>Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.
Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article
The CBC article doesn't mention what's arguably the most interesting thing about this lawsuit, which is that it goes after Meta on the grounds of product liability. This of course a pretty established area of law and a central feature of the decades of legal battles that Big Tobacco was embroiled in, but applying it to online publishers is very new.
I think the states have an interesting point. Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact? Doing so is illegal and I think your average HN'er would agree that this is bad when applied to say Big Tobacco or some manufacturer selling a product that contains toxic chemicals or whatever, but what about Big Tech?
Of course there's a big can of worms here. We've known that watching TV "rots your brain" on some level for years, and there's a fair bit of research which claims that porn is bad for you too. So where do you draw the line and when is litigation the correct recourse for society in dealing with these issues vs approaching it another way?
Hard to have sympathy for a company like Meta at this stage in the game though...
> Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact?
With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.
There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.
Well, you're definitely going against the grain on this if you say yes. This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages for the health consequences of their products, and get them to add warning labels to their products. I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.
> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages
I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.
Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).
My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.
> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.
This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.
The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.
Curious if this indictment makes a clear distinction between chemical and behavioral addition. I’ve heard some pushback comparing this to smoking. In my mind, comparing this to gambling would have been more apt. Social media seems to employ many of the behavioral reward schedules which make gambling (or loot drops in video games) addictive. (Eg: literally using a variable ratio reward schedule.) Social media isn’t merely addictive in this way (It leans on crucially important things such as social standing, or perceived social standing.) but this is a major distinction which I often see people fail to make.
Don't many companies do similar things to hook kids? Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance? The same argument applies to breakfast cereal companies as well.
Yes, and they should go after Roblox /Fortnite next. Fleecing parents so your kids don't get made fun of for "having the free skin" shouldn't be a business model.
> Fleecing parents so your kids don't get made fun of for "having the free skin" shouldn't be a business model.
Not any different from me guilt tripping my parents into buying me an expensive pair of Jnco jeans back in the day.
Without them I wouldn't be cool and other kids would make fun of me! Or maybe they'd make fun of me for wearing those instead of something else the next year, who knows. Social pressure evolves pretty quickly.
Can you explain why? I allow my son to play it once per week for about 30 minutes, but I sit next to him the entire time and watch. Why did you ban it?
That level of supervision isn’t what I want to do and allowing him to play at all each time turned into no work, no other play, and even waking up in the middle of the night to sneak downstairs and play. It scared the crap out of me, tbh.
No disagreement here, but Instagram shouldn't be let off the hook just because cereal companies get people addicted to sugar too and do awful things as well. Remember two wrongs don't make a right.
Last I checked candy companies aren’t finding ways to stalk children and keeping record of their habits and behaviors. Physically sugar might be worse, but the business practices of physical products have mostly been the same for decades. Social media companies are engaged in many practices yet to be litigated.
Edit for clarity: certainly candy companies have general demographic data and market research, but advertising companies have profiles down to the individual. Lawyers seem to have settled on COPPA allowing them to do this for 13 year olds, but I would imagine most parents would prefer minors be excluded from any tracking, profiling, inclusion in multivariate testing or targeted advertising.
> but advertising companies have profiles down to the individual
That's just because candy/cereal companies don't need it. Slap a superhero or Elsa on the cereal box and you'll have 50% of kids under 5 crying until their parent buys the cereal.
Wasn't the whole victory there because cigarettes/vapes can't be sold to minors?
It seems really hard to define a firm line between making an addictive product and making a product that people really use a lot because it's well-made.
For instance, I play a lot of video games. If their developers got punished for getting me so hooked, that would be a real slap in the face to everyone involved.
The focus of this lawsuit is specifically the declining mental health of minors, not the good quality of the product. If games will be determined to have an extremely detrimental effect on children, there will be similar lawsuits.
Which is why there’s been a long history of formal regulation and explicit industry self-policing for both of those examples. Engagement-optimized social media is now big enough and seemingly permanent enough to be invited to the club, and seems to be very reluctant to do the self-policing thing so far.
