There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?".
Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your product. Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
I also hope the reasons are obvious.
Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult. I don't think it's fair to ask children to resist social media through sheer willpower when there are legions of highly educated adults on the other side trying to increase engagement.
It should be no surprise that children can be manipulated by highly intelligent adults.
>[There are] legions of highly educated adults [at Meta] trying to increase [child] engagement
Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life?
Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?
I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger.
Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never prioritized actual lab research or clinical advancements.
Incentives drive outcomes, do they not? It's too easy to become a billionaire as a charlatan and too hard as somebody able to make a difference. Rather than granting Zuck nearly unlimited power and politely asking him to use it wisely if he doesn't overly mind the inconvenience, why not create a world where monsters can't have that much power in the first place?
I just find it ridiculous that we as a society have allowed CEOs to become that wealthy. It's one thing to make your money from lucky investments, and become a billionaire. It's another to get there by simply running a corporation.
And not just a minor, AIUI it's important that at the start, she was under 16
> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult.
This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.
Or assign responsibility to…parents and legal guardians…who are not children.
Meta is not blameless here. Responsibility can be shared when Meta (and others) are essentially preying on children. It’s an uphill battle for parents by Meta’s design.
They’re not Meta’s kids, they’re freemium customers.
Doesn't this lawsuit (essentially) prove otherwise?
It would work if parents had legal course to seek justice against corporations that stalk, groom, and manipulate their children against their wishes.
I would prefer Meta make their products less addictive for children, with the side-effect that they're perhaps less stimulating for adults, than for Meta to keep their products the way they are, gatekept behind a system that allows them access to even more of my personal data.
I understand why they would want the opposite. They can f*ck right off.
What's obvious to me likely isn't obvious to you or anyone else, therefore nothing is obvious.
I wish we'd delete that word from the English language.
We already have a distinction because it’s been known for decades already that some things are addictive purely through reinforcement psychology and some things lock people into a chemical dependence.
For example see the glossary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
And for some reason we only use "addiction" to describe things that are recreational in nature, not drugs that have no recreational use but can be quite dangerous to discontinue abruptly.
> I also hope the reasons are obvious.
Based on the fact that many people here disagree about fundamental things, as well as the fact that “liberal” is a highly overloaded term, I think it should be obvious that it’s not obvious what you mean.
I don't think the reasons are obvious. Where do you put gambling on the spectrum?
If something compels behavior vs. behavior remaining a free choice, a liberal society can and should treat it like any other source of compulsion.
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I thought the actual physiological cause of addiction was similar in both nicotine and gambling: you crave the predictable release of dopamine.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
You're missing the negative affect node of the Koob addiction cycle, which exists for gambling but to a lesser degree than for nicotine.
I don’t gamble, but if I did, I am fairly certain it would release little to no dopamine for me, win or lose.
I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.
From everything I have read about addiction, it is far from that simple. One of the best examples are pain medicine like morphine. Give opioids to patients and some will form addiction to it and others will not, and the predictors for that are both genetic and environmental. It is not as simple as inject it into person X and now they are a slave to it. One way one can see this is in statistics in that long-term opioid use occurs in about 4% of people following their use for trauma or surgery-related pain.
It not at all certain that you would find it hard to stop if you suddenly decided to try smoking. There would naturally be a risk, but how high that risk is is a debated subject if you have none of the risk factors for addictions.
You’re being downvoted, but there’s an interesting point you’re trying to make. Dopamine-chasing is truly selective in the behavior and chemical sense.
There is a particular hard drug that I could be easily addicted to if it were cheaper and more accessible. Nothing else like it gives me irresistible craving for more. Not nicotine, ADHD meds or speed, benzos, and not even opioids have the same effect. So after I discovered this about myself, I went on a little journey to self test myself other possible addictions.
Social media? Nope. Video games and tv? yes. Gambling, hoarding, shopping: No. Sex: yes. Exercise: yes
I can’t rationalize any of it.
And yet, some people find themselves compelled to continue gambling long after they’re drowning in debt.
If you don’t want to call that addiction, fine, but you can’t deny that it happens.
Right: They’re gambling addicts. That’s a distinct fact from, “Gambling is a physiologically addictive behavior for typical humans.”
