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Meta Designed Platforms To Get Children Addicted, Court Documents Allege (theguardian.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint. The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew -- but never disclosed -- it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents.

In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage." The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 -- far fewer than half of the reported accounts -- were "disabled for potentially being under the age of 13" that year. The complaint noted that at times Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5m accounts of younger children awaiting action. The complaint alleges this and other incidents violate the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires that social media companies provide notice and get parental consent before collecting data from children. The lawsuit also focuses on longstanding assertions that Meta knowingly created products that were addictive and harmful to children, brought into sharp focus by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed that internal studies showed platforms like Instagram led children to anorexia-related content. Haugen also stated the company intentionally targets children under the age of 18.

Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called "teen fundamentals" which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains' relative immaturity, and teenagers' tendency to be driven by "emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward" and asked how these asked how these characteristics could "manifest ... in product usage." [...] One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company's business in a 2019 email. But a year later, the same executive expressed frustration that while Facebook readily studied the usage of underage users for business reasons, it didn't show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger kids and remove them from its platforms.
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Meta Designed Platforms To Get Children Addicted, Court Documents Allege More

Meta Designed Platforms To Get Children Addicted, Court Documents Allege

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  • Git 'em when they're young! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday November 27, 2023 @10:45PM (#64037229)

    Looks like ol' Zuck's taken a lesson from the tobacco industry!

    However, this all seems just too nefarious. If you follow the money, I have an inkling that this just a play to get congress to institute some kind of mandatory online ID system. That would be Meta et al's wet dream... give them your government ID, and now they can actually track you from cradle to grave instead of just a vague profile. Suffer a little bit of bad PR now and maybe they can get those laws written...

    • That may be someone's end-game plan, but I doubt it's something Zuckerberg dreamed up and orchestrated all himself. I have inside information that this was happening from the earliest days at MySpace too, and I think it's reasonable to assume that it's been a dirty secret kept by literally every single other social media site between then and now.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Narcocide ( 102829 )

        And yes, I'm pretty sure that I've been modded down for sounding an alarm about it here before, and I won''t be surprised when it happens again.

      • That may be someone's end-game plan, but I doubt it's something Zuckerberg dreamed up and orchestrated all himself.

        Don't worry, my friend - this is America, and dear Zuck will not be held accountable. Some night shift Janitor is gonna pay though.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's the age group when people are the most pliable. If you Google the phrase you'll find a ton of rather dodgy religious organizations talking about it. It's been extensively studied.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Yep explains why the Groomers or so dead set on sexualizing middle schoolers and normalizing their practices of sodomy and other perverted relationships with that group.

        Its a good thing religious organizations are waking up to this. The overlap between big tech, the queer lobby, is rather alarming, and yes they use the same play book.

         

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Waking up to it? It's been high on the religious agenda since at least the middle ages. A "good thing"? Well, that depends on just what your goals are.

        • religious organizations just don't like the competition,

        • Yep explains why the Groomers or so dead set on sexualizing middle schoolers and normalizing their practices of sodomy and other perverted relationships with that group.

          Its a good thing religious organizations are waking up to this. The overlap between big tech, the queer lobby, is rather alarming, and yes they use the same play book.

          If the choice is between buggery and religion? Give me buggery. Fucking hells, nothing skeeves me out worse that religious indoctrination of children.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by whitroth ( 9367 )

          Groomers? You mean like the Promise Keepers, who get their daughters to see their fathers as their boyfriends?

          FOAD. If I wanted to groom, I'd join your church and become a "youth pastor".

    • Less the tobacco industry & more the gaming industry, i.e. gambling. They've been recruiting specialists in behavioural cognitive psychology for as long as it's been as thing in order to get people to gamble more, for longer, & bet higher. Our law-makers have also colluded with gambling companies to make such practices trade secrets so that it's close to impossible to investigate them for causing harm. This isn't just Meta, they're just one of the more egregious examples of industry-wide & persi

    • Honestly, if FB *hadn't* done something like this I'd be more surprised. It's literally their job to understand human psychology, and understanding teens is the "start" of the user journey - and what goes for teens still holds true (to a lesser extent) into the 20s and much further. If they weren't building that into product, they'd be FriendsReunited by now.