Yes. Knowing I will never be as good as them, knowing I am not as clever as them, realizing a 17 year old kid made a base that was 10x as efficient as mine in half the time in my 700 hour game.
I assume you're kidding, but I'm going to respond as though you didn't because I think many here may unironically believe you.
Nope - it's exactly the opposite. The kinds of people with the pure autism needed to get good at Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress end up as world-class developers. Some of the best historians are going to be minted by expert paradox game players.
The games we should regulate are the garbage, zero-thought zero-gain games. Even fortnight and roblox are highly educational compared to the legalized child gambeling I see with those stupid ticket machines at places like Dave and Busters.
Also, shooters are unfortunately a national security thing. I can show you videos from the US military, especially US tank trainers and rifle trainers about how shockingly familiar that these systems are even to people who have no experience with them due to realistic portrayals in their video games. This is why "Americas Army" existed at all.
Well? Its not enough to just say something and assume its absurd and stop thinking about it. Have those companies intentionally made their products addictive to the extent you think they are deserving of censure or punishment? Because if thats the case maybe your point shouldnt be "this new bad thing is fine".
I'm not so much saying it's fine (it clearly isn't), but that it seems to be grandstanding to me. Maybe it will yield some positive results for kids, even if at the cost of having official truth validators and/or uncensorable outrage porn for everyone else.
Thats fair, from the article alone I can't tell. They perform psychological research in order to make their product addictive though so I'm biased to believe this could be more of a 'banality of evil' type situation rather than a boogeyman hunt with fun civil liberties consequences.
imagine if kids had a magic rectangle in their pockets at all times that generated, when tapped, an infinite amount of sugary breakfast cereal for them to consume, anytime, anywhere, and it had become commonplace for kids to spend plural hours each day doing nothing at all but mindlessly tapping said rectangle and consuming the magically-produced sugary breakfast cereal. imagine if this started from early childhood, with parents giving kids a slightly larger, rubber-bumpered sugary-cereal-producing magic rectangle to occupy themselves while out to eat or shopping for groceries or even just around the house. imagine if this was all completely socially accepted and anyone speaking out against it was shouted down as being opponents of technological progress or whatever.
imagine if they didn't though because it was just societally accepted that kids having access to sugary-cereal-producing magic rectangles was completely normal, even out in public—plus adults also use their own magic rectangles almost as much as kids, and kids learn by watching adults.
What stops you from making this argument to allow kids to smoke cigs? That's kinda how this is. Imagine if every kid smoked, and if you didn't want your kid to smoke too, they become a social outcast with all the mental issues that come with it.
Society steps in to regulate harmful/predatory behaviors all the time, even between consenting adults (let alone children, even if their parents play along). Libertarianism just doesn't work for kids. (I think it doesn't even work for adults, personally)
Candy companies don't run invisible psychological experiments on their customers. An app like Instagram is also self-replenishing, which can't be said for physical products with addictive qualities.
There is no experiment happening once the candy bar is in your hands. The bar discloses its nutritional contents in a readable label as required by law. The same is not true of Instagram whixh is an algorithmic black box. The EULA is made intentionally unreadable and easily skippable, so its users ignore the risks.
Candies are the least sever offender. Everyone know, that you have to limit kids candy intake, because they have too much sugar. But why all of a sudden products like yogurt or pedialyte have loads of sugar?
Does switching to high fructose qualify as tweaking the formulas specifically increase/enhance the addictive properties? To me, Socials should be treated like Big Tobacco.
> Does switching to high fructose qualify as tweaking the formulas specifically increase/enhance the addictive properties?
“… a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome. This equivalence is not surprising given that both of these sugars contain approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose, contain the same number of calories, possess the same level of sweetness, and are absorbed identically through the gastrointestinal tract.”
HFCS is used because it’s cheaper. Not because it’s addictive.
