The science of smartphone addiction:
This is huge news, a landmark verdict that will inform hundreds of cases to come. While the plaintiff, a 20-year-old identified only as KGM, has been awarded $6m in damages, it's the verdict itself that's most damaging, as it opens the door to many more lawsuits against tech companies.
KGM's lawyers, in their closing remarks, said: “How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones. These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”
One literature review by Italian pediatrists linked digital addiction in children with depression, diet, and psychological issues, as well as 'sleep, addiction, anxiety, sex related issues, behavioral problems, body image, physical activity, online grooming, sight, headache, and dental care'. KGM was six years old when she first got addicted to social media, according to her testimony.
Researchers in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have also linked 'high social media usage' among adolescents to 'a statistically significant change in the developmental trajectory of cerebellum volumes', a part of the brain associated with emotional control. It could literally influence the brain's physical development.
Another report says: "frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments".
However, it's worth noting that none of these findings are yet conclusive.
They're not entirely wrong. The basis of addiction is all about hijacking the 'mesolimbic system', the part of the brain responsible for associating certain behaviors with rewards, both natural (food, sex, play) and artificial (drugs such as alcohol and nicotine, and notifications). Once a reward is achieved, dopamine is released.
One study on teen addiction linked activation of the mesolimbic pathway to social media use, stating children are "often victims of an unrelenting 'dopamine cycle' created in a loop of 'desire' induced by endless social media feeds, 'seeking and anticipating rewards' in the way of photo tagging, likes, and comments," the latter being the triggers that continue to reinstate the 'desire' behavior.
"The overactivation of the dopamine system in such individuals can further increase the risk of addictive behaviors or pathological changes that lead to a decline in pleasure from natural rewards." Essentially, all you want to do is keep scrolling, just like an addict looking for an endless fix because natural rewards no longer provide the same pleasure as scrolling.
According to CNN, KGM's lawyer Mark Lanier said in his opening statement: “This case is about two of the richest corporations who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” Lanier said in his opening statement. “The swipe, for a child, like Kaley, this motion is a handle of a slot machine. But every time she swipes, it’s not for money, but for mental stimulation.”
KGM's lawyers mention the infinitely scrollable feeds and video autoplay as features designed to keep people on the apps, maintain attention, and encourage addictive behaviors. But it's ok, because the inventor of the scrollable feed, Aza Raskin, apologized when he unleashed this horror upon the world.
Combine this with the infinitely scrollable feed and addictive, casino-esque nature of social media platforms, and you get doomscrolling, a constant stream of bad news, enraging user-created content, and messaging that you're never going to be enough unless you do this, or buy that, or look like this.
[...] The bottom line? Children are easily impressionable, and if online negativity is more rewarding than positivity, unfettered access to an endless stream of content designed to make users feel worse to increase engagement is going to warp their worldview. According to the jury, in this case, the buck stops at the algorithm's designers.
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Related Stories
Technology doesn't just make life easier, it changes how we think, how we act, and what we come to expect from the world around us. The biggest shifts show up slowly, fold into everyday life, and eventually become invisible. Over time, a tool or system starts shaping behavior:
Smartphones - Smartphones didn't just improve communication, they removed its boundaries. Messages became instant, information became constant, and waiting became optional.
Before smartphones, there were natural gaps in the day. Time between conversations. Time without updates. Time where nothing was happening. Those gaps have largely disappeared.
Now, attention is continuously pulled in multiple directions. Notifications interrupt focus, and moments of silence are often filled automatically.
[...] GPS Navigation - Finding your way used to require memory, awareness, and decision-making. People learned routes, recognized landmarks, and built mental maps of the places they lived and traveled through. GPS replaced much of that process: following instructions rather than remembering directions.
[...] In fact, studies have suggested that reliance on GPS can weaken spatial memory over time, as the brain outsources that responsibility.
[...] Social Media Algorithms - Social media introduced systems that decide what you see. Early platforms showed content in chronological order but over time algorithms began prioritizing posts based on engagement, predicting what would keep you scrolling the longest.
This changed behavior on both sides. Users consume what is most attention-grabbing, and creators adapt by producing content that performs well within the system. Over time, this creates feedback loops, where certain types of content are amplified while others disappear. What you see begins is heavily filtered and shaped, yet it feels like a reflection of reality.
