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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.
(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]