Meta-Static

Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram last week agreed to a $16.7 billion settlement to end a barrage of lawsuits being brought by the attorneys general of numerous states.

I believe two things should be kept in mind about this agreement: firstly, the settlement, in its totality is not even in the same zip-code as enough. And secondly, and the point which foretells of harrowing events still to come: it changes very little of real and damaging substance. It imposes some box-checking restrictions around the edges, while leaving the core engine of Facebook and Instagram running largely unimpeded. It is partial penance, monetarily and structurally, for the smaller Meta sins of the past, but does little to avert the consequences of the life-destroying sins of Meta past and future.

That Meta can afford to casually throw $16 billion to the states, like crumbs thrown to peasants, shows how little this money means to them. It does not even represent 10% of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune, let alone Meta’s — which is projected to earn revenues of $226 billion in 2026. A bump in the road then, just like they would appear to view the mental health damage and actual deaths of so many people delivered purposefully manipulative content by their algorithms.

This settlement does very little to protect users in general and children specifically from the ongoing harms caused by the unfettered algorithms that have been unleashed by the social media platforms.

It was not meant to be this way. When the internet was still in its commercial infancy, several small groups came together to lobby for, write and pass Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The idea was to create a liability shield for internet operators as they sought to navigate conflicting liabilities for third-party posts.

What no-one then anticipated and what everyone too-easily found a way to live with once bucketloads of money started rolling in is what happens when you combine fathomless quantities of personal data with zero regulatory oversight and a seemingly unlimited potential for profit.

When Section 230 was passed, there was no social media. The first day of Facebook was still eight years away. Now, thirty years later, its effects have metastasized as a cancer that enervates life, love and peaceful coexistence around the world.

The algorithms that were no more than a dream in 1996 now exist in a very permissive legal environment, within which the platforms have evolved from the passive hosts, imagined in the provision’s writing, to the active algorithmic curators of today — and have done so while the bill that shields them has not evolved concomitantly.

Now those social media companies spend tens of millions of lobbying dollars every year to ensure that Section 230 remains in place. And the politicians, who have learned to use and subsequently rely on these same platforms in order to remain in power, are disincentivized to alter an ecosystem that works to their own advantage.

The social media companies do not just have control over what is fed to you — and what is not. They even have control over what comments you see, thus making it easier to believe that others also agree with whatever belief they are instilling in you. And by you, I don’t mean just you, I mean the young children in your life also.

But the damage is not only being done by the social media companies directly. I believe that the behavioral pathways they open us to and then normalize are often then walked to very destructive outcomes.

Three disturbing statistics I saw just this morning:

1. Among American women aged 18-24, 35% reported that a partner had choked them during their most recent consensual sexual encounter.
2. Sexual strangulation is now thought to be the second most common cause of strokes in women under 40 in the UK.
3. Of 1,004 teens, aged 16-18 interviewed in Australia, 74.8% have encountered online porn and, of those, 39.1% first encountered it before age 13.  
   

All three of these statistics have ties of varying depth to the effortless availability of porn across the internet and so across the world, and the behaviors it can normalize.

Although I want to be clear that Meta, Alphabet and the other social media conglomerates are not, to my knowledge, in any way directly involved in hosting, playing or even directing people toward watching porn on the internet, (although I am hearing much chatter about the appearance on Facebook of porn-adjacent AI slop) they have created an environment where what internet viewers repeatedly view online is interpreted as an accurate reflection of how life in the real world is and should be lived.

Porn tells our kids, “This is what sex looks like.” Influencers say, “This is what success looks like.” Instagram and TikTok say, “This is what beauty looks like.” Political feeds say, “This is what people like you believe.” And the comments (the ones you are allowed to see) say, “Everyone agrees.”

One sad and largely forgotten chapter in this history is how close the “.XXX” top-level domain was to being birthed as an online red-light district in 2005. The initial plan was that it would be a place where the locating of porn would be voluntary, but the long-term goal of its advocates was that all porn sites would eventually have to be located there. The porn industry virulently opposed the measure because they realized that it would make porn sites very easy to block with even a rudimentary filter. Amazingly, what fully derailed it was opposition from conservative Christian groups who said that the domain would be legitimizing porn. And so, instead of being corralled into an easy-to-fence area of the internet, porn had the viral proliferation that we see today. By pursuing elimination instead of containment, the porn opponents helped preserve the precise environment where it could spread most freely. (The domain was eventually allowed in 2011, but the moment it could have had any actual effect was, by then, well in the rear-view mirror.)

And so here we are. We have reached a time where the young adults, now reaching college age, have spent their entire lives exposed to the corrosive and cancerous effects of this ecosystem. The damage is so vast, it is difficult to truly take in — it touches their entire view of the world.  And we must not forget that this limited settlement does not cover all the other places that our children and young adults (and adults) are exposed to the highly caustic effects of a life spent online. Google, Snapchat, Discord, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and many, many others have yet to face anything even approaching accountability for the harms attributed to their platforms, nor have they been reined in in any fashion from continuing to pursue business as usual.

Something that, even though I live adjacent to this world and write about it regularly, still makes me shake my head in sad amazement, is why anyone would want to be called an “influencer” let alone call themselves that. An influencer is just someone who tries to persuade you to believe something and do something, in order to scoop some money from that belief or action. It is difficult for me to imagine why anyone would want their name associated with such a duplicitous act. But our road has brought us to here, a nation broken by the power of social media; dancing like marionettes on strings that are mostly invisible, and certainly and often deniable, being pulled on by their algorithms.

Teens take many more selfies than they post. The photos being posted are the intermittent survivors of a destructively self-critical process of editing, cropping and filtering in search of the perfect outward presentation — a process not available in the real world that teens and young adults are increasingly shutting themselves away from.

ALL of that depressing reality sits at the doorstep of the social media companies and the politicians who refrain from doing anything truly substantive to rein them in. Teens and adults are cast adrift, feeling unable to escape from the ecosystem that is both the source of their communication and the source of their torture.

But we are all guilty too. The social media companies and the companies that pay them for your children’s behavioral habits (and yours) have for two decades driven the stock market to ever higher value. Now AI, social media and linked companies account for over 50% of the S&P 500’s total market value and an even greater share of its recent gains. If you want to know what price we, as a nation, put on our childrens’ mental health, the blind rejoicing in the stock market is your answer. Which leads to the question: was it worth it?

Meta just threw a sop to our children. $16 billion is a minor pothole on their freeway-like income stream. From what I can discern, the minor curtailments placed upon them will do little to nothing to shield our children from the identity shaping, and thus behavior shaping, that is the final product being sold, for hundreds of billions of dollars every year, by the social media companies.

Your kids (and many, many adults) are a commodity, a life-support system for a corporate economic infrastructure, and they will be steadily bled for revenue as long as they stay alive. But the money is the small cost. Their identity, who they actually believe they are, is the greatest cost of all. Because from that externally sculpted identity will flow their future behavior.