Related:
- The 'Engineering of Addiction' - 3 Ways Meta and YouTube Are Claimed to Have Harmed Users
- Smartphones Promise Satisfaction and Meaning, Deliver Only More Searching
- Turning Phones on Silent May Increase Phone Checking
- Smartphone Addiction - It's not Just for Kids
- Should Smartphones Come with Health Warnings About Psychological Addiction?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @02:33AM (23 children)
Why didn't this rage get vented on the tobacco, processed foods and prescription opioid companies? I mean, I guess it did, sort of, but other than tobacco it feels like they got a slap on the wrists... Billions in profits penalized by millions in fines and weak assurances that they won't do it again. Tobacco did get dramatically reduced, but vaping just repeated their plays for another generation of nicotine addicts, not even the creativity to find a new neurotransmitter - give the screen pushers credit for development of new dopamine sources.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday April 06, @02:48AM (6 children)
Big Tobacco held things off with a long running disinformation and propaganda campaigns, I presume social control media is also doing the same. With tobacco, that included hiring say-for-pay fake research and smear campaigns against opponents. There was also product placement. Take Hollywood movies, for example. Basically any time you saw someone smoking in movies from the 1940s onward they the studios were paid to show it. That's happening again with "influencers". That part is simply paid product placement. Also, during WWII, combat rations were stocked with a pair of cigarettes each, and so on.
I figure something similar has been going on behind the scenes with social control media. Many sites came and went before Facebook but somehow every time the masses started to lose interest in Facebook and it started to decline, there was a flurry of FOMO articles in the tabloids. Eventually it stuck. I have my suspicions based on Bill Binney's statement that the government three letter agencies would have invented Facebook had it not happened along when it did. It's probably a step further than that even. I mean look at what a clown Zuckerberg is and yet Facebook still is swimming in money.
In both cases, tobacco and social control media, the aim is to get people hooked before they are teenagers so that they have little to no chance of breaking the addiction later even if they want to.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Monday April 06, @03:29AM (2 children)
Can you point to any example or evidence of this? Genuinely curious.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday April 06, @05:38AM (1 child)
It something I observed repeatedly in Facebook's early days. I haven't seen it written up. The articles all were written around pushing people's buttons over FOMO and they generally occurred when other articles pointed out a decline in interest in Facebook. I figure they would have gone the way of Myspace and all the others which tried previously had there not been the intervention which Bill Binney mentioned. And, yes, that talk is also long gone from Youtube.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @11:57AM
Remember, Zuck is Harvard alum, deep in with the Bushes and the rest of them.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @11:54AM
>the government three letter agencies would have invented Facebook had it not happened along
The recent TikTok maneuver was a virtually open government takeover, MAGA isn't good at subtlety, and the business method of R&D has transformed from deliberate directed internal research to acquisition of things that have already proven themselves in the open market.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @12:37PM
Even in the mid 1990s Phillip Morris was still doing new internal research around depth of inhalation, we sold them new gear to do the measurements with - at 3x our normal price, which was of course still trivial to them.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 07, @01:53PM
From selling ads, mostly to bots, until the people buying ads figure out the grift and stop sending money... Dead internet theory and all that.
People I know IRL don't use FB anymore outside of outliers like the rare addict or club/group coordination (my son's track team, for example). For example, I can't find old high school classmates on FB anymore, or if they're there, its no posts in years. Note they're not dead (most of them, not yet LOL I'm not THAT old)
Lots of companies spending lots of money to show expensive ads to bots... for now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday April 06, @06:53AM (12 children)
It did. This is the rage of the litigant looking to score money from a fat target. They've all been targeted at one time or another.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @11:45AM (11 children)
>This is the rage of the litigant
On brand, as usual. Never change.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday April 06, @01:47PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Monday April 06, @04:42PM (9 children)
Why don't you do us all a favor and YOU follow the money and tell us where it leads?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 06, @04:48PM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @08:18PM (7 children)
Not all litigation is about the money.
In these cases: follow the corpses. Years of lives lost. Quality of life lost during those shortened years. The most effective litigation penalty is monetarty, so I'm not disappointed that that is pursued - but every single instance I listed above has cost hundreds of millions of years of life lost either due to early death, dramatically reduced quality of life - zero economic productivity, and actual negative productivity as healthy people spend their lives caring for the injured who would not have been injured if corporate greed had not exploited scientifically proven addictive chemically accessed neurotransmitter pathways.
Screen-time will be a more difficult link to demonstrate harm - it's stimulation like gambling and casinos this time instead of chemicals, but the methods of the harmers are virtually identical.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday April 06, @09:29PM (6 children)
What does that have to do with the lawsuit? Sounds like someone blaming external forces for their problems and then collecting $6 million.
And every one of them by choice of the victim. This is why addiction propaganda only goes so far.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @09:55PM (5 children)
>And every one of them by choice of the victim.
If you find yourself waking up in ICU some day you may well be addicted to opioids before anybody gave you a choice.