It's not the equivalence. Breaking down things down to elements and comparing them misses the unique structure and our response to that. Apple are the same as orange if you break them down into fructose/glucose.
Sugar is not an addictive substance. You cannot become physiologically dependent on sugar with negative consequences. Lets not bring in even more disinformation. This nebulous application of the word "addiction" to non-addictive concepts by the public can lead to damaging outcomes like state DAs themselves exploiting the public ignorance and mis-use of the concept to try to bring themselves fame so they can run for public office later. See the original post topic for an example.
A quick search through clinical literature reveals the following points:
1. Brain Chemistry and Sugar: Sugar activates the brain's reward system by releasing opioids and dopamine, similar to addictive substances.
2. Behavioral Similarities to Addiction: High sugar intake can lead to addictive-like behaviors, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms.
3. Contrasting Views in Research: While sugar affects behavior similarly to addictive substances, it's debated whether this is due to physiological addiction or other factors like emotional dependencies.
4. Physical Effects and Overconsumption: Excessive sugar consumption is linked to health issues and may create a dependency cycle, but this is not universally accepted as clinical addiction.
5. Human vs. Animal Studies: Evidence for sugar addiction largely comes from animal studies, and translating these findings to human behavior is complex due to multifaceted influences on eating habits.
The real answer here is: You don't know. You don't know because clinicians and researchers don't know, so if they don't know, you damn sure don't.
And this is why “disinformation” is a bullshit term. Hes not spreading lies nor objective falsehoods. Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). He makes a perfectly valid point that we can all discuss as we see fit without maligning it as disinformation.
Sexual addiction: Not in the DSMV or even the updated DSM-5-TR. Not in the ICD-10 or ICD-11 (pre-release).
Gambling addiction: The only one grandfathered in to the DSM. It's in DSMV. Probably to be removed in later versions "The DSM-V has since reclassified pathological gambling as gambling disorder..." ref: https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 . Also not in ICD-10 or ICD-11.
Internet addiction: "Excessive Internet use has not been recognized as a disorder by the World Health Organization, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)." "The American Psychiatric Association (APA), while stating there is insufficient evidence for the inclusion of Internet gaming disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, considered it worthy of further study."
And now lets go back to sugar and accepting your moving the goalposts to "food addiction" (another unsupported concept): You say that it is a purely psychological "addiction" with no physiological aspect and I agree. It's not an addiction. Those are called habits. Read more at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ "Food Addiction in the Light of DSM-5" to understand how this societal fear meme fails to fulfill the requirements of an actual addition disorder.
The APA and DSM-V will be credible resources when anybody in the entire institution of psychiatry manages to reliably correct a single psychiatric disorder they've identified. CBT is just dog training applied to humans. Beyond that neat little trick they're just a pill-pushing standards committee.
Where they don't succeed, or get taken for suckers too many times, they take to reclassifying disorders to pave over their failures. You don't need to have corrected multiple personality disorder or Munchausen syndrome when you can quietly rename them and obfuscate just how often you get it catastrophically wrong. When your failures end up committing suicide, they won't be testifying against you later.
That they're denying excessive internet use outs them as either incompetent-- or complicit. FAANG hires psychologists to help in algorithm design to engineer these specific ends. You can't identify gambling addiction is a problem while your own people are the ones consulting on development of gambling algorithms. That would be unethical, and look very bad for you. #mentalhealthawareness! We won't acknowledge sex addiction as real, but we're totally qualified to treat it!
Notice how doctors quietly stopped advocating for circumcision of all male infants. When we look at what they've been recommending for generations--and their rationalizations--it makes them look like savages ("They don't feel the pain! They don't remember the pain! Women prefer it! It prevents HIV, maybe! You don't speak English? No problem, just sign here."). They have no skin in the game (and now, neither do you) beyond adding an additional line item to mom's invoice.
(I'm not anti-medicine, just disillusioned in how little these institutions ever acknowledge wrongdoing or complicity.)
