Meta Faces Tennessee Trial Over Instagram Design ⇥ reuters.com

Diana Novak Jones, Reuters:

Meta Platforms faces trial in Tennessee on Monday over the state’s claims that Instagram’s design is to blame for a youth mental-health ​crisis, one of several trials in the coming weeks testing allegations that the company’s social media platforms were intentionally built to be addictive.

I imagine Meta will spend considerable time trying to nail down a definition of “addiction”. The lawsuit makes no attempt to define the term, though it does quote several internal Meta communications acknowledging this as an outcome of the company’s products.¹ In a legal sense, this might be an important question.

The term, however, seems loaded: is Instagram really comparable to cigarettes? As a matter of practicality and ethics, I have personally found it more useful to think of this in terms of whether Instagram and its competitors are intended to be hypnotic and compelling beyond users’ comfort levels. I believe they are. A social media app today looks more like gambling, where you wager your time, than it does a continuation of real-world social experiences.

It is therefore too bad this lawsuit and others like it are exclusively related to the effects they have on children. I understand why, but I think we all need greater control over what we see. There are people I know whose TikTok feeds are absolutely full of A.I.-generated nonsense, often a mix of not-harmful trash and malicious information. This will not be solved by simply telling people of all ages to just say no to using these apps.