> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.

Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.

Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.

At minimum, Stricter and revised gambling laws should certainly apply to attention consumption where recommendation algo's are used.

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