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?
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.
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.
Be careful what you wish for. Serious, persistent world hunger in certain countries primarily exists not due to climate change or lack of food or even lack of money but because of local violence and corruption. For example, the notorious 1980s famine in Ethiopia attracted much attention in developed countries and many people (including billionaires) donated money to help. There was a drought which made farming difficult but the main problem was a violent civil war. Armed groups used food as a weapon against the civilian population by destroying crops and stealing foreign aid.
So, if you want "these egomaniacal billionaires" to end world hunger then you're effectively asking them to form private militias and impose peace by force in the developing world. The new colonialism. Is that what you want?
>to end world hunger then you're effectively asking them to form private militias and impose peace by force in the developing world
Does this happen to be your space? If this comment were posted to a forum of experts, I imagine they would hotly debate whether a range of ideas would work.
I struggle to imagine the private militia concept would be suggested in that context; with that said, I know nothing.
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?
Yeah, but who is going to lobby for it? Certainly nobody with actual money to pay for the lobbying.
And which politician would want to vote that in? Certainly no one with any rich friends who donate to their campaigns. Which means no politician that supports this is ever going to have the budget to get elected in the first place.
And then you have the problem that you cannot just fix this in one country. Because then all these rich people will find tax loopholes to claim they’re not nationals and thus exempt from this tax. So you have to convince every rich person and every politician in every country to change.
And now that you’ve created a wealth vacuum, you need to ensure that nobody rises up to flip the system again, using their wealth to manipulate everyone into repealing these new laws.
And now we are at the stage of having to change the nature of humanity…
The problem we have is that economics is driven by scarcity and consumption; and humans are largely driven by greed (or at the very least, a desire to make life comfortable). And we can’t have a future where rich people aren’t greedy, without changing the entire way economics works. Which also requires changing human nature too.
The basic concept of an impenetrable global taxation scheme came to mind about a decade ago, but at the time I was hopeful such a thing would be possible. (Ain’t no communist, but realize nice to have public roads etc. to get your employees to work - everyone chips in -> we all make more money.)
Is it human nature to rise up once a breaking point is reached? Since I concede it is not in our nature to finish our shift at our third job and go knock on neighbors’ doors, rock the vote. (agitating to elect the least greedy capable people)
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.
I mind the tolerance of society when some of these billionaires make their money on the back of negative externalities.
When "small" conflicts, like unpermissioned surveillance they use to psychological leverage against us, literally paying for content that gets eyeballs without taking any responsibility for the misinformation and hate they are financing to get produced, actively algorithmically pushing attention getting material without taking any responsibly for misinformation or hate material they are actively promoting, when they get paid for ads, but take no responsibility for taking money from scams and promoting them, and all the other seemingly "minor" but pervasive negative externalities that they hyper scale, people get hurt, and all of society gets degraded.
As everyone points out: incentives. If you don't take perverse incentives away from billionaires, or continue to give them perverse safe harbors, then those billionaires will relentlessly reinvest and innovate, in more harms, at ever greater scales. Things we still think are minor ethical issues, are not when they are hyper scaled.
This isn't some passive, life is rough sometimes situation, that people should be expected to weather. This highly financed, highly managed psychological, social and political harm, for profit. Even if the harm is distributed and seemingly low in any given incident. It adds up to a visibly degraded society.
Somehow social media gets treated with all the lack of responsibility of a neutral web site server. But they are highly active in how they operate. They should be responsible for their very active choices.
> 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.
I don’t. That presupposes that they have anything to contribute to begin with.
Their wealth beyond some millions (edit: being generous) is built on exploitation. That’s not necessarily a transferrable... skill.
> 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.
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.
Oh, corporstions pushed age verification, so of course they will not have any choice now. But before that they could just stop being addictive regardless of age.
There are ways, like double blind age verification, in which neither the website knows anything other than "yes, >18", nor the verificator knows anything other than "I was asked if user X is >18, checked, yes". Website doesn't know actual age, verificator doesn't know which website it is or for what action was the request performed.
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.
Sure, parents do bear some responsibility here too. But we are talking about a platform that is engineered to be addictive to adults too. So it’s not as if the platform isn’t still predatory even if we find a way to parent every child on the internet.
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.
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’m not a doctor but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
Substances like caffeine, sugar, and painkillers are definitely still referred to as “addictive”.
Whereas substances like sertraline (antidepressant) are referred to as a “dependence” because it’s dangerous to discontinue abruptly (as you said) but there isn’t any psychological addiction involved.
To elaborate, I think experