The whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a reasonable empathetic person.
Plenty of adults don't catch it either. You don't need to be blatant. Dress it up in neutral business language, keep the arguments one step removed from the conclusion, and anchor it in assumptions people already hold about markets and American institutions. Then it's nearly impossible to push back on without sounding like you're attacking the premises.
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?
Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.
> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences
Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares
Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...
Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.
1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking, there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking again, but I understand why we don't.
2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the calories:
But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people to use their products more. At some point, letting giant multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free choice that you're trying to avoid.
Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games makes a little less money on Fortnight.
But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with zero care for the users well being.
I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating better, how to make people more matches spending less time on the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful features that generated money
Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there because they were eating great food. They were eating a lot of bad food that doesn't fire satiety signals in their head.
Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.
If the monopolist chef is deliberately adding addictive ingredients that causes health problems, I think, yes, they're the ones to punish or address the problem with.
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.
> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.
(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).
If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.
In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.
It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.
It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.
Where do you live that this is not possible?
(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2
Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.
1. Because people like it.
2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).
When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.
There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
I have been snickering at the term "grilled" for years now. All of the aggressive bullshit language being used to retell these accounts is nonsense: NOTHING HAPPENED. Nobody is held accountable, and they just got nagged at in front of class for a bit.
If you asked me, "Hey do you want to make billions of dollars breaking the law, but you might have to sit in front of some cameras every few years and answer fake questions in front of people with dementia?", then I could understand someone thinking that's easy money.
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
That’s a perjury.
I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.
Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.
Which part is perjury? Can you prove that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think his apps deliver something useful to the users? As far as the attracting kids part, well, that’s the entire premise of the trial, no?
Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.
Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India Company but the screws persist.
But "capitalism" doesn't actually exist as such -- it's just a concept that represents patterns of human behavior that stem from human beings' pre-existing motivations inclinations.
Treating descriptive models as the causal factors behind the things they're describing is a reification fallacy.
> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
This was the funniest / most evil testimony I’ve seen, in any case, in a while.
Couldn’t find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he testified they don’t care about increasing user engagement (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there’s always a lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up to and including 2024.
The whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a reasonable empathetic person.
That's what Meta paid for.
That’s exactly the lens they were hoping for
I guess so, I expected a little more nuance to hide it better. but it was just blatant. like any child could figure it out
Plenty of adults don't catch it either. You don't need to be blatant. Dress it up in neutral business language, keep the arguments one step removed from the conclusion, and anchor it in assumptions people already hold about markets and American institutions. Then it's nearly impossible to push back on without sounding like you're attacking the premises.
[delayed]
That’s what the WSJ is there for
Some alternative reporting:
https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-social...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mark-zucke...
Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.
@dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
From a Rolling Stone article:
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and suicidality she experienced.
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?
Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.
Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
According to Wikipedia
> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences
Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares
Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...
Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.
So I think two things:
1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking, there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking again, but I understand why we don't.
2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the calories:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYbpWcw6MfA
But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people to use their products more. At some point, letting giant multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free choice that you're trying to avoid.
Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games makes a little less money on Fortnight.
Food? Some products sold as food are most certainly addictive.
Video games? As just one example, Candy Crush is a vacuous waste of anyone's time and money, with plenty of tales of addiction.
Books? People used to think novels were addictive and bad news: https://archive.is/WDDCH
But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with zero care for the users well being.
I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating better, how to make people more matches spending less time on the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful features that generated money
Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there because they were eating great food. They were eating a lot of bad food that doesn't fire satiety signals in their head.
Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.
There's people with unhealthy relationships with both food and video games and I'm comfortable saying they suffer from addiction.
So then do you punish the chefs for making their food too appealing?
Yes
If the monopolist chef is deliberately adding addictive ingredients that causes health problems, I think, yes, they're the ones to punish or address the problem with.
Facebook does not have a monopoly on social media. (He says, writing on a competing social media site.)
> addictive ingredients that causes health problems
Like sugar? Are we going to make candy illegal now? Through the court system, retroactively, with no legislative mandate?
Diluted only if one doesn’t know the definition of addiction
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.
> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.
(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).
If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.
In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.
It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.
It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
The person who said smoking and hard drugs, and you said a beer outside after 2am. Those aren't the same thing!
> Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes
Go on
For example, smoking tobacco in Japan… wait a minute
https://news.gallup.com/interactives/248240/global-emotions....
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.
Where do you live that this is not possible?
(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
Indeed. As a wise man once said:
"Who is to say what's right these days, what with all our modern ideas and products?"
Mark Parilla haha
There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.
Wat mean?
1. Because people like it. 2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).
It means it's addictive
Alternatively, it may mean that people are largely hypocritical, and evaluate themselves and other people by different standards.
When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.
There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"
That seems like a bizarre comparison. Is TikTok high in nicotine?
Have you ever tried quitting smoking?
Easy. I've done it five times in the last three years alone.
If this is a real litigation process, I wonder what would be the conditions Meta will need to accept for them to let it go.
https://archive.is/20260218225234/https://www.wsj.com/us-new...
I have been snickering at the term "grilled" for years now. All of the aggressive bullshit language being used to retell these accounts is nonsense: NOTHING HAPPENED. Nobody is held accountable, and they just got nagged at in front of class for a bit.
If you asked me, "Hey do you want to make billions of dollars breaking the law, but you might have to sit in front of some cameras every few years and answer fake questions in front of people with dementia?", then I could understand someone thinking that's easy money.
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
That’s a perjury.
I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.
Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.
Which part is perjury? Can you prove that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think his apps deliver something useful to the users? As far as the attracting kids part, well, that’s the entire premise of the trial, no?
Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.
Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India Company but the screws persist.
But "capitalism" doesn't actually exist as such -- it's just a concept that represents patterns of human behavior that stem from human beings' pre-existing motivations inclinations.
Treating descriptive models as the causal factors behind the things they're describing is a reification fallacy.
> which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by almost everyone, though, as an analogy?
> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
This was the funniest / most evil testimony I’ve seen, in any case, in a while.
Couldn’t find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he testified they don’t care about increasing user engagement (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there’s always a lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up to and including 2024.
Oh wow they’re really holding him to account by asking some interesting questions then letting him get back to it.
/s
Agreed - such useless pageantry. At least with meat, 'grilling' changes it.