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, according to a report by The Guardian. The case, which heard closing arguments this week, has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s. At the center of the trial are features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling, and constantly chirruping alerts, which have been accused of addicting the brains of children.
Mark Lanier, the lawyer prosecuting the case, claimed that the defendants were guilty of “addicting the brains of children”. However, Meta insisted that providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”. The trial has sparked a debate about the consequences of these features and whether they are creating addicts rather than users.
Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who worked in child online safety at Meta until 2021, explained that infinite scroll works by providing an infinite supply of content that gives users a constant dopamine hit. “The promise of these things is that there is always going to be something interesting and rewarding and there is a never-ending supply. That is the mechanic of infinite scroll,” he said.
Internal documents surfaced in the trial showed that other Meta employees were worried about signs of rising “reward tolerance” among users. One email conversation in 2020 showed one person referring to Instagram saying: “Oh my gosh y’all IG is a drug.” A colleague responds: “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.” Béjar told the Guardian that users are constantly chasing the next thing, even when they find what they are looking for.
The Psychology of Social Media
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, said that when young people scroll through their feed, they make split-second decisions to swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, watch, swipe, swipe, watch. “There is always a feeling that the next thing could be good and it’s only going to be another second or two,” she said.
Videos that autoplay are now everywhere from the Netflix homescreen to YouTube and Instagram. However, according to Béjar, consumers initially hated the feature. “They found it disruptive,” he said. “The result was that more people watched more videos and advertisers were happy, but users were unhappy.” Autoplay triggers a reaction in humans to watch enough to understand what is going on.
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 behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University, said that winning the competition for likes is a rewarding thing that gives users a little hit of enjoyment.
Addiction and Social Media
Griffith explained that when users enjoy something, their body produces dopamine and adrenaline, which can lead to addiction. However, he noted that social media addiction is not the same as addiction to nicotine or cocaine. “For some people it’s genuinely addictive,” he said. “But by my criteria for addiction, very few people would fulfil that.” Instead, he talked about social media’s “moreish quality”.
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. Instagram’s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, insisted that social media was 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 Future of Tech Companies
Jurors in the case against Meta and Google in Los Angeles began their deliberations on Friday. Their verdict will be closely watched as it could redefine tech companies’ responsibilities for their platform design. The case has sparked a debate about the role of tech companies in shaping user behavior and the consequences of their design choices.
