The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, is under fresh pressure regarding the impact of its platforms on the users, especially children and teenagers. The company’s recent settlement of some allegations that its products have led to problematic and addictive social media behavior has brought new pressure on management. The size of the conflict has also brought to the fore a bigger question of whether Mark Zuckerberg can continue to be in the middle of the decision-making process, since he has been running the company since Facebook’s inception.
The settlement is more than just a financial agreement. It’s representative of years of rising concern about the roles of the big tech companies and the outcomes of building platforms for engagement. While it doesn’t resolve the scientific dispute over the degree of addictiveness of social media, it does point to humanitarian concerns of both the design of digital products, as well as the way content is recommended, and the response of companies once evidence of harm surfaces.
Mark Zuckerberg has been at the heart of Meta’s evolution from a college social-networking platform to one of the world’s biggest tech firms. Facebook grew into a massive company under his leadership, purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp and eventually joining the overall business model of Meta. The expansion generated huge value, but also fed into a series of privacy, misinformation, political abuse, online abuse, online content control and youth welfare controversies.
The discussion about Meta didn’t just happen all at once. Since over a decade, analysts, researchers, civil society organizations and journalists have studied the effect that social media corporations have on society. The political debate on social media and disinformation during major elections and the Brexit campaign lent momentum to concerns. In the wake of these events, there was a greater focus on scrutinizing the algorithms and business models that shape the content millions of people encounter daily.
The problem is that social media platforms are designed in a particular manner. The users do not just get to see an uncolored collection of posts. Algorithms determine what appears more prominently, based on factors like previous interactions, viewing time, signals of interest, etc. The more time a user spends on the site, the greater the chances the site has of providing advertising. This generates a strong business reason to smoothen the user experience to keep the attention.
This doesn’t mean that all features are deliberately evil. The decisions made by technology firms, however, can have ramifications that are hard to foresee and even harder to undo. Recommended content that is meant to keep viewers engaged can also lead to the viewing of extreme, sensational or misleading content. Those effects can be especially troublesome for younger users, in whom emotional and social development are still in progress.
The analogy with tobacco is becoming more frequent when talking about regulation of technology. This was a turning point for public opinion on smoking when research and public health activists made it clear that the effects went beyond the individual smoker. The introduction of the term “second hand smoke” was a step in the right direction for demonstrating the costs to families and to the broader community of harmful products. With the passage of time, governments adopted age limits, warning labels, public education awareness campaigns, and cigarette smoking bans on places.
Social media is certainly not like tobacco, and the parallel has a number of important limitations. There are some real benefits to digital platforms, such as communication, education, entertainment, community and access to information. They are relied on by millions of people for both their livelihood and their personal lives. But the tobacco analogy proves helpful in one way: it suggests that consumers should take responsibility for managing the risks associated with such a product in part due to its design.
This is reflected in the most recent bans, applied to teenagers. Time limits for youth use, limiting overnight use and decreasing notification alerts are strategies that can assist families in controlling excessive use. Improved age verification and parental engagement could also provide more parental choice over the use of social media by young people.
Meanwhile, they face new challenges. If platforms have to gather more information about their users then age verification can raise privacy issues. Also, parents may discover that it is not the quantity of time that matters, but the quality of content that teenagers are viewing. What one teenager reads on a platform could be very different from what another teen reads on a platform in the same platform in an hour.
One of the most challenging problems is Content Recommendation. Controversial topics that may include drugs, gambling, sex, dangerous challenges, conspiracy theories can spread quickly online. While an individual post may be taken down, the overall recommendation system can still recommend other content that is related. This makes moderation a lot more difficult than merely deleting harmful material once it’s reported.
Meta has also been criticized on a number of other points for privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, misinformation and hate speech. The company has come under fire for the part its platforms have played in spreading deadly stories and misinformation about public health. The thorny issues have repeatedly posed the same basic problem: what is the proper responsibility of a technology firm in a case where the design and size of its product is a factor in actual harm?
The financial implications have been enormous, and fines and settlements might not cure the situation. Even large penalties can be shrugged off by a big tech firm when the bottom line for their overall business is strong. The more challenging part, from a regulatory standpoint, is establishing incentives to incentivize enterprise to prevent harm rather than just punish for it.
