jail people they disagree with. How would you write the law to to prevent that?

direwolf209• 5 months ago

The whole point of a court is to find truth. They do it all the time. Actually you would need to prove someone knew something is untrue, because it's innocent until proven guilty. You wouldn't have to prove what you said is true to get let off, just bring enough doubt to ward off your opponent's accusation of untruth.

notepad0x902• 5 months ago

I don't get what you mean? proving whether you've done something against someone's interest is already on the books for embezzlement, fraud,etc.. intention and planning are covered under many conspiracy laws. the influence part would need to be proven using internal documents, whistleblowers,etc..

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512

tock• 5 months ago

I mean everyone knows this right? There are even leaked memos. They are public companies who need to grow revenue and they gain that revenue mostly through ads and attention.

wslh• 5 months ago

It’s a matter of time, it could be decades, until we shape those "engineered addiction" similarly to the Tobacco trials.

rexpop• 5 months ago

That's optimistic! I worry the attack on discourse and community has fundamentally undermined democracy.

exabrial• 5 months ago

Listen, it sounds a lot less evil when you label it "audience engagement" mmk?

Devasta• 5 months ago

Just ban personalized advertising and be done with it, they will do any amount of harm so long as it gets a click.

visarga• 5 months ago

They will have personalized feeds for engagement and non-personalized ads, still get the addictive effect.

lingrush4• 5 months ago

That would solve exactly zero of the complaints surfaced in this lawsuit. Companies still have an incentive to maximize app usage regardless of whether the advertising is personalized.

parsimo20102• 5 months ago

I am generally displeased with the way social media has evolved, but I'm not in favor of this lawsuit. It seems like a way to blame tech companies for Congress' failure to regulate businesses properly. None of the engineers involved thought of their work as a way to rot the minds of future generations. Their thought process was straightforward-

1. We sell ads to make money 2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money 3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.

I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.

Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.

Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.

arijun• 5 months ago

That seems like a really bad excuse to void responsibility. Consider a cigarette maker:

1. We sell cigarettes to make money

2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make

3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.

Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.

parsimo20102• 5 months ago

Cigarette companies were not penalized for making addictive drugs or doing generally immoral but technically legal things. They were penalized because the USA had set a minimum age for smoking cigarettes, and they were marketing directly to people who could not legally buy their products, and there was conclusive proof that they were targeting minors with their ads.

The DIRECT comparison from my previous comment would be if a country set a legal age requirement for accessing social media, and then you could hold the social media companies if they continued marketing to them. But for now, no such law exists in the USA. Social media has not been regulated like tobacco, because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to regulate these companies.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

This is weird because ... at which point does an addiction start?

People used to be addicted to watching TV, right? Well, nobody was made responsible for that. If it is addiction, and I am not necessarily saying this is not, then all websites would fall under the same category IF they are designed well enough to become addictive. Most games would fall under that category too. I don't think this is a good category at all. Both Meta and Google should pay simply for wasting our time here, but the "you designed your applications and websites in an addictive manner" ... that's just weird.

deepsun• 5 months ago

No TikTok?

direwolf209• 5 months ago

They just spent so much money and political capital to steal it from those evil Chinese communists. Who would they sue? The evil Chinese communists who are too far away to enforce a judgement, or the new freedom–loving American owners who only just got it?

laweijfmvo• 5 months ago

TikTok settled ahead of the trial.

carabiner• 5 months ago

Any tech company funded primarily by ad money is dirty.

adolph• 5 months ago

Would it be ironic if Meta and Google were required to add "a landing page that displays information about responsible [social media use]" similar to their policies regarding gambling ads (example below)?

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/15132179?hl=en

squeefers3• 5 months ago

absolute hysteria from everyone on here

charcircuit3• 5 months ago

Do they expect social media sites to show less posts of things you are interested or less posts from your friends to make you use it less. They provide good products which people like.

halestock• 5 months ago

There's a difference between "things you are interested in" and "things that will make you addicted".

munificent2• 5 months ago

How do you know that people like them?

If the answer is "well, they keep using them". Then by that same definition, people like slot machines, cocaine, and over-eating junk food.

Is it a good, useful definition of "like" if it describes behavior that people feel compelled to do but are remorseful about after?

charcircuit3• 5 months ago

Social media sites literally have a ui affordance for liking a post.

goldenshale• 5 months ago

Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again. Authors try to write books you can't stop reading. It's silly to imagine that any type of media would do anything other than seek to gain your interest and attention. It's our job to have personal hygiene and to control our information diet. This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.

trueismywork2• 5 months ago

You do go to restaurants for food, you do buy books (story books at least) to be enchanted. And even then addictive substances are banned from food.

Not everyone goes to social media for entertainment, and there's no way to maintain hygiene apart from just going off it.

recroad• 5 months ago

I see where you are coming from, but this is different because:

1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine

2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing

You are right, it is our job to control our information diet but when the ability to control is diminished through the consumption, then we have a problem which doesn't fit into the model of "get your shit together".

There's also a social responsibility you inherit when you start selling products that have harmful side-effects. Auto manufacturers have to comply with emission testing, drug makers have to prove efficacy, air conditioning manufacturers have to adhere to air quality standards etc. What do social media companies have to do? Very little if anything, and that's the problem. We've yet to find a counter-balance that works and protects the consumer, so we're in this era where we're trying to find out what we can do, but the landscape is changing so fast that we're trying to hit a moving target.

lostmsu• 5 months ago

Does Google lace your web pages with cocaine?

derangedHorse3• 5 months ago

1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine

Cocaine creates a much larger chemical change in the brain and can kill you in high doses so it’s not really comparable.

2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing

Says who? Why is reading inherently a good thing?

And all of those things are regulated because they have what most consider to be objectively bad effects on the body (with metrics based on cellular harm).

SpaceL10n• 5 months ago

This is a reductionist take on the problem. If I knowingly spike your drink with habit forming chemicals, and I don't tell you about it, am I in the wrong?

ipdashc• 5 months ago

knowingly spike your drink with habit forming chemicals

Like sugar?

intended3• 5 months ago

Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again.
This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.

Restaurants get shut down when they don't match hygene and safety levels.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 5 months ago

If you genuinely want to understand what we're talking about here, I suggest you read up on how certain behavior discharge dopamine on cue, how that builds tolerance and addiction. Then perhaps you understand the difference between this subject and the examples you gave.

derangedHorse3• 5 months ago

I agree. People are on social media more because other alternatives for entertainment have dwindled in affordability, quality, abundance, etc. Perhaps the problem that should be addressed are the lack of quality alternatives rather than the industry tactics of a particular form of entertainment.

caycep• 5 months ago

I wonder if there's something from addiction neuroscience that can be utilized as "evidence" in the legal sense; or if it's used in the process of product development. i.e. how google/meta/frito lay/P&G maximize dopamine hits in the ventral segmental area, etc

h4kunamata• 5 months ago

The problem started when people asked about privacy, they reply with "I have nothing to hide"

That gives big techs the power to do whatever, and once power is granted, it hardly ever is revoked.

trinsic2• 5 months ago

The plaintiffs said they would call expert witnesses that will argue that young people's brains are not yet developed to withstand the powers of the algorithms being flung at them on Instagram and YouTube.

I'm all for preventing addictive algorithms, but if you are letting your 6 year old watch you-tube, you got problems. This is just going to be used to push age restrictions

Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial

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