“What did these companies know? When did they know it? And how did that knowledge shape the products millions of children were encouraged to use daily?” For me this is tobacco company litigation v2.0. In that I recall studies done by tobacco companies on the effects of cigarette smoking including long term deadly health effects and making cigarettes more addictive. That certainly caused tobacco companies destruction. If the upcoming test of whether major social media companies “deliberately engineered their products to keep children compulsively engaged, and whether those design choices contributed to measurable psychological harm” has for the trial a document dump that contains studies with known effects on children and adults including addiction, then it’s going to be near impossible for the social media companies to wiggle out of their innocence they didn’t anything. Maybe this will shrink their power and/or cause their destruction. We’ll be watching.
Wonderful article. But tell me please, Mr P, how you can avidly read the WSJ daily and filter out the undoubted heavy right wing bias and the propagandising attempts that percolate through everything owned by Murdoch? In some respects, his media outlets are as damaging as the algorithms currently on trial in the case you report on.
He says it right there in the article, hello? He judged what was written and in this case completely rejected the Wall Street journal's story. Not to mention this entire post is decidedly not pro business.
The impact of the internet is an important issue of our time. Not only its effects on childrend brains but on adult brains as well.
In Washington DC “The museum of words”, reminds us how incredibly powerful words are, and of course the Internet, the smartphone, pictures, double the effect.
Brain imagery has opened up whole new worlds of brain changes, ie the pictures of the brain on music .
I look forward to following this closely as it unfolds.
Mark Twain once said Americans would spit in their grandchildren's face to make a buck... Let's not forget what happened with vaping, when JUUL came out with grape flavored maximum nicotine-infused pods that looked like SD cards. It took authorities a couple of years to catch up, but by that time the "Stanford startup" founders had cashed out, and left a few hundred thousands of kids hooked. The fact that they were never brought to justice and instead prospered is par for the course.
Across industries, the government has relied on research provided by the very companies that stand to gain from presenting said research to the public and investors. And many times, they use tax dollars to do research. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest at the very least. As a country, we wait until there is a crisis to "fix" problems that could have been avoided in the first place. The only way we will ever have transparency is to place an independent commission of people on the board of every tech, agricultural, and pharmaceutical giant alongside their CEOs and Advisory Boards, whereby the commission has access to every email and every decision made by that company. And then they present their findings to the public. Too bad if the companies don't like it - make it law.
“What did these companies know? When did they know it? And how did that knowledge shape the products millions of children were encouraged to use daily?” For me this is tobacco company litigation v2.0. In that I recall studies done by tobacco companies on the effects of cigarette smoking including long term deadly health effects and making cigarettes more addictive. That certainly caused tobacco companies destruction. If the upcoming test of whether major social media companies “deliberately engineered their products to keep children compulsively engaged, and whether those design choices contributed to measurable psychological harm” has for the trial a document dump that contains studies with known effects on children and adults including addiction, then it’s going to be near impossible for the social media companies to wiggle out of their innocence they didn’t anything. Maybe this will shrink their power and/or cause their destruction. We’ll be watching.
If we knew the actual effects on every age, we would probably be astounded.
Well done G.
Wonderful article. But tell me please, Mr P, how you can avidly read the WSJ daily and filter out the undoubted heavy right wing bias and the propagandising attempts that percolate through everything owned by Murdoch? In some respects, his media outlets are as damaging as the algorithms currently on trial in the case you report on.
He says it right there in the article, hello? He judged what was written and in this case completely rejected the Wall Street journal's story. Not to mention this entire post is decidedly not pro business.
True, but that misses my overall point.
The impact of the internet is an important issue of our time. Not only its effects on childrend brains but on adult brains as well.
In Washington DC “The museum of words”, reminds us how incredibly powerful words are, and of course the Internet, the smartphone, pictures, double the effect.
Brain imagery has opened up whole new worlds of brain changes, ie the pictures of the brain on music .
I look forward to following this closely as it unfolds.
Mark Twain once said Americans would spit in their grandchildren's face to make a buck... Let's not forget what happened with vaping, when JUUL came out with grape flavored maximum nicotine-infused pods that looked like SD cards. It took authorities a couple of years to catch up, but by that time the "Stanford startup" founders had cashed out, and left a few hundred thousands of kids hooked. The fact that they were never brought to justice and instead prospered is par for the course.
a simple solution to show the cost of screen addiction, but as successful as outlawing narcotics
I've been concerned for the last 5 years about my 9yo granddaughter. TY for bringing this case to our attention!
Across industries, the government has relied on research provided by the very companies that stand to gain from presenting said research to the public and investors. And many times, they use tax dollars to do research. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest at the very least. As a country, we wait until there is a crisis to "fix" problems that could have been avoided in the first place. The only way we will ever have transparency is to place an independent commission of people on the board of every tech, agricultural, and pharmaceutical giant alongside their CEOs and Advisory Boards, whereby the commission has access to every email and every decision made by that company. And then they present their findings to the public. Too bad if the companies don't like it - make it law.