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Posted by Shamar 1 day ago

Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"(techoversight.org)
290 points | 164 commentspage 3
Shamar 1 day ago|
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

hansvm 1 day ago||
How did that work mechanically though? At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data, even if we only suspected they might possibly not be an adult -- no A/B tests, no ML, no ad targeting, no nada. Did leadership design a system where those sorts of things would happen anyway? Were there just enough rogue teams to cause problems?
jacquesm 1 day ago|||
Because the product is made to appeal to that particular demographic. The data doesn't really matter if you have that kind of reach.
worik 1 day ago||||
> At YT we were banned from doing basically anything with pre-18yo data

I guess things are different at Google now.

iwontberude 1 day ago|||
For business, government, and religion: achieving scale and centralization necessarily leads to corrupt outcomes. This is also where Marx’s legitimate criticisms of capitalism turn into a solution which is essentially its doppelgänger, a scaled system of corruption with absolute authority with the rhetorical veneer of democracy.
mahirsaid 1 day ago||
Are people surprised by this. Clearly this was a tactic widely used in the tech industry. Their aim is to keep people on the platform specifically teens. Why else would you need curated algorithms for users.
idle_zealot 1 day ago||
Anyone paying attention knew. A smoking gun means that legal action is possible. Or it would be in a better time.
mahirsaid 1 day ago|||
Indeed, I've been paying attention to the market share of the biggest companies in advertisement, its clear that Google and Meta are the largest share by a large margin. Almost not even comparable to other players other than Reddit recently. which it's exposure is dependent on Search engines like Google and Bing for that matter. users within the platform are a different story. I personally think the internet is not being utilized wisely when it comes to current context. There is still so much to be done and innovated and there are gate keepers keeping this from happening.
lostlogin 1 day ago|||
It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.
jmcgough 1 day ago|||
Tobacco paid billions of dollars, and we've heavily restricted where it can be used, where it can be advertised, and who can buy it.
ludicrousdispla 1 day ago||||
Companies don't necessarily have to suffer when restrictions are placed on them.

Ask any educator what the biggest positive change was to U.S. high schools in the 1970s and they'll probably answer that it was the ban on smoking in schools.

I expect a similar response in the future regarding bans on social media.

mahirsaid 1 day ago||
I can only imagine what it's like right now in schools. I can't see how anybody arguing the point that student are allowed to use social media in school is an okay activity. I know there are some countries banning the use of such activities in Europe and some others i can't think of right now.
idle_zealot 1 day ago|||
Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.
indubioprorubik 1 day ago||
Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.
miltonlost 1 day ago||
I hope that all the engineers who went along with this are able to sleep well with their stock options.
dxuh 1 day ago||
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?

takklob 1 day ago||
[flagged]
pembrook 1 day ago||
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.

AlexandrB 1 day ago|
> 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

You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.

Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.

Edit:

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

By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.

pembrook 1 day ago||
Social media is a marketplace business. Both parties are your customer.
AlexandrB 1 day ago||
Only one party is paying anything.
jacquesm 1 day ago|
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...