Nobody ever accused these companies of being competent at suppressing the research (which includes third parties btw, not just internal).

Companies do this research for all sorts of reasons (including legal compliance, demonstrating due diligence to regulators, to understand users and improve products, etc etc etc). For example, it's not like Zuck commissioned an internal study to show how they're harming children, more like some internal team was seeking to understand why kids love a certain feature which led them to conclusions that make the company look bad.

To your third point, that research is usually leaked by whistleblowers or conducted by third parties, not because of the altruism of these companies.

Finally, the platforms aren't doing enough and with this court case, it seems like they've persisted in finding ways to hook children because of financial incentives.

The sources cited in this article are a good primer for understanding what these companies are doing: https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/meta-suppressed-re...

> The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face.

The argument is not that it is vaguely "somehow damning".

The argument is that the existence of the research and its findings, and that it was in the hands of the firms, and that the actively chose to suppress it, is evidence of one specific fact relevant to liability—that, at the time that they made relevant business decisions that occurred around or after the review and decision to suppress the reports, they had knowledge of the facts contained in the report.

> The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day.

The success of suppression is not relevant to what the decision to suppress is used to prove.

> The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress"

The fact that, had they made different decisions previously, they would not have had knowledge of the facts that they actually had when they made later business decisions is also not relevant to what the existence and suppression of the research is used to prove.

> (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?).

It would obviously be suppression of the report (which isn't a legal term of art but a plain-language descriptive term), but unless they later made fact claims about their product that were contrary to what was in the suppressed report and were being sued for fraud or false advertising, that suppression probably wouldn't be useful as evidence of anything that would produce legal liability.

> The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press.

Which is addditional, though weaker, evidence of the firms knowledge of the same conclusions (weaker, because its pretty hard to prove that the firm had particular knowledge of any of those studies, but it is pretty easy to prove that they had knowledge of the studies that there is documentation of the commissioning, reviewing, discussing internally, and deciding to suppress.)

But it doesn't in any way counter the weight of the evidence of the suppressed reports, it weighs in the same direction, just in much smaller measure.

The "overwhelming majority" standard for harm seems odd when you use 15% of smokers getting harmed as an example. 15% is not an overwhelming majority.

The jury disagrees with you.

>This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer.

Unfortunately for you and social media sites, the legal standard for defective products has no "percentage" of people harmed to incur liability. Product liability is showing product was defectively designed and caused foreseeable harm to a specific plaintiff.

> absurd legal reasoning

It's certainly not surprising you think protecting minors in legal cases (she was a minor when the case was filed) is "absurd legal reasoning".

Addressing the actual legal questions in the case might be more fruitful than hurling shit against a wall.

Addictive patterns in games and other online activity is a bit less innocent than you are portraying it: knowingly causing harm is too low a standard. A lot of the profitability of online games, prediction markets, etc. comes from the whales. The whales are probably addicted. If your business is a whale hunt you are possibly causing harm at least to the extent that addiction is dangerous.

"Free market" and "entrepreneur spirit" fetishism and fear of collective social action against individual drives.

In the span of how long it takes for law to catch up to what’s going on, YouTube and Facebook has been around for a tiny amount of time.

> Why are we allowing this in the first place?

Exactly what I keep coming back to.

For me, it feels like you could cut this problem down substantially by eliminating section 230 protection on any algorithmically elevated content. Everywhere. Full stop.

If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement. You want that content to be seen, for whatever odd reason, and if it's harmful to your users, you should be held responsible for it. It's one thing if some random asshole messages me on Telegram trying to scam me; there's little Telegram can do (though a fucking "do not permit messages from people not in my contacts" setting would be nice) but there is nothing at all that "makes" Facebook shovel AI bullshit at people, apart from it juices engagement, either by genuine engagement or ironic/ragebaiting.

And AI bullshit is just annoying, I've seen "Facebook help" groups that are clearly just trawling to get people's account info, I've seen scam pages and products, all kinds of shit, and either it pisses people off so Facebook passes it around, or they give Facebook money and Facebook shoves it into the feeds of everyone they can.

It's fucking disgusting and there's no reason to permit it.

That's a good point, I'm not 100% sure it's worth throwing away the potentially beneficial uses. There might not be a solution that's both feasible to implement and avoids banning useful things. In the end I usually come back to it being the parent's responsibility to monitor usage, limit screen time, etc., but it hasn't been working so well in practice.

When it comes down to it, I’m not sure how you differentiate an “addictive” product from a well-made product that I choose to keep using.

When people say that Tetris and Civilization are “addictive” they aren’t implying anything malicious about the development, it’s more of a compliment about the game (and maybe a little lament about staying up too late).

