Does Facebook Get Children Addicted to the Site
December 15, 2023
Several officials at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, acknowledged the social media platforms are designed to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, according to newly released company documents.
One 2020 internal presentation by Meta officials discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity, and teenagers’ tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward.” They focused on how these characteristics could be “manifest(ed) . . . in product usage”, according to a report in today’s Guardian.
The documents were made public as part of lawsuits filed in October by attorney generals of 41 states in the U.S. The lawsuits allege that Meta’s “platform algorithms push users to descend into ‘rabbit holes’ in an effort to maximize user engagement. Features like infinite scroll and near-constant alerts were created with the “express goal of hooking young users [using] manipulative tactics [that] lure children and teens back onto the platform,” according to a statement issued by the New Jersey attorney general Mathew Platkin. “At the same time, Meta falsely assured the public that these features are safe and suitable for young users.”
A major issue for teenagers is problematic use - when their inability to stop using social media becomes detrimental to their work, sleep, or social life. Instead of taking steps to reduce underage usage, as well as mitigate the associated psychological and health harms of Facebook and Instagram, Meta not only concealed these harms but also amplified them by employing features that fueled young users’ addiction to its platforms, the attorney generals state.
Meta relied on Instagram to increase usage growth especially among teens, who had a “higher tolerance” for being interrupted by notifications than adult users. It also created charts “boasting Instagram’s penetration into 11- and 12-year-old demographic cohorts,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Over the past seven years, there have been several stories about the addictive strategies pursued by social media companies. In 2021, the issue got wider attention, especially from European and U.S. lawmakers, after Frances Haugen’s testimony in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress.
A former Facebook executive, Haugen revealed that the company intentionally targets children under the age of 18 and steered them towards damaging content, like anorexia-related topics. Also, Haugen noted that the Instagram app was addictive “like cigarettes” and that Meta put “astronomical profits ahead of people.”
Facebook and other American social media platforms are seeing little or no growth in the number of users in the U.S., their most lucrative market. They are banned in China, the world’s biggest market.
Eager to show continued growth in revenues and profits, Meta, parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as Alphabet, owner of YouTube, are aggressively pursuing the Indian market, given its mostly young 1.4 billion people. So is Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
Haugen and other former Meta whistleblowers and researchers say that the push of addictive content among children and teenagers - as well as fake news - is far worse in India and other developing countries. This is due to weaker management practices in those markets, in large part driven by the desire to grow rapidly, as well as a lack of regulatory and legal scrutiny by the local governments.
Children below the age of 13 are generally barred from social media platforms by U.S. federal law. Despite the law, Meta reportedly has as many as four million underage users in the U.S. The number of underage users on Meta platforms in India can only be very, very much larger: roughly six times more Indian youths (246 million) are ages 5-14, than U.S. youths in the same age group (43 million).
The addiction to social media is a “youth mental health crisis” that has ended lives, devastated families, and damaged the potential of a generation of young people, says Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General.
In addition to addictive content, Instagram’s algorithms also serve content to those it decides might have a prurient interest in children. In a study published today, reporters of the Wall Street Journal found that Instagram’s Reels, a platform for short videos, served jarring doses of salacious content, “including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” to the test accounts they set up. In one instance, “a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a 10-year-old girl,” the Journal reported.
Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government demand that Meta and other American social media platforms dismantle their addictive features and ban salacious content to protect India’s children and teenagers?
After all, the social media companies are dependent on the Indian market for their current and future financial success. For instance, the largest number of users of Meta’s platforms are in India, not in the U.S.: WhatsApp has more than 500 million users in India; Facebook more than 370 million; and Instagram Reels more than 327 million users. In fact, these Meta platforms face no competition in India. In the U.S., Reels faces competition from TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance.
The stock price of Meta, which has a market value of $860 billion, will collapse if the Modi government demands the company’s platforms protect children and the management refuses to implement them.
Will Modi demand that Facebook make the necessary changes? So far, there are few if any indications.
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