It was as “easy as ABC”, claimed the lawyer prosecuting a landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google which heard closing arguments this week. The defendants were guilty, said Mark Lanier, of “addicting the brains of children”. Not true, replied the tech companies. Meta insisted providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.
Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling and constantly chirruping alerts woven into the fabric of online platforms were central to the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s. But how do these features work and what are their consequences? Are they creating addicts rather than users or are they just giving consumers more of what they want?
There was a time when social media feeds ended. Now the scroll never stops.
“There is always something more that will give you another dopamine hit that you react to and there is an infinite supply of that,” said Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who worked in child online safety at Meta until 2021. “The promise of these things is that there is always going to be something interesting and rewarding and there is a never-ending supply. That is the mechanic of infinite scroll.”
Internal documents surfaced in the trial showed that other Meta employees were worried about signs of rising “reward tolerance” among users. One email conversation in 2020 showed one person referring to Instagram saying: “Oh my gosh y’all IG is a drug.” A colleague responds: “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
Béjar told the Guardian: “You are constantly chasing and even when you find what you are chasing … there is the promise of something else that catches your attention right after and with no bounds on that part of the mechanism.”
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics said: “When you watch young people scroll through their feed, they flip really, really fast. They make split-second decisions to swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, watch, swipe, swipe, watch. There is always a feeling that the next thing could be good and it’s only going to be another second or two.”
Autoplay
Videos that autoplay are now everywhere from the Netflix homescreen to YouTube and Instagram. But according to Béjar, who was at Facebook when it became standard, consumers “hated it”.
“They found it disruptive,” he said. “The result was that more people watched more videos and advertisers were happy, but users were unhappy.”
Autoplay, he explained, “triggers that reaction we all have as humans to watch enough to understand what is going on”.
Lanier compared endless scroll and autoplay to getting free tortilla chips at a restaurant and not being able to stop eating them.
Fear of missing out
Notifications and likes are other parts of the social media apparatus that keep people, especially children, hooked. Mark Griffith, professor emeritus of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University said that winning the competition for likes, is “a rewarding thing that gives you that little hit of enjoyment”.
“When you enjoy something, your body produces dopamine and your body produces adrenaline pointers,” he said. “You produce lots of pleasure chemicals. And you know that in a way you’re becoming addicted to your own body’s endorphins.” It is not, however, the same as addiction to nicotine or cocaine, he said.
“For some people it’s genuinely addictive,” he said. “But by my criteria for addiction, very few people would fulfil that.” He talked about social media’s “moreish quality” instead.
Social media consumption mostly falls into the categories of “habitual use”, which can affect productivity and relationships without necessarily ruining your life, and “problematic use” which has more serious implications.
Giving evidence this week, Instagram’s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, insisted social media was not “clinically addictive”. People could be addicted to social media in the same way that they could be addicted to a good television show, but that was not the same thing, he said.
Jurors in the case against Meta and Google in Los Angeles began their deliberations on Friday. Their verdict will be closely watched as it could redefine tech companies’ responsibilities for their platform design.