But the addictive nature of social media feels different and I can’t figure out what that distinction is.

I understand what you’re saying, I personally don’t like or use social media, but I don’t agree that these companies are at fault after reading this article and others. I’d rather be wrong and learn something than think I’m right, so I welcome further criticism.

Right, like social media and addictive drugs for instance.

I can agree that I think they acted to harm society knowingly. I used to think regulation could help and maybe it can, but if there were some way to shape the culture to value, for example, educational tv programming, I think that would be the most powerful influence on tech/media companies. Regulation could serve to inform parents “this programming/platform is known to rot your kids mind” like a nutrition label and some day hopefully parents will be more likely to disallow it like some do knowing how much sugar is in sodas.

As sibling comments point out, parents are already overly held responsible for how they care for their kids. To an absurd amount.

I have had CPS called on me by an overbearing school administrator. Have you had that happen to you? Let me tell you, it's not a fun experience.

Enough of this "blame the parents" mentality! Ironic given that the goal for all these platforms is growth at all costs. Where do you think "growth" comes from, after all? If you make being a parent so goddamn difficult that it's more rational to just not do it, guess what, poof goes your sweet, sweet growth.

So tired of this line of thinking. The parents are put into an impossible situation. Stuck between kids who by definition and by design will test the boundaries that they're given, and tech platforms that are propped up with not just trillions of dollars of valuation, but the societal expectation that you engage with them. Want your kids to compete in sports? Well, they need to have WhatsApp and Instagram to keep track of team events!

Give me a break. Equating controlling social media and devices to "look both ways when crossing the street" is disingenuous at best. There are no companies that make billions of dollars in advertising revenue telling your kids to jaywalk. But Facebook gladly weaponizes their algorithm to drive "engagement" - and, surprise, children with still-forming prefrontal cortices are drawn to content that reinforce their natural self-criticisms and doubts. So now my child, who has to be on Instagram to keep track of sports schedules, is also force fed toxic content because that's what a mechanical algorithm thinks is most "engaging" based on my derived psychological and demographic profile.

You want to talk about CSAM? X proudly proclaims that they have every right to produce deep-fake pornography with the faces of underage children. What action shall I, as an individual parent, take if my 15 year old girl's face is suddenly pasted onto sexually explicit video and widely shared thanks to xAI's actions? Shall I be held responsible for how I "let this happen" to my child?

For 30 (60's to 90's) years we told parents "It's 10pm do you know where your kids are", with an AD, on TV. We came home to empty houses and go in with a key around our neck.

Now, we call the police, and arrest parents, if kids are outside, unsupervised. https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/us/mother-arrested-missing-so...

When I was a child in the 80s and 90s, we had "jobs" as kids... Mowing lawns, Paper routes and so on. Now if you go offer to mow your neighbors lawn, the cops get called: https://www.fox8live.com/2023/07/26/officer-surprises-young-...

Parents are afraid to let their kids out of their site, and for those of us who have been pragmatic because we understand the data (and not the fear) they tend to look down on us.

Talk to any one who is Gen X and they will tell you that we basically got thrown out side all day (and had fun). Parents cant say "go outside and play" so kids end up getting handed devices... and they are going to play and explore and do the dumb things that gets them in trouble.

> those child safety systems we put in place

Except we have denormalized things that SHOULD be perfectly fine. And as fewer kids get to go outside unattended with friends, it pushes their peers to go "online" to socialize.

Maybe the government needs to run commercials "Its 10am, why isnt your child outside playing with the neighbor kids unsupervised"

> Parents ought to be held held responsible for how they care for their kids.

If YouTube detects that a child is watching 5 hours of video a day, should Google alert child protective services?

Agreed. Libraries have books and DVDs, and you have things like the classical stations. You also have playgrounds and walks in the park, etc. (I'm also a parent of two young children.

Always doing wholesome stuff with your kids is certainly not easy or trivial, but there is a cascading effect here. If your child does not expect to be able to just watch TV all the time it's easier to keep them interested in other things. Once that expectation is burned in you'll be fighting it for a while. And once that expectation is burned in, a small child will _never_ say "I've had enough youtube, I don't need any more."

So I really don't want to be self-righteous about always doing wholesome stuff with your kids (we definitely do not succeed 100% of the time) -- but rather point out that letting them use addictive media has negative, cascading consequences that actually do make it harder for you as a parent. It's analogous to drinking to relax. You get relief now, and pay for it later. Not actually a good tradeoff much of the time.

PBS is great if you are looking for a workable harm reduction strategy. Eliminating that type of entertainment is probably an even better goal.