| Some useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024... "Meta knew what it was doing" In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on
the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016,
Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram)
taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.” Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of
208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact,
Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including: • Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72 • Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894 • By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….” That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even
though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the
amount of time they spend on our app.” One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.” As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.” In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering
negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms
taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.” |
Corporations are evil but teams that work there are even more evil than them. Because they are also part of the decision makers, not just CEO.