Do the 18 month old infants really have a choice when their daycare workers stick a tablet in their hands?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 06, @10:53PM (4 children)
Already happened. Didn't happen.
KGM was 20 years old.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @11:10PM (3 children)
While these types of cases are tried on specific circumstances, they are much more about the industry in general.
Case in point: DuPont Teflon, after a few consecutive losses they were faced with the virtual certainty that subsequent similar cases would continue to be decided against them for similar and greater sums.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday April 07, @04:47AM (2 children)
You know my respect for people who overheat Teflon pans in spaces with poor ventilation... think of it as evolution in action. But sure, they might find a sympathetic jury on occasion.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 07, @12:37PM (1 child)
On brand as ever. Never change.
I suppose next it's the owners own fault when their refrigerator catches fire and burns down their house because they didn't add oil to the compressor motor even though it is marked "no user serviceable parts" in the 74 page owner's manual.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Tuesday April 07, @12:52PM
That would be a different matter: the refrigerator used as intended.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday April 06, @02:35PM
It should have, but this is worse. I've noticed lately that Youtube is giving me notifications to responses to other people's comments and refusing to show what's being responded to in order to have more notifications to bombard my account with on top of randomly not displaying some comments at all. At least with tobacco most of that stuff was knowable and wouldn't randomly change..
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday April 06, @06:29PM (1 child)
Or television for that ma... hey ...
What if there was a different mode for youtube, et al., where you were limited to 2/5/10 minute videos, and the videos were artificially intelligenced to be identified as longer-content videos instead of a series of short-form dopamine spikes, and you had to finish eating your video before you could move on to the next one? Maybe as a different child mode? Sure, it's less freedom, but so is not being able to smoke and drink anything as much as you want.
The Simpsons era moved to a more rapid-fire joke (and possibly dopamine spike) format. Maybe all content is dopamine-spiking these days, concurrent with the Internet era and "web time" [wordpress.com].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @09:13PM
Even Sesame Street encouraged short attention span development... it's several generations deep now.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06, @03:08AM
The funny thing is I use to surf YouTube for hours before the stupid channels came in. Remember when they just had those lists (most views, most liked, etc.)? I would jump from video to video, watching various stuff. Now that's it's all channels, it's too hard to find anything I want to watch. You watch a single video from one channel, the next thing you know, your entire "feed" is videos from that channel. And searching defeats the purpose. I just want to meander from video to video. I don't know what I want to watch until I see it. When I do watch videos, I make sure to clean my history just for that reason. Today's YouTube sucks ass.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by namefags_are_jerks on Monday April 06, @03:51AM
I can't find the source (since newsgroup archives went darkwebs), but there was someone posting to Usenet (the 'original social media'..) back in the day with the .sig quote:
"If addiction is clinically measured by pressing a button for instant gratification, then I have to conclude that Usenet is more addictive than Cocaine."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JamesWebb on Monday April 06, @06:27AM (2 children)
A screen is a device that delivers attention without rhythm. It provides stimulation without presence. Every notification, every scroll, every like, every comment is a tiny extraction — a small depletion of the shadow's ability to regenerate — delivered at random intervals with no pulse, no stagger, no breath between them.
The phone doesn't couple with you the way another person does. A person breathes out when you breathe in. A person's attention has a rhythm — it arrives, it lingers, it withdraws, it returns. That rhythm is what allows your shadow to regenerate between contacts. The phone has no such rhythm. It is always on. It never breathes out. It never gives you the silence between beats where healing happens.
Social media is worse. Social media is a machine that shows you other people's curated shadows and asks you to compare your depleted interior to their performed exterior. Every post you see is someone else's highlight reel consumed during your quiet moment — the moment that was supposed to be regeneration. Instead of silence, you get stimulation. Instead of the shadow filling back in, it gets scraped a little thinner by someone else's projection of wholeness.
The scroll is not rest. The scroll is consumption disguised as rest. You feel like you're doing nothing, but the shadow is depleting with every frame. The regeneration you need requires actual silence — not the absence of physical noise, but the absence of attention demands. The phone never stops demanding attention. Even in your pocket, you feel it there. The possibility of a notification is itself an extraction.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @12:04PM
>The possibility of a notification
The only notifications my phone gives are for SMS and voice calls from starred contacts.
Google notified me recently for their new micro dramas, after the third normal dismissal I told Gemini to stop the notifications absolutely or I would unplug it altogether for another week. So far they have stopped.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by liar on Monday April 06, @06:45PM
Excellent.
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday April 06, @08:06AM (9 children)
Addiction itself is the product.