Sugar is addictive, in the sense that people understand the term: "It hacks your brain and makes you want more, despite it being real bad for you". That's millions of years of evolution at work. OP never claimed any of what you're straw-manning.
Btw, the APA colluded to torture people [0]. That's not something a credible or reputable organization does. I know, they fired four people and said sorry - it's not enough. I don't care about their view on what addiction is in the slightest, and nor should any of us.
How can you call it a psychological addiction then say its not an addiction? Remember you claimed he was spreading disinformation, not that you disagree about how to split hairs in terms of defining addiction.
Anything can be addictive. If anything, broader use of the term would serve to disarm it, not strengthen it, and that's a good thing given how poorly the law handles addiction and addictive substances.
I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health.
With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction.
Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.
> Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, also claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents' consent, in violation of federal law.
The federal privacy law part is crystal clear. But there is no description, or even mention, of what laws are being violated related to addictive products. Is this federal law? State law? What does the law say?
Which is understandable, given that the "metaverse" thing was over in a hot minute. The rebrand is only going to continue making less sense as time goes on.
There's also a lawsuit that Seattle Public Schools filed earlier this year. Not sure where that's at but it looks like there was activity as recently as last month.
When the business is entirely about marketing everything their users do against them, regardless of age, can you blame them for wanting to grow their business?
This is why I've never had a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, etc. The poor bastards that do get what they signed up for and accepted in the TOS.
I'm hoping this is them ramping up on that type of stuff. From what I've read Meta's made themselves a pretty strong target because like the tobacco companies they have documentation that they explicitly know they're doing it and ignoring the effects cause money.
Should they also sue all the garbage TV shows for kids and food companies putting sugar everywhere? Did they also sue TikTok? To my knowledge California and New York did not sue TikTok, but is way more dangerous that Instagram. Did they not want to upset Xi during his visit?
> Did they also sue TikTok? To my knowledge California and New York did not sue TikTok, but is way more dangerous that Instagram. Did they not want to upset Xi during his visit?
Presumably, California (in particular) has an easier time investigating Facebook than TikTok, given it lies within their jurisdiction.
Other states sued TikTok. TikTok distribution channels are Google and Apple. They also use aws and azure, so Amazon and Microsoft. Hence well within California reach. Probably non negligible part of ad revenue comes from California as well.
Facebook has offices in China, too, but that doesn't mean Zuckerberg's gonna surrender himself if they invite him over for a chat with the Ministry of Public Security.
California can readily reach Facebook's headquarters and top leadership. California cannot do the same to TikTok. Investigations into the two organizations will face very different challenges in obtaining information.
I am no obtuse, you are ignoring reality. Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress and lied through his teeth that they will invest in restructuring to store US users data in the US and insulate it from CCP government, which is impossible without significant US presence. TikTok's current head of operations, Adam Presser is a US national, as well as his predecessor. If Californian cared about kids mental health, they would absolutely go after TikTok.
Do you also think that California should not go after drug trade, because cartels that run it are outside of the US and Californian jurisdiction?
> Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress and lied through his teeth
So, what will we do about it? How will we subpoena ByteDance's internal emails and commuications with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to demonstrate that he knowingly lied?
If we get a valid warrant for Zuckerberg's emails, we'll have them in our hands shortly thereafter. If we get a warrant for Liang Rubo's, we won't. This presents obvious challenges to an investigation.
> Do you also think that California should not go after drug trade, because cartels that run it are outside of the US and Californian jurisdiction?
I think trying to do it by suing the cartels isn't a particularly promising approach.
Several states started investigating TikTok in 2022. They investigated Instagram first due in part to the whistleblower. So it’s not that other suits aren’t coming, it’s just that IG is the farthest along.
That's a fair analogy and numerous countries and states did introduce measures to combat obesity caused by sugary drinks (mostly through an added tax, which seems to have worked to reduce consumption).
I think there's a difference between what Coca Cola has done and what Instagram has done.
