The recent landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google in the US has brought attention to the features woven into the fabric of online platforms, and how they contribute to user addiction. As the lawyer prosecuting the case, Mark Lanier, claimed, it's as easy as ABC to see how these features can addict the brains of children. However, the tech companies insist that providing a safer and healthier experience for young people has always been core to their work.
Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling, and constantly chirruping alerts are at the center of the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s. According to The Guardian, these features have been designed to keep users engaged, but the question remains: are they creating addicts rather than users?
Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who worked in child online safety at Meta until 2021, explains that infinite scrolling works by providing an infinite supply of content that gives users a constant dopamine hit. As he told The Guardian, the promise of these features is that there is always something interesting and rewarding, with no bounds on the mechanism.
The Mechanics of Infinite Scrolling
Internal documents surfaced in the trial showed that Meta employees were worried about signs of rising reward tolerance among users. One email conversation in 2020 referred to Instagram as a drug, with a colleague responding, Lol, I mean, all social media. We're basically pushers. Béjar notes that users are constantly chasing the next thing, even when they find what they're looking for, and that the promise of something else catches their attention right after.
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, observes that when young people scroll through their feed, they flip really, really fast, making split-second decisions to swipe, watch, or swipe again. There's always a feeling that the next thing could be good, and it's only going to be another second or two.
Autoplay and its Consequences
Videos that autoplay are now everywhere, from the Netflix homescreen to YouTube and Instagram. However, according to Béjar, who was at Facebook when it became standard, consumers initially hated it, finding it disruptive. The result was that more people watched more videos, and advertisers were happy, but users were unhappy. Autoplay triggers a reaction to watch enough to understand what's going on, and Lanier compared endless scroll and autoplay to getting free tortilla chips at a restaurant and not being able to stop eating them.
Notifications and likes are other parts of the social media apparatus that keep people, especially children, hooked. Mark Griffith, professor emeritus of behavioral addiction at Nottingham Trent University, notes that winning the competition for likes is a rewarding thing that gives a little hit of enjoyment, producing dopamine and adrenaline pointers in the body.
Problematic Use and Habitual Use
Griffith explains that social media consumption mostly falls into the categories of habitual use, which can affect productivity and relationships without necessarily ruining one's life, and problematic use, which has more serious implications. However, he notes that for some people, it's genuinely addictive, but by his criteria for addiction, very few people would fulfill that. Instead, he talks about social media's moreish quality.
Giving evidence this week, Instagram's chief executive, Adam Mosseri, insisted that social media is not clinically addictive. People could be addicted to social media in the same way that they could be addicted to a good television show, but that was not the same thing, he said. The jurors in the case against Meta and Google in Los Angeles have begun their deliberations, and their verdict will be closely watched as it could redefine tech companies' responsibilities for their platform design.