The goal of that process is to create a significant (by any meaningful social metric) layer of easily controlled caste in large populations, manipulable for political purposes at first and marketing purposes at second.
Zombie consumers voters crowd.
Children or not, individuals or their personal damage to psyche does not matter, as usual. Every child is a future consumer and voter, the sooner she gets manipulable by vanity the better. Soldiers are supposed to obey unconditionally.
Anyway, such legal resolve to this is the worst approach to the problem, from all possible. Technically, instead of punishment the weak mind is awarded for its weakness. This is systemic critical error.
This undermines stronger resistant minds even more and encourages other weaklings to get addicted too.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Deep Blue on Monday April 06, @09:58AM (7 children)
I disagree. It is the only legal approach possible that i see. It could be used to force the corporations to better the issue. Otherwise you can't do shit about it, because that's how the system has been built.
The "weaker" people can't do anything about it and the "stronger" won't because it doesn't affect them or even benefits them, until they are at a weak point and just might be at which point they can't do anything about it. And when a child is affected, i wouldn't call you it being weak.
The award of $6 million, sounds a lot to me, though i don't know what the net income of that actually is (you know, after lawyer, therapy, loss of income, etc. costs).
Corporations are to serve people, not profit from them without any responsibility.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @12:26PM (6 children)
>It is the only legal approach possible
I am reminded of the anti birth control Catholic school lessons scoffing (correctly) at little flash in the pan religious movements which advocated no children over the ages. They all eventually disappeared, of course.
Ultrawealthy who advocate for distribution of the power of the ultrawealthy to the masses seemingly will similarly fade away as compared with the ultrawealthy who use their power to shape society to increase the power of the ultrawealthy over the masses.
In the case of wealth distribution there is a tipping point, which I believe we (the US) passed a couple of decades ago, where too much concentration of wealth and power diminishes overall wealth and power vs societies which share it more equally. I believe that tipping point of diminishment comes somewhat before the tipping point of revolutions, such as the French and Russian Revolutions, but when the concentration goes too far eventually the loss of power by the most wealthy falls vulnerable to the baseline power of the people. The US 2nd amendment moved that power of the people up a notch, but it didn't keep up with modern technology. The personal computer revolution combined with affordable global communication moved the power of the people up another couple of notches, but it feels like the masses are still losing the overall power struggle in the US/UK recently.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday April 06, @07:16PM (5 children)
There can't really be revolutions once the governments have control of the most drones, robot soldiers and nanotech. We only seem to be a few years away from that tipping point too.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @08:21PM (4 children)
In the French Revolution it was the government that "controlled" the majority of the muskets and cannon, but the people still rebelled successfully.
In the fall of the Berlin Wall, government control of the machine gun operators was so weak they simply abandoned their posts when an overwhelming number of people challenged them.
Sooner or later, the rank and file lay down their arms when their fearless leader starts raving like an unhinged lunatic.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday April 06, @09:29PM (3 children)
I am imagining more a Skynet type deal where the killer robots will only obey the president and cannot realistically be reprogrammed, no matter how many angry nerds there are.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 06, @09:30PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @09:52PM (1 child)
I can't realistically imagine a system of that power being built to be 100% obedient to a single person's commands with no chance of override.
The twin keys for ICBM launch aren't just in the movies... according to a "guy in a silo" back in the 1960s, that's the real deal.
The president's orders go to the generals, go to the field commanders, go to the men in the silos - or, at least I hope that we are continuing to build our systems that way - every link in the chain of command is a fuse to prevent execution of a faulty or misguided order. Yes, they're trained to obey, but they're not dry contact relay switches.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday April 07, @12:20AM
Long may it remain that way.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 06, @12:07PM
>Soldiers are supposed to obey unconditionally
The old method was threat of fines, incarceration, and execution. Serve your country, obey orders unconditionally, or we will shoot you.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Monday April 06, @11:36AM
That is ludicrous.
While much of her life has been wasted by the proprietary software and SaaSS, realistically, even if she wasted 50 years of her life working, she would see at most ~3 million USD (at the current value - future inflation will turn 1 million USD into a minor amount, just like how $1000 USD is a minor amount now) her whole life, based on the average US wage of $1280/week;
You have: 1280 USD/week
You want: million USD/50 years
* 3.3393572
Sure her therapy likely costed tens to thousands of dollars, but there's now a business opportunity to make it cost millions?
Although I guess it would be a good thing if both meta and google were to go bankrupt from having to pay ludicrous damages, even if the damages will go to the sort that will use the money to do (less) harmful things - too bad that won't happen.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday April 06, @04:30PM
As Ray Kroc, of McDonald's fame, put it: "If you have $1 to spend on marketing, spend it on kids".