Right, there's a difference between a chemical that will addict most people simply because of the changes the chemical makes to the brain (even if the person doesn't even really like doing the thing that causes them to consume it), vs. an activity that gives you dopamine hits and can be addictive, depending on the person.
One is physical addiction and the other is psychological.
But I'm also feeling a parallel here to people who think that mental health issues aren't real medical problems and that people can just "get better" whenever they want. And that's concerning. We shouldn't be more lenient on things that are "only" psychologically addictive.
It's predictably addictive under common circumstances (a lack of socioeconomic support and a lack of alternative means to occupy one's time). If those circumstances are becoming more and more widespread in a society (which they are in this one), it behooves experts to consider that "typical" and "this particular cohort" might become harder and harder to distinguish, to the point where what would have been targeted interventions need to become general.
> If something compels behavior vs. behavior remaining a free choice, a liberal society can and should treat it like any other source of compulsion.
Indeed, and if we want those behaviours to remain as things considered to be choices rather than the nearly inescapable negative life-destroying feedback loops (activities with high addiction potential, for lack of a more concise term), they should be treated with special reverence and highly restricted from outside influence. Put another way, if we want liberal societies to be sustainable, I'd argue all forms of overtly addictive behaviour should—in many cases—be banned from public advertisement and restricted from surreptitious advertisement in entertainment, and we should have definitions for those.
For ages we've not had cigarette ads on public broadcasts, and yet people still "choose" to smoke, meanwhile there's been a increasing presence of cigarettes among Oscar winning movies in the last 10 years.
If you are addicted to smoking and trying to avoid being reminded of it, you'd realistically have to stop watching movies and participating in that aspect of culture in order to regain control of that part of your life. Likewise, with gambling, you don't only have to stop going to the casino, you have to stop engaging with sports entertainment wholesale.
You seem to be differentiating between physical and psychological addiction, and saying that only physical addiction meets the technical definition of addiction?
I’m saying society should tread extremely carefully in attempting to regulate citizens’ potentially psychologically addictive behaviors.
Good news, social media has been extensively studied and found to be addictive. So we have little need to tread carefully, we already know it’s addictive.
Fortunately it also has minimal to no value to society, so even if we overreacted and banned it completely it’d be fine
Ah OK. Yes I agree, there can be a blurry line between something a person does compulsively/addictively and something that he just enjoys doing. And it's different for different people.
To add to the confusion, sometimes I do stupid things just once. Even so, those things should be banned, for harming me.
We already have a category called addictive personality disorder where someone is much more prone to being addicted to pretty much anything.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.
Where would you put 24x7 political content?
That's more like perversion...
Dark patterns are real. Deceptive advertising is real. So-called prediction markets amount to unregulated gambling on any proposition. Many online businesses are whale hunts and the whales are often addicts.
Specifically when it comes to children, we need to show more restraint in giving them the liberty to partake in potentially addictive substances.
It's one thing if an adult smokes and gambles, it's another thing if a child does. It seems to me that stuff you do in youth tends to stick around for life.
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I feel like people use the word “addiction” to refer to both chemical addiction and behavioral addiction, and that people understand that the latter is (usually) far less serious than the former.
I don't think you can put them into buckets like that. All addiction is driven in persuit of a reward. The magnitude of reward can be estimated with brain scans and stuff but to my understanding isn't universal in all humans.
Can we definitely say gambling addiction is less serious than alcohol addiction when there's individuals who find the former harder to quit than the latter?
> I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
Be aware, the vast majority of people who have ever smoked cigarettes occasionally never became addicted. They were not labeled as “smokers”. A non-trivial number of people today continue to smoke cigarettes on occasion. I like to have one on my birthday. Then again, I’m able to eat a chip and not consume the entire bag. I’m not convinced of these social science studies, and when digging into individual studies I’m sure the replication crisis comes into play.
Tobacco may be the most* addictive delivery method, but nicotine alone is also addictive. To say its not is misinformation. Consistent use of nicotine still leads to upregulation, which does cause irritability, brain fog, cravings when you stop.