I've had someone who isn't me have to visit mental wards (practicing doctor) and almost all the wards have a strict no FaceBook, no Instagram, no TikTok after leaving. Almost all return patients end up pointing fingers at those companies.
Haven't heard of anything similar from Coca Cola products, extremely scary IMO.
Before Reagan advertising was subject to FCC regulations around producing and publishing advertisements aimed at children. Once it was deregulated the big toy companies went full bore on commercial ads and we have the familiar experience today of children begging for, needing, toys because of the manipulative tactics used in advertising. The experts call it "pester power".
This should be an easy to try case. Just bring in an expert witness about addiction. There is only one behavioral addiction in the diagnostic service manual: gambling addiction. And that one is basically just grandfathered in from before addiction was understood and had a clear medical/biological meaning. Nothing that happens while looking at screens is inherently bad or addictive. To use that word here is to devalue it and marginalize it's meaning in cases of actual addiction all just so they can try to sue to make noise and bring the DAs involved fame (so they can run for public office later) while exploiting the ignorance of the public re: medical science.
And what has the field yielded? Are there actual effective addiction treatments now?
Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way?
All they seem to have done is try to make video game enthusiasm into a mental illness. Of course there's no real treatment for it other than "just don't" either.
"For example, it is still widely perceived that gastric bypass works by mechanical means, i.e. food restriction and/or malabsorption. Recent clinical and animal studies, however, have indicated that these long-held inferences about the mechanisms of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) may not be correct. A growing body of evidence suggests that profound changes in body weight and metabolism resulting from RYGB cannot be explained by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption. One study in rats found that RYGB induced a 19% increase in total and a 31% increase in resting energy expenditure, an effect not exhibited in vertical sleeve gastrectomy rats. In addition, pair-fed rats lost only 47% as much weight as their RYGB counterparts. Changes in food intake after RYGB only partially account for the RYGB-induced weight loss, and there is no evidence of clinically significant malabsorption of calories contributing to weight loss. Thus, it appears RYGB affects weight loss by altering the physiology of weight regulation and eating behavior rather than by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption."
> Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way?
I think you're mistaking privately run "internet addiction treatment" centers and the like for actual medical science published in journals. In reality they're more like the "treatment" camps for homosexual people: scams designed to prey on people's fear and ignorance with no science backing besides third tier pay for publish journals.
You're really out of date. See wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction. Dopamine Nation by Anna Lambke (Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University) is a good pop sci intro. Plenty of other published research.
That's an edutainment book written for profit (https://www.annalembke.com/events) by someone who's income depends on fearmongering and getting interviewed/giving paid talks. Especially the title, "Dopamine Nation" and the abstracts I've read. It harkens back to the 1970s when people still mistakenly believed that dopaminergic populations were responsible for the perceptions of pleasure in the brain. Those are implemented by glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Anyone writing a book about dopaminergic pleasure is still in the 1970s. Dopaminegic populations encode for wanting, not liking, and predict reward (necessary but not sufficiently encoded in the ventral tegemental area). But they are not reward.
I'm not out of date. I read journal articles on this every week and have for the last 20 years.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of what addiction is. Considering how similarly people with behavioral and drug addictions act and how similarly the brain reacts to drug and non-drug addictions, your definition is much too narrow and yes, out of date.
Another single author paper. But at least he's citing Robinson and Berridge, 2008, that's solid work. But then it goes on to try to say any changes in the brain (he phrases it as neuroplasticity) are addiction indicators. But that's simply not true. He should re-visit Berridge (who does actual science and not just meta-studies) and look at more recent work on incentive salience and teasing apart the mechanisms of liking vs wanting.
So you would like to basically define addiction only if the brain uses the wanting mechanism instead of the liking mechanism. Which is ridiculous, since people act very similarly whether the wanting mechanism is used or not. It's basically a silly little definitional thing to exclude an entire class of addictions, even though people in both classes act very similarly.