      As for allowing under age people accounts - there they have a problem. It's obvious they were doing it, although it's not obvious how much they really

    • declare facebook a church and everythings fine!

    • Looks like ol' Zuck's taken a lesson from the tobacco industry!

      However, this all seems just too nefarious. If you follow the money, I have an inkling that this just a play to get congress to institute some kind of mandatory online ID system. That would be Meta et al's wet dream... give them your government ID, and now they can actually track you from cradle to grave instead of just a vague profile. Suffer a little bit of bad PR now and maybe they can get those laws written...

      Give them your government ID? That's not Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg's goal. The end-goal is to BECOME the electronic government ID. Make Facebook mandatory for all US citizens, and tie it directly to EVERY aspect of your life. It wasn't that long ago they were wanting access to banking and medical records. They still push to have access to all your data every chance they get. If they could prop themselves up properly as "the" online identity tool, and get the government to climb aboard? Kiss your privacy fore

  • Check the age of the average Facebook and Instagram user, they are old. Hell, I'm in my 40s and Facebook is mostly used by my mother's generation. Young people use Discord, Guilded, and TikTok.

    • Your observer bias has zero to do with the story.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        I think you're missing a point being made that is relevant. Meta makes a lot of products. All of them are made on the same formula, but targeting different demographics today. Facebook did indeed start trying to addict everyone. Today, it's mainly for addicting the older people, men and women.

        Instagram is the meta product aimed at addicting young girls. Meta lost the young men to youtube and young boys to tiktok. Tiktok notably is fighting really hard for young women and adult women market with instagram an

        • I think you're missing a point being made that is relevant. Meta makes a lot of products. All of them are made on the same formula, but targeting different demographics today. Facebook did indeed start trying to addict everyone. Today, it's mainly for addicting the older people, men and women.

          No, you're missing the point. What you *THINK* Meta is doing today has no bearing on the lawsuit. Instagram and Facebook actually continue to be full of kids despite the meme that it's only for adults, and all of that is irrelevant in the face of the accusations which are related to actions of the past.

          You can't pretend these kids don't exist when the whole story is about them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            Have you tried addressing the point instead of going for the tried and true "but it's not ALL so nothing else matters" argument.

            Edgelording only gets you so far.

  • Facebook Reels works... (Score:3)

    by AnonCowardSince1997 ( 6258904 ) on Monday November 27, 2023 @11:27PM (#64037307)

    Pretty well at hooking Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y too.

    Have had a few friends decide all they could do so as to not waste time on Reels was to delete Facebook, which is certainly for the best.

    • Re:Facebook Reels works... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @12:08AM (#64037349)
      I don't think it's an accident though. Facebook has teams of psychiatrists whose job it is to figure out how to hook people and they use different tactics or different age groups. In general people get upset when you do that to children because they haven't had a chance to be taught or learned any critical thinking skills. They are highly vulnerable to manipulation tactics
      • The psychology aspects of the services that social media companies contract or hire are in cognitive behavioural psychology, which has little, if anything, to do with psychiatry, which is more or less diagnosing disorders & prescribing drugs & therapies, much like a doctor. Think more in terms of teaching & training people who don't have psychological disorders to change & adopt both physical & mental habits. In most cases, it's for their own benefit in order to do particular jobs or get

      • Adults too, we underestimate that. Our software, we keep patching over and over to fix vulnerabilities. Our brains are still the way we evolved and we have at best inadequate patches for the exploits out there.

  • This seems to check a lot of the boxes for the potential of a nuclear verdict. Targeting kids to use something that is potentially harmful + large, faceless yet pervasive corporate defendant + tens of millions of plaintiffs in a hypothetical class action, etc...

    • By "nuclear verdict" do you mean people high in the hierarchy at Facebook going to jail? Is that even possible in the jurisdiction where this is being judged? Because that's what needs to happen if the charges are true.

      • Seems that in the US legal system it is far easier to win a civil suit for (massive) damages, than it is to secure a guilty verdict in criminal charges. In case of damages they just need to show Meta are responsible for them. To actually convict managers, it’ll be a lot of talk about “unwittingly”, “knowingly” and “deliberately”.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • in the US, I usually take the term "nuclear verdict" to mean either a verdict so high that it would far more than bankrupt the defendant(s), or, in the event the defendant(s) may be able to pay, one which hits a new high water mark according to some metric.

