YouTube, Meta and the case of the Infinite Scroll

“A jury in California has just found tech giants Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark marked social media addiction trial. The jury found both companies liable for negligence and failure to warn, saying that these companies did design their apps to be addictive for young kids. This is a real Bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20 year old woman. She's only identified as KGM, and she had accused the social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos.”

“Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 basically said that platforms are not responsible for what users post. So if the videos are harmful, it's not on the platform. Traditionally, publishers are responsible for everything on their site. The New York Times looks at every article before it is published, and so they are responsible for what they post. And tech platforms, were sort of granted immunity through section two thirty.”

“This was a bellwether. What does that mean? So this means that this is basically a test case. There are thousands of cases like this that are essentially pending, and this one now sets the stage potentially for how the rest of these cases will go and how they can potentially also win over the platforms.”

“One of our writers said, when I open Instagram, it feels like I'm hitting a vape. And I was like, woah. Yeah. Like, I know what the feeling is. And, like, maybe TikTok is more like like drinking a Four Loko or something, but, there's a feeling to it. And we're older. Like, we existed without it. So we we are aware of it. But if you only existed within this, it is pretty crazy.”

“Tim Cook said, well, I don't want people using them too much. I don't want people looking at the smartphone more than they're looking in someone's eyes as if they're just scrolling endlessly. This is not the way you wanna spend your day. Go out and spend it in nature. And that's the guy who sells the device.”

“There are warning labels similar to cigarettes, that have been instituted in four states, California being one of them, where if a minor spends over three hours on the app for thirty seconds, a label comes on screen that covers 75 of the screen, and talks about the mental health effects.”

“So there's an obvious parallel there to the tobacco industry. And if we look back at the 1998 tobacco settlement, there was a $206,000,000,000 payout from tobacco companies. And they then were hit with marketing restrictions, especially to minors, and, like, an industry wide shift in how they operated. And, basically, the case in 1998 reframed smoking from a choice to an engineered addiction. And that's kind of what's happening here, suggesting that social media is not a choice. It is engineered addiction.”

“It covers these different creators who speak predominantly to young men. They're very misogynistic. A lot of them are, you know, promoting gambling websites, scams. Some of them are running, like, only fans rings almost as if they're, like, modern day pimps. And one of the weird things watching it, all of them had their YouTube play buttons up on their walls. And I felt so strange that they valued something in the same way that I do, yet we share none of the same values.”

“I think the big shift now from platforms and creators is gonna go from capture attention at all costs to capture attention, comma, responsibly. That's the new tagline of the creator economy. It's not as sexy. It might not be as big, of an industry. But I guess that was also maybe relatively Hollywood capture attention responsibly. Like, it has to go through so many filters to, like, finally make it to theaters.”

“Somebody pitched this on Twitter. I think it's such a good idea that there should be business hours for social media that it should just shut down. Yeah. It's nine to five. It just shut down, and you can't use it when you go home. That'd be so amazing that you wake up. It's still not on until nine. But sometimes I like social media at home. Like, I'll ask my wife, like, you got any good TikTok?”