Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive?

At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case

I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite content. Was the intent to _addict_ people? It doesn't have to be, to create a system people have become addicted to. Even if the harm is not intended, does that mean it cannot be regulated? Surely not! Let's ban infinite scroll for a start. The question of whether to punish Meta is quite separate from the question of how to reduce the harms of its products.

I am old and used to use FB back when it was cool. Think 2010-14 period, and it was addictive even then even when it was just content from friends. Humans have deep need for connection with other humans and they will be addicted to anything that provides it given that modern society is increasingly isolated.

People are addicted to reddit, heck I know people who are addicted to Stocks app because they just need something to scroll.

Modern day addictions are complex and products are not the sole cause imo, they are just filling a void. Why that void exists needs to be answered. You remove Instagram and that time will be replaced by Reddit, tiktok or whatever product gives you some dopamine

I'm delighted to see this headline because I've been comparing Facebook to cigarettes for more than a decade. The parallels are striking. Both industries knew their products were poisonous and intentionally hid that knowledge while intentionally engineering them to be as addictive as possible, and ended up marketing them directly to children.

I do wonder what’s going to happen in the future to addictive social media algorithms. Feels like one of those things that’s so powerful, but skirts by because it doesn’t feel like it should be (like targeted advertising).

Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws.

I wager there is a foot gun component to this, in which Meta has tried to preemptively, either through gestures of goodwill or public reassurance or PR, institute various think tanks, work groups, and internal studies with an intent to alleviate the public's worry.

Those studies and workgroups actually could end up demonstrating that their products and algorithms and user interfaces, indeed, caused whatever this trial accuses them of doing. And if they didn't act according to what their internal data showed, I bet this is going to be the crux of the trial.

> It could, for instance, do so on the grounds that it is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which safeguards platforms from legal liability for content posted by third parties.

But then the platform decides what to show and to whom. It's not an impartial medium anymore, not since the engagement algorithms become a norm.

What's the gist of this case? Making social media addictive isn't a felony AFAIK. Big Tobacco has never been convicted of it either.

Meta, good reminder to buy diversified funds and not whatever hot company. (-29% - 1 year)

Fidelity zero is compelling, in a retirement account.

If nothing, at least 'Social Reckoning' movie will get some blockbuster success due to the timing.

Investors not panicking seems rational. Companies this large can survive astonishingly large fines...

Meta employees reading this: whether you work in Reality Labs, ads, operations, ML compiler, LLMs, marketing, whatever. You're all complicit in the harm. Remember that.

At worst Suckerberg just pays money. So the issue is not being solved.

These US corporations operate outside the law - and they are protected by the orange king who is just too incompetent for anything other than pocketing away more money from the people, which is the only real skill he has.

Facebook causes Face Cancer: their interface and algorithm are so toxic that it causes users to React by scratching their eyes out because it hurts so much to look at and use.

At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case

Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to proving exactly the extent of what Meta knew, and what they decided to do about it, and how that violated various laws.

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices.

And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.

But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.

My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.

For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed.

If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.

Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.

"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."

For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?”

Roughly that.

The best idea ive seen is if you decide what a user sees in an algorithm way (beyond “natural” ones like chronological) you are liable for the content - you are no longer a common carrier and can be sued for damages. That should be step 1.

Tobacco regulations don't regulate the general case, they regulate tobacco products. I think the same will apply to social media. There's no need to define an addictive platform anymore than there's a need to define an addictive substance. Instead all that you need to define is a social media platform. And that can be expanded/adjusted as necessary.

As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.

A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections.

If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.

In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive.

Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.

NAL, but looks like they're alleging something like negligence & deception. Addictiveness is just the mechanism of harm, so doesn't require a strict general case: just actual harm and the prior knowledge thereof.

So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."

It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.

The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.

You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.

A trial is also the wrong venue. It isn't illegal to make an addictive website.

Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.

