Much of this behavior by Meta et al. is similar to that of the big business moguls of the early 20th century, who were repeatedly called out by muckrakers for enriching themselves at the expense of the public good. The original antitrust legislation in the U.S. was designed to reign those people in, but those drafting and campaigning for that legislation could likely not have foreseen its usage on an unprecedented global scale.
Just bought the book Careless People. Thank you for alerting me to it.
And I have witnessed this happening:
"In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state."
(Or the social media influencers encourage blaming the body for any and all problems. They tell kids that if they are uncomfortable with their bodies, that means they are trans and born in the wrong body. Therefore, they must immediately take cross sex hormones and schedule irreversible surgeries. "Affirmation only" and no addressing, treating or healing underlying comorbidities allowed.)
The number of our kids who have been harmed by unchecked social media influencers, who are "careless", is beyond counting. It must stop.
"This is perhaps Meta and tech’s most effective strategy: leveraging “third-party validators,” which is an internal tech lobbying euphemism for “pawn,” or, in some cases, “useful idiot.” Meta has forged partnerships with valuable third-party validators beyond those Wynn-Williams names, who have clearly been selected to help Meta launder its reputation around kids’ safety issues."
American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media, National PTA, and Girl Scouts all come to mind here. Each of these "trusted institutions" has become financially entangled with Meta and other big tech companies and now basically serves as a pawn in the Silicon Valley propaganda machine. How do we, the little people, push back against that? How do we reach people in positions of influence in those orgs and get them to see that they are being used for no other purpose than to boost profits for Zuckerberg & co?
When a parent googles "screen time guidelines" and one of the first hits is the American Academy of Pediatrics website which says "Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines" - they will probably take that at face value. Not realizing the people who helped write those guidelines at the AAP are on Meta's payroll (Michael Rich of the tech-funded Digital Wellness Lab, Megan Moreno who's funded by Facebook, to name a few). How do we fix this??
Thanks for this piece Jon and Casey. But Jon, one quibble about your intro. I was a little surprised you singled out TikTok along with Facebook as being particularly malign, while leaving out Twitter.
Now I suppose you may have had kids in mind, in which case you're probably right. Twitter has never had much purchase with young people. But when you talk about it's impact on "humanity," I'd argue that it's actually Twitter that has done the most to coarsen political dialog and polarize our society.
And to be clear, i'm talking about Twitter and not X. Which isn't to say that the site has improved; under Elon it obviously has become even worse. But the problem with Twitter in terms of it impact on society was never about whether it swings right wing or left wing or how the site is moderated. The problem with Twitter is its fundamental model: short messages + endless fragmentation (and the option for anonymity as well). Such a model is inevitably going to descend into tribalism and snark. It's why Bluesky, Mastodon, and all the other alternatives will inevitably be no better.
One additional tactic not mentioned in the article is use of influencers on social media to shape public opinion around the image of the company / morality of legislation.
E.g. Alice Cappelle's video "Social media and Gen Z mental health" is pretty much a copy-and-paste of the tactics described in your article! (I.e. deflect and distract, false consensus etc) thus creating a positive feedback loop
Bought the book immediately upon reading this post! Fully deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts already and told Amazon to send me all the data they have on me using the link in this post. Thanks! We simply cannot allow these companies and individuals to run roughshod over our lives and country, indeed, the world.
Absolutely could not put this book down. Confirms our worst fears/what we already know about the predatory and "careless" leadership at Meta. Congratulations to Sarah Wynn-Williams for the courage to publish this. And on a side note: as a new mother myself, her performance review conclusing she was "hard to reach" after almost dying in childbirth is shocking!
The other problem to consider is the extent to which political and institutional governmental classes will repurpose legislation initially meant to protect kids to censor the free speech of adults. In the UK we have the Online Harms Bill. One would have thought it would have at least restricted social media usage per day for the under 14s. Instead it's being used to censor speech in manner reminiscent of Soviet era political correctness- censoring observations which are true, but nonetheless harmful. According to some, even mentioning the industrial scale rape of teenage girls is 'Islamophobia', even though the grooming gang scandal is only disproportionate in relation to Pakistani Muslims whose communities originally stemmed from the Kashmir region, and is not true of British Muslims more generally, or even British Pakistani Muslims whose communities didn't stem from Kashmir.
2 cents on books vs. less demanding ways of absorbing information: I worked for 25 in Human Resources and HR consulting. Reading books on current thinking was important for me, and I had a pretty nice library. 15 years after retiring, I finally succumbed to my wife's thought that I should give the books away. I approached several HR consultants and professionals. Nobody wanted them. I eventually concluded that such long-form resources weren't being used any longer. [Finally did get them to an academic friend who put them in a business school reading room].
Educating young people to make them aware how tech manipulates their lives is essential to counter this malign social phenomenon. I use adventure edufiction to let them ‘experience’ through the trials and tribulations of the main characters.
