The second one outlined for Meta is:
> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).
This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.
The first one outlined for YouTube is:
> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”
This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:
> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.
This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
The issue I take with statements like that is that they are saying one thing while doing the opposite. This document [1], for instance, shows that YouTube knew as early as April 2025 that infinite feeds of short form content can "displace valuable activities like time with friends or sleep", but that hasn't stopped them from aggressively pushing YouTube shorts everywhere.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that there are two factions, one worried about the effects of YouTube in teens and a second one worried about growth at all costs. And I don't think the first one is winning.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
There are plenty of examples that the mental health people aren't being completely steamrolled. Parental controls allow you to block Shorts for your kids. That doesn't sound like a "growth at all costs" mindset.
The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.
Maybe if they actually did any of those things...
And yet here we are years later without change. So we've got proof that they knew this and have done nothing. Don't need to speculate at all.
I use the Revanced patched app logged out so Google doesn't decide to ban my account on a whim. Yes, one day I will dump Gmail, its getting closer with the state of things at the moment.
The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.
That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.
In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.
It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?
To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.
For instance, a simple law like "Companies should take measure, even if it lowers revenue and growth, to reduce addictive behavior. They should to it more emphatically on under age users and even more on under 13 years old.". But no. Instead, they will write 40 pages of what companies should implement in their software, and than have the 40 pages be quickly outdated, partially impossible to implement and hell for developers who try to do the right thing to comply. Total crap of standards and regulation bodies that help nothing and slow down all innovation.
Solution will only come from social pressure, movements to delete the apps, parents actually educating their children to avoid adicitive features. It will take time. But Government will solve nothing.
They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.
Nothing to see here.
Probably, not definitely
It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
In what universe would this be possible?
Teen/kid addiction to sugar was and is a priority.
Social networks is a sugar for minds.
My kids were born long before Obama took the office.
What's your point again? That president can't control the quality of the food in the country under their control?
My theory is that the food tasted less flavorful, so people compensated by adding their own.
I don't eat a lot of junk food, but for a long time after the Obama administration, when I did partake, often my immediate reaction was "Wow. These aren't as tasty as I remember."
/I'm looking at you, Cool Ranch Doritos.
Sugar has been vilified for longer and more vociferously than social media use by kids, but that may be changing now.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-01-07/trump-admin...
[2]: https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)02461-9/pdf
Untrue
My six year old grand child made up a food related game for me to play with them that involved penalties for choosing food with sugar.
Somebody is getting to them, good
That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.
Meta and Google have not
If they lose at trial they will likely be settling thousands of cases in the future
Time will show the wiser
A jury will decide
Win or lose, going to trial means more public disclosure of what these companies do behind the scenes
Example of high quality, low viewcount
I could post every quote on the page and respond to it how it's not a smoking gun but not one of them seemed like a smoking gun to me. Anyone care to point to one that seems like a smoking gun to them?
Once you're a subscriber, there's no incentive to get you to increase your engagement (beyond the threshold that makes it interesting and useful to you so you continue to subscribe) because unlike an ad-based network you're not generating more revenue the more you use it (in fact, you're increasing costs)
Both cases makes teens as victims, both cases was a great deal for them but only from the first look. Both cases are piramid-like schemes when the victims attract new victims to keep benefitting from the system. Is it just like in alcohol case, when having too many victims justifies a bad spirit as the new norm?
But if people keep proselytizing that nothing will happen and all is hopeless, it's going to be hard to get people together to support a change. You and others here are doing the work of social media companies by spreading that - on social media. In fact, nothing can stop the public if they want something.
Europeans have been saying that for what, 20 years now? How long does it have to not work before we stop saying that it's a realistic solution?
I don't want the russian-style ban enforced by ISPs
Probably punishing companies who pay YouTube for ads would work
And actually I think just banning them from conducting any business, accepting payments/etc, would be mostly sufficient. They could continue to operate at a loss, but it would put American corps at such a disadvantage that domestic social media might be able to compete, and enforcing regulations against domestic companies should be far more feasible.
I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got.
I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc.
If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal.
2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast.
It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.
We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive. We seem to be fine with expanding gambling - where I live (not Nevada!) slot machines are everywhere. Nice restaurants even will dedicate corners to slot machines - not just seedy bars. Sports betting apps are all over streaming ads, and their legality is expanding even though when they are legalized in an area the divorce and loan default rates go up measurably.
Why would we regulate big tech if we don't bother with anything else?
The kids are just the latest victim of a long ongoing trend.
I’m pretty sure we do, in fact, ban under 18s from tobacco, alcohol, and real-money gambling.
this is doing a lot of heavy lifting for how loose we have become with under 18 questionable products.
Hmm, candy flavored vapes both for THC and nicotine. Teen psychosis from THC. Popcorn lung. Not so good it seems!
https://www.lung.org/research/sotc/by-the-numbers/8-things-i...
If that's not enough, in the US we created a federal level agency that oversees 3 things only. Two of those things are alcohol and tobacco. And the third thing isn't even regulated half as much as those two.
Why on earth anyone thinks these things are unregulated is beyond me.
The idea that we don't regulate things would be shocking to the anti-regulation crowd, and the staffs at the FDA, FCC, etc.
Because it is simply wrong.
> AAA game companies have been reported to have psychologists on staff to help make their games more addictive. > We don't police big tobacco very well on making their products more addictive.
Three wrongs don't make a right I guess.
“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years
I guess things are different at Google now.
The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?
Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.
They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.
If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.
You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.
Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.
Edit:
> They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.