I really hope it gets legislated away or kneecapped to the point where it isn't so effective. With all the legislation coming out regarding kids and social media, I hope that people will start to draw a line to the fact that maybe adults shouldn't be hooked up to it too. I don't think all content recommendation algorithms should go away, but we need to dial down the intensity by an order of magnitude or two.

With the amount of money behind them, I regret to say I don’t think they’ll get legislated away. My best guess is that social shaming slowly dwindles their usage. It’s actively shameful to scroll at dinner among Gen Z, for example. The problem becomes using the apps alone at home.

Can we just ban algorithms for content and go back to chronological feeds circa 2004 Facebook?

Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.

Those both have problems too, I'm sure.

Yeah, the internal research could be far more damaging than the existence of the harmful effects themselves

I’d bet that an exceptional legal team could make a pretty solid case based purely on the volume and testimony of behavioral psychologists on their payroll

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?”

Roughly that.

But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive

This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows. I'm a responsible adult. I want those things. I make use of them. They make my life better when I'm trying to listen to some music while I work on something or when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show. I do not want regulations coming along and making all of my products worse due to heavy-handed regulation.

Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.

I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.

Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain

I think a better take is:

> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.

If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.

Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

Mix this with "...of User-Generated Multimedia Content", and you might get closer. This excludes music platforms, for example (although, Band Camp and Soundcloud might have some issues with that, admittedly).

But isn't that just product design and Improvement?

I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.

Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.

What product does not listen to how users use the product to design the first or later version of a product?

Can we just ban algorithms for content and go back to chronological feeds circa 2004 Facebook?

Or maybe ban all content that the user isn't explicitly subscribed to.

Those both have problems too, I'm sure.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.

Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain

I think the major issue is, people still have the option of those older forms of feeds, people just don't like them.

New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.

Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.

Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up.

If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.

I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s

This, with a decent regulatory agency, wouldn't be that difficult to manage. We really could just say "infinite scrolling" and then add more things to the list as needed. We do it with firearms, medicines, drugs, vehicle parts, and about a million other things.

In fully supportive of prosecuting wrongdoing in the food industry.

But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.

Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?

why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

Unlike big tech, which would never do that.

Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.

In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.

You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?

> Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.

Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.

"You can stop smoking at any time"

"You can stop gambling at any time"

As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.

I'm not sure about that example. I'm seeing non tech people getting very addicted to their customized chat bots. Companies are very primed to eventually nudge them to enshittify the content of the responses and it could get bad.

> It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.

Suppose you have a video service which takes context from previous videos you watched to show you more videos you're interested in. Doesn't sound very addictive, does it? You described it in an innocuous way, but I can absolutely see that being a lead-in to a parasocial "relationship" or even AI psychosis.

> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.

What product does not listen to how users use the product to design the first or later version of a product?

A hammer doesn’t have a sensor to know how you are doing while you're hammering away, and it doesn't make the strike smoother to keep you hammering longer if you start seeming tired. Almost no products ever monitor you

Most products don't spy on you?

Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.

Unlike big tech, which would never do that.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

I think the major issue is, people still have the option of those older forms of feeds, people just don't like them.

New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.

In fully supportive of prosecuting wrongdoing in the food industry.

But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.

Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?

You’ve not already noticed that the end of every consumer-facing LLM chat always includes an invitation for just one more turn to keep the loop going?

Of course, but the users can’t be trusted to stay away from something designed to addict them. Only real solution is regulation, although the how is still a big question mark.

How? The 2 feeds on my IG account: "posts" and "reels" show content of people that I do not follow.

It seems to me like Meta is being singled out here. It's likely not the start of a movement to change how we live and get rid of/diminish bad influences on our lives - because I don't think we wanna really do that - not for economic reasons and also values - we like our personal freedoms. This is simply targeting one company whose CEO is very disliked so we can all carry on with our lives and feel better about ourselves. I do support restricting social media (not just Meta) in general for people under 18.

No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether

> It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.

Most products don't spy on you?

What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness

Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis

According to "Build things that last" author, 90% of the businesses evaluated are "customer first", meaning business listen to the customer and improve their produce based on that feedback.