* I'd even change this to say modern nicotine salts in vapes are likely to lead to dependency faster than tobacco. A 5% nicotine salt pod will contain as much nicotine as a full pack of cigarettes, and so vapers tend to consume far more nicotine in a single sitting than they ever could with a cigarette. That combined withe constant availability means users of nicotine vapes & pouches (aka, no tobacco) are likey to have a more difficult time quitting than cigarette smokers.
Bottom line, its still dangerous to dismiss nicotine's addictive potential with or without tobacco as a delivery method.
> Not careful enough apparently: Nicotine isn't that addictive on its own, tobacco is.
That is a very strong claim to make when the current scientific consensus strongly disagrees.
How does that work when nicotine products that are every bit as addictive as tobacco exist, maybe you're just not aware of them? Sitting here with non tobacco snus (Swedish nicotine pouch) under my top lip, something I have been utterly unable to quit. I believe "nicotine free" tobacco would be completely non addictive.
tobacco contains MAO inhibiting compounds, which potentiate nicotine and increase addiction potential. that doesnt mean nicotine on its own isnt insanely addictive, i have no idea what the guy youre responding to is talking about. however, MAOIs were withdrawn as antidepressants for a good reason - they have a terrible withdrawal all on their own.
"I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive”…"
To be sure. But still an obviously dumb thing for a CEO to say though.
Prohibition? Despite your hopes I'm not sure I got your intent.
> As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine.
The problem is that this runs directly into the evidence that is mounting from GLP-1 agonists.
A lot more things are tied to the pathways we associate with "addiction" than we thought.
Social media is addictive the same way anorexia is. If you think Anorexia isn't a form of addiction, then sure, you got your 'safety'.
Mmhmm those are words. Words that are hand wavy pretexts for conservatism rather than liberalism; as a lover of liberal society you hope it acts conservatively!
This just comes off as poorly obfuscated self selection. You own a bunch of Meta, Alphabet and other media stocks?
There’s a big distance between libertarian and liberal societies. The libertarian tendencies of corporations are what tend to cause more harm.
> Can you imagine saying the same thing about oxycodone or cigarettes?
No, but unfortunately I can very easily imagine people saying it, just like the people who made loads of money from pushing those products did. Also just like the people who are profiting from the spread of gambling are saying now.
Why would someone choose to do a thing if it harms them? There are good arguments against laws that restrict personal freedoms, but this isn't one of them.
But what if we're talking about a product that you're giving away to children? I agree that for adults, cigarettes are fine. But in this case, you're actively designing to maximize tweens and teens engagement and the end result is them saying that they wan't to stop but can't.
Though to be fair, I was mostly pointing out the fact that this was a pretty dumb thing to say for a case like this, especially in a jury trial.
Yes, I agree with you, I think that regulation is needed here and that this was a dumb thing to say. I'm just saying that my reaction to Zuckerberg saying that people must love his product if they use it a lot is exactly what I'd expect him to say. It's also exactly why other parties must step in.
Yeah, Zuck is really being a bit of d** there. You can't spend decades hiring the best engineers in the world and give them millions of dollars worth of resources with the sole aim of creating products specifically designed to retain attention and then simply shrug and say "if you don't like it, leave it". That's just not a fair fight.
From what I understand the argument is, and to miss quote Marshall McLuhan it is “the medium, and not the content is the addiction”.
In other words is not the posts by the influencers, but techniques such as infinite schooling, and so on.
This is why meta and google could not relay on User-Generated Content Safe Harbor (Section 230) part of the law.
If people feel that smoking causes lung cancer why do they keep smoking?
it's especially galling because he (or at least his wife) also funds neuroscience research at Stanford and elsewhere, and should have been well informed of the science behind addition, dopamine, and the reward pathways in the brain
Why not make personal responsibility illegal whilst we are at it. It is egregious that an individual can be held accountable for their own behaviours.
How much personal responsibility should we expect children to have? Genuine question. Because there was a time where some people believed that it was ok for kids to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
That doesn’t answer the question.
"If people didn't like destroying the environment, why would they let lobbiests run their government"
-- Billionaires
The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.
There's a large body of evidence on the damage that social media can do to people, and on the engineered compulsion to use it.
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Don’t care, the society disrupting nonsense will stop one way or another and we’re done entertaining concern trolls about the matter