“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” Jeff Hammerbacher, an entrepreneur and early Facebook employee, said this to Ashley Vance in his BusinessWeek article in 2011. Few words have ever stuck so stubbornly.
The quote has been infinitely recycled and rehashed. It is a neck tattoo of an era; the signal often cited as the reason global society has not reached utopia despite its tremendous digital advancements.
Fifteen years later, we appear to have arrived at our collective Damascus moment. What is being widely sung as a landmark ruling came out of Los Angeles last week. A 20-year-old woman (referred to only by her first name, Kaley) took Meta and Google to court, blaming them for a number of severe mental health challenges she has endured — notably, depression and body dysmorphia.
The jury ruled in her favour, awarding her $3m in damages and a subsequent $3m in punitive damages. (Meta absorbs 70% of the responsibility and Google 30%. Snapchat and TikTok previously reached an undisclosed settlement.)
It’s the details that leave a haunting impression. Kaley was six years old when she first started using YouTube and was on Instagram by age nine.
Experts and former employees called in as witnesses spoke scathingly of the tactics used by the tech giants to make their products — emboldened by infinite scrolling — as addictive as possible. And specifically designed to ensnare the attention of children.
Metaphors of seedy gambling and drugs were invoked to drive home the point. A few million dollars is cents on the street for these companies, but those characterisations will do severe, incalculable damage.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s exaltations — “We’re building this thing to be a good thing that has value in people’s “lives” — evidently failed to sway opinion.
It was a bad week for Meta. A separate verdict in New Mexico ordered it to pay $375m in penalties after it found that its platforms failed to protect users from harm and had enabled child exploitation.
The finding owes much to an incredible 2023 investigation by The Guardian into how Facebook and Instagram were being used as marketplaces for child sex trafficking.
The two verdicts, which Meta has indicated it will appeal, come as hundreds of similar cases are being registered by US courts. Observers are describing it as tech’s “big tobacco” moment — the tipping point when public and legislative opinion inexorably turns.
Until now, Big Tech has been shielded by the infamous Section 230 protections — essentially legislation that has enabled them to skirt responsibility for user-generated content.
In his testimony, Zuckerberg spoke of addiction almost as a fait accompli to a well-made service. He insisted: “If you make your product better, then people will use it more.”
Last week was a rejection of that line of thinking. As a society we are now confronting the very fabric of these platforms. We are interrogating not just what appears on them, but their infrastructure and the foundational principles it’s built on.
It goes beyond Meta. And even social media. The very rules that underpin the internet are, in effect, on trial now. The line is being drawn in real time.
As a society we are now confronting the very fabric of these platforms. We are interrogating not just what appears on them, but their infrastructure and the foundational principles it’s built on.
Consider the words you are reading now. They have been crafted in the hope that you will keep reading them. They appear in a newspaper or on a website that has been designed to be as alluring as possible.
The sentiment of the Los Angeles jury is that online actors are going beyond those basic ambitions and turning to techniques of a more nefarious nature.
Most of us feel icky when we talk about online regulation … and for good reason. The internet is a bastion of human potential, broadly speaking uninhibited by the whims of any one government. But the reality is that the organic erection of its guardrails could never keep pace with social media’s mid-oughts big bang.
Did you know multiple reliable studies have found that popular caffeinated soft drinks could perceptibly taste the same without caffeine? Which raises the question of why it continues as an ingredient. Or if its highly addictive nature is just a coincidence.
Until now, Meta et al faced little to no scrutiny on what went into their sauce. Hammerbacher’s colleagues were put to work with the primary purpose of hooking people for just another 10 seconds, so they could be shown just one more ad.
Few moral or practical limitations stood in the way of those ambitions. They did, because they could. This week suggests that could all be changing.
• Feltham is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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