The bell has been tolling for social media for a while now. It rang a warning with Cambridge Analytica, and it rang an alarm with The Social Dilemma (2020). This breakaway Netflix docudrama showed the distressing ways in which social media giants, led on the front by Meta (then Facebook) manipulated human psychology and biology to influence how we behave. The effect on children was even more appalling, highlighted by a 14-year-old girl’s suicide in the UK, apparently due to prolonged exposure to content about suicide and self-injury on Instagram. The Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen then added to the clamour in 2021, by revealing internal documents that demonstrated that Instagram worsened body image issues for teen girls and the company knew it all along. Even the US surgeon general issued a formal advisory on this issue. US President Joe Biden deemed this important enough to include the negative mental-health effects of social media on young users in his State of the Union address this year and encouraged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to tackle this.
However, the latest in this gory saga might be the final warning bell for social media, especially Meta and its world-leading social networking platforms. Forty-two Attorney Generals in the US have sued Instagram and its beleaguered parent Meta over this issue in federal and state courts, charging them with actively contributing to a youth mental health crisis, because of the addictive nature of the platforms. The effort is bipartisan, almost as if heeding Biden’s clarion call. The charges in the filing are quite serious: They allege that Meta deliberately strives to make sure young people and teens spend the maximum time possible on social media, despite realising that teenage brains are vulnerable to the instant gratification of likes and approval from other users. “Meta did not disclose that its algorithms were designed to capitalise on young users’ dopamine responses and create an addictive cycle of engagement,” the complaint also said. Dopamine, sometimes called the happy hormone, is a neurotransmitter that is associated with feelings of happiness and pleasure. Studies have shown that a like on Facebook, for instance, leads to heightened dopamine activity in children. “Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” states the complaint filed by the initial 33 states, including California and Illinois. “Its motive is profit.”
The last point flags what I have written many times before: The big problem with social networks is not the technology, or the product, or even the early intent of the founders. The problem with social media is its business model. Social networks, as the name suggests, were built to catalyse and amplify human connection — to connect the people of the world to each other. They succeeded admirably in their task, as we found long lost friends separated by distance, high-school classmates we knew decades back, and far-flung family members. However, as the more successful of them grew to span the world through network effects, they gradually morphed into social media. We do not have social networks any more, all of them have become media properties where the world’s advertisers find us, along with our habits, intentions and behaviours. We have become pieces of data, purportedly anonymised, but otherwise very visible. Social media influencers have become the new role models, as teens and others strive to like them and be like them. The algorithm driving them is a vast hungry monster, wanting more and more of our data to grow even larger. But now, it seems to have started feeding on itself. If the states win, Meta could be liable to up to $5000 penalty for each violation — sounds small, but could add up to billions of dollars, given the 160 million users that Instagram has in the US and potentially sounding the death knell of the company.
Meta has reasons to be worried about this beyond the US. The UK and EU regulators are circling and will be encouraged to push forward their own legislation. India, with the largest Instagram user base in the world at 229 million, is also straining at the leash. The Minister of Electronics and IT gave a statement soon after the US suit: “It is important for (social media) platforms to be much more accountable and responsible for what they do, what content they host, and who they allow on their platform to host such content… I think the days of free pass and immunity to (these) platforms are over.”
Meta has been defensive and said that it has already launched more than 30 different tools to support teens and their families. They have expressed their disappointment with the suit, saying that it would have been better to work productively together to resolve some of these issues, rather than take a confrontational approach. However, try as hard as they can, until the business model rewards user engagement and data monetisation, it will be difficult to do so. Perhaps, the networks can take a leaf out of OpenAI’s playbook for ChatGPT, and look at a subscription model, rather than an advertising one. That would result in a drastic drop in user base and revenue but, in the long run, they will need to listen to the clanging of these bells to survive. They also might want to listen to John Donne, who wrote “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.
The writer is the founder of Tech Whisperer Ltd, UK and teaches at Ashoka University