Much of this behavior by Meta et al. is similar to that of the big business moguls of the early 20th century, who were repeatedly called out by muckrakers for enriching themselves at the expense of the public good. The original antitrust legislation in the U.S. was designed to reign those people in, but those drafting and campaigning for that legislation could likely not have foreseen its usage on an unprecedented global scale.
Just bought the book Careless People. Thank you for alerting me to it.
And I have witnessed this happening:
"In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state."
(Or the social media influencers encourage blaming the body for any and all problems. They tell kids that if they are uncomfortable with their bodies, that means they are trans and born in the wrong body. Therefore, they must immediately take cross sex hormones and schedule irreversible surgeries. "Affirmation only" and no addressing, treating or healing underlying comorbidities allowed.)
The number of our kids who have been harmed by unchecked social media influencers, who are "careless", is beyond counting. It must stop.
"This is perhaps Meta and tech’s most effective strategy: leveraging “third-party validators,” which is an internal tech lobbying euphemism for “pawn,” or, in some cases, “useful idiot.” Meta has forged partnerships with valuable third-party validators beyond those Wynn-Williams names, who have clearly been selected to help Meta launder its reputation around kids’ safety issues."
American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media, National PTA, and Girl Scouts all come to mind here. Each of these "trusted institutions" has become financially entangled with Meta and other big tech companies and now basically serves as a pawn in the Silicon Valley propaganda machine. How do we, the little people, push back against that? How do we reach people in positions of influence in those orgs and get them to see that they are being used for no other purpose than to boost profits for Zuckerberg & co?
When a parent googles "screen time guidelines" and one of the first hits is the American Academy of Pediatrics website which says "Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines" - they will probably take that at face value. Not realizing the people who helped write those guidelines at the AAP are on Meta's payroll (Michael Rich of the tech-funded Digital Wellness Lab, Megan Moreno who's funded by Facebook, to name a few). How do we fix this??
Thanks for this piece Jon and Casey. But Jon, one quibble about your intro. I was a little surprised you singled out TikTok along with Facebook as being particularly malign, while leaving out Twitter.
Now I suppose you may have had kids in mind, in which case you're probably right. Twitter has never had much purchase with young people. But when you talk about it's impact on "humanity," I'd argue that it's actually Twitter that has done the most to coarsen political dialog and polarize our society.
And to be clear, i'm talking about Twitter and not X. Which isn't to say that the site has improved; under Elon it obviously has become even worse. But the problem with Twitter in terms of it impact on society was never about whether it swings right wing or left wing or how the site is moderated. The problem with Twitter is its fundamental model: short messages + endless fragmentation (and the option for anonymity as well). Such a model is inevitably going to descend into tribalism and snark. It's why Bluesky, Mastodon, and all the other alternatives will inevitably be no better.
Will certainly buy that book!
One additional tactic not mentioned in the article is use of influencers on social media to shape public opinion around the image of the company / morality of legislation.
E.g. Alice Cappelle's video "Social media and Gen Z mental health" is pretty much a copy-and-paste of the tactics described in your article! (I.e. deflect and distract, false consensus etc) thus creating a positive feedback loop
Bought the book immediately upon reading this post! Fully deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts already and told Amazon to send me all the data they have on me using the link in this post. Thanks! We simply cannot allow these companies and individuals to run roughshod over our lives and country, indeed, the world.
Absolutely could not put this book down. Confirms our worst fears/what we already know about the predatory and "careless" leadership at Meta. Congratulations to Sarah Wynn-Williams for the courage to publish this. And on a side note: as a new mother myself, her performance review conclusing she was "hard to reach" after almost dying in childbirth is shocking!
The other problem to consider is the extent to which political and institutional governmental classes will repurpose legislation initially meant to protect kids to censor the free speech of adults. In the UK we have the Online Harms Bill. One would have thought it would have at least restricted social media usage per day for the under 14s. Instead it's being used to censor speech in manner reminiscent of Soviet era political correctness- censoring observations which are true, but nonetheless harmful. According to some, even mentioning the industrial scale rape of teenage girls is 'Islamophobia', even though the grooming gang scandal is only disproportionate in relation to Pakistani Muslims whose communities originally stemmed from the Kashmir region, and is not true of British Muslims more generally, or even British Pakistani Muslims whose communities didn't stem from Kashmir.
Like The Matix, tech cannibalism.
2 cents on books vs. less demanding ways of absorbing information: I worked for 25 in Human Resources and HR consulting. Reading books on current thinking was important for me, and I had a pretty nice library. 15 years after retiring, I finally succumbed to my wife's thought that I should give the books away. I approached several HR consultants and professionals. Nobody wanted them. I eventually concluded that such long-form resources weren't being used any longer. [Finally did get them to an academic friend who put them in a business school reading room].
Educating young people to make them aware how tech manipulates their lives is essential to counter this malign social phenomenon. I use adventure edufiction to let them ‘experience’ through the trials and tribulations of the main characters.
Very informative! Thank you so much for spelling this out and giving all of us a great overview of the book and the strategies.
Good read. Thanks for sharing.
This is terrifying!
The new robber barons, everyone! This piece was very informative and pieced together so many loose threads. Careless People sounds like a must-read.