For the love of our children — end social media’s immunity!

Do you ever get the feeling you are being taken for a ride, Rana? Given your impressive writing on the subject, I have little doubt you will more than match my Munchean scream every time a social media executive testifies to Congress. How many more times must we be asked to believe that these companies are paragons of community values that are doing their best to protect children? The latest, on Wednesday, came from Adam Mosseri, chief executive of Instagram, who made the company’s Nth plea for industry self-policing against an increasingly sceptical Congress (a part of me dies when anyone refers to rising congressional scepticism, which I suspect may be an infinitesimally gentle curve).

Earlier this autumn a Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, revealed that the social media group, which has since been renamed Meta and owns Instagram, had concealed extensive in-house research about the harm its algorithms did to children, public health and democracy (a by no means exhaustive list). Whenever Mark Zuckerberg’s company faced a trade-off between safety and “astronomical profits”, it would always choose the latter, said Haugen. Meta’s own research had shown that teenage girls were 13 per cent likelier to think of suicide after using Instagram, 17 per cent likelier to fall into eating disorders, and 32 per cent said when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

None of this would be a surprise to anyone who has teenagers, as we both do. The internal research only came to light because Haugen had the courage to take on her immensely powerful former employer. “It is clear that Facebook prioritises profit over the wellbeing of children and all users,” she said. Zuckerberg’s response was that “it’s important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids”. Not that important it seems.

On Wednesday Mosseri promised legislators he would do more to improve Instagram’s safety controls, including adding in a “nudge button” that would prompt teenagers to take a break if they had spent too long on the app. This, and one or two other anaemic sops, were overshadowed by the fact that he still refused to rule out launching a new app, Instagram Kids, that would be aimed at 11 to 13 year olds. This new offering would give parents better tools to monitor their children’s online activities, Mosseri claimed. I hope Swampians will forgive me for calling bullshit — it is so much more productive than screaming. A brief note to Mosseri, which is unlikely to be news to him: underage users have been joining Instagram forever; they know how to get ’round your verification checks; also parents are no match for their kids, as I’m sure you also know.  

But my philippic has been prompted by something even darker — a meticulously researched and devastating New York Times investigation into a suicide site, whose name I will not mention. I urge Swampians to read the piece. The site, which has become a hub for people as young as 14, to which the report has traced at least 500 deaths, is protected by the first amendment to the US constitution, says Google, which refuses to do anything about it. The internet search giant has legal immunity under the notorious Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a 1990s gift from Capitol Hill to what was then small tech about which today’s Congress is, um, increasingly sceptical. This is in spite of the fact that many users openly encourage others to take their lives, post threads announcing their planned suicide dates and seek advice about methods. One such vector is a preservative for cured meats, which gets deadlier over time. The site’s owners, who took a lot of tracking down, defend their site as “pro-choice” — between suicide and not suicide. This macabre hub has more than a million users and is dominated by 15 to 24 year olds.

So there we have it. At a time when suicides are sharply rising — the rate has shot up by almost half in America over the past 20 years, and masks an even steeper rise among teenage girls — American law can apparently do nothing about it. The site’s hosts and purveyors hide behind freedom of speech protections and liability immunity. Society collectively shrugs.

We may know that poison is being pumped minute-by-minute into our children’s heads. We may be aware that, for one reason or another, today’s teens are more vulnerable than before to suicidal ideation. We may also recall that Silicon Valley executives keep their children away from these devices (“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” one San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur said of screens and children). Yet we feel immense passivity in the face of a tide we feel we cannot stop.

I recall similar feelings about Purdue Pharma and its promotion of the addictive painkiller OxyContin a few years back. The tide seems to have turned on the Sackler family. I hope very much we will come to see the far wealthier titans of some parts of social media as equally pernicious.

Rana, for the little that it is worth, I am calling time on industry self-policing. Children’s mental health is more important than Facebook’s share price. The US Congress needs to make these companies accountable for their content. But do you think that would this be enough?

Recommended reading

• My column this week reminds readers that “America is still a dangerous nation” — to cite Robert Kagan’s eponymous book. China and Russia are treating the US like a paper tiger but public opinion can shift rapidly in the face of shocking new events. I also wrote a FT Big Read about Joe Biden’s summit of democracies, a two-day event that finishes on Friday. Democracy is a great thing but this doesn’t seem to be an ideal moment to be preaching its virtues.

• Elsewhere, do read this nicely phrased Alex Massie piece in The Spectator on Boris Johnson’s style of governing. (Spoiler alert: everyone always knew he was singularly unsuited to running anything.) “Nothing is real and anything is possible,” writes Massie. “And who can be bothered to care anyway? It is all so shabby and grimy and low-rent, isn’t it?”

• Finally, do watch this very funny Daily Show report on leftwing anti-vaxxers in California. Not every science-distrusting, conspiracy-mongering vaccinophobe lives in a red state. As we speak, some of them are enjoying coffee enema treatments in Malibu.

Rana Foroohar responds

Ed, I love that you are on this topic, because there is synergy here for me. When I received your Note, I was in the middle of writing my next column on an upcoming report from University College London that may help move the policy needle on Big Tech (I have the exclusive, so watch for it Sunday online and Monday in print).

The reason the platforms are able to get away with as much as they do, and that it’s taking SO long to regulate them, is because we don’t have the same amount of detailed information about their business models as we do about many other companies and industries. Part of that is down to the fact that they can hide the operations of individual product lines (including the value of the data they monetise from users and how they aggregate it) within the financials of the larger conglomerates.

Simply put, they aren’t playing by the spirit, and perhaps even the letter, of Securities and Exchange Commission rules, which desperately need to be updated to account for this. I don’t want to say too much more and scoop myself, but I will say that this report has what I think is some of the most impactful analysis of how platforms are able to hide the real value of extracted data (and how to fix that) since Shoshanna Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

But on a more human level, I was just blown away by The Times’s reporting. In addition to seconding your call for readers to look at it carefully, I’d also advise anyone with children (or eyeballs) to go to the Center for Humane Technology, which has many such hair-curling stories and news about efforts to fix them, and how you can help.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to ‘Globalisation isn’t dead, but it’s different’:

“Globalisation is not only not dead, it can’t be stopped. The west jumped
on board after the second world war ended and began using all the ports and landing strips the military created for commerce. Now that most of the world has seen the benefits of capitalism (ie, wealth) there’s no stopping it. At best the virus in all its forms is nothing more than a mild slowdown. We do, however, have to create a political and financial infrastructure that will support and maintain a decent modicum of fair and equitable trade.” — Edward Tomchin, Golden Valley, Arizona