    • It depends on what they can prosecute in court. For typical violations, verdicts, & sentences, search for "COPPA fines." It looks like a fraction of a percentage of what they've made from breaking the law. It'd be very difficult to win a case against Meta for any harm that may have resulted from children using its services. Possibly even more difficult than prosecuting fast food industry giants for making kids fat & unhealthy.
  • Naturally, F****erburg is doing this. With a total absence of a moral compass and being solely guided by $profit$, there really isn't anywhere else to go. Do we have time to turn things around? I very much doubt it: "All your information are known to us already." Hard core regulation (which is far beyond what the EU is proposing) and significant sanctions (in the tens of percent of revenue per day) might work. The current disincentives are irrelevant even though they are at the scale of millions. It's j

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      How would that work in the world where majority is addicted and likes the services being offered? Your suggestion would de facto kill service quality, because less tracking inevitably means less accuracy in suggesting what you would like to see next.

      You would have to have an anti-democratic progressive uprising, where leaders genuinely believe that "they know better than the people" (TM) (I'm not sure who gets the trademark, it's a good fight between communists, socialists, fascists, theocrats, royalists an

  • Well, not that shocked.

  • Go for the mentally incomplete. Easiest revenue stream. This is where capitalism has always failed, and social media is just the latest version of pushing tobacco and booze to the young. If I had a say, I'd ban it here and now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Wait, how's that relevant to capitalism? It's the progressive movement that always went for the youth, ever since the birth of modern progressive movement in 1800s. It's even in their literature as one of the core tenets, that adults are anti-revolutionary because they have something to lose in the revolution, whereas youth are yet uninvested in the system and therefore the primary target to go in and change the system if properly indoctrinated by the revolutionaries.

      All of these companies are steeped in pr

  • if parents were parents and don't let them on....

  • Sooo.... it's all good when organized religions play this game but we lose our bananas when companies exploit the same delusional glitches.....

    Kids are too dumb for the real world so we should do some vague thing whilst yelling about how dumb kids are. This is a great message.

    As a parent, your one fricken job is to create a functional, rational, human being. If you can't do that, you failed. Own it. Quit trying to parent-by-proxy your way out of it.

  • They have made an absurd amount of money. Now they'll potentially face some minor fines. Being evil was an excellent financial decision.

  • You say "addiction", I say "engagement". I guess it depends on which side of profit fence you're on.

  • perhaps somewhere in the documents there are more details, but there is a big difference between knowing there are overall a million underage users and knowing specifically which users those are. As the summary stated, in one case they could not be sure that the user was underage based simply on complaints from another user. I know I don't want my account shut down because some unverified person claimed they were my mother. It's an open platform, and in the USA at least the people resist any form of central

  • Any good scam, including religion, social media, etc. knows that you need to indoctrinate your victims when they can least defend themselves. Meta does know this too, obviously. And they will probably get away with it.

    • Couldn't the public school system do this? Find out what gets students attention so they will willingly go to school.

  • Look out (Score:4, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @09:12AM (#64037839) Homepage Journal

    In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage." The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 -- far fewer than half of the reported accounts -- were "disabled for potentially being under the age of 13" that year.

    There's no way for Meta to know how old people are without doing ID verification. That is the very next thing these people will be screaming for.

    You do not want the precedent of ID verification set for internet services.

    You do not want Faceboot to shut down your account because someone accuses you of being under 13.

    There's only one way to fix this problem, and it is parenting. Parents pretend their children live in a world where things they don't know about can't hurt them, and then are shocked when they get hurt, because they are in deep denial about it — usually to support being in denial about their own actions and lifestyle. If you don't teach your children about predators, they will learn from the predators.

  • If you say that Meta targeted kids, then where are the parents? Oh, the parents are probably gambling at slot machines at the closest casino sipping on watered-down drinks.

    Addiction can start at an early age.

  • I've been posting off and on for decades. I still don't understand the intent and function of the karma system.

  • fines should be large enough so they are not part of "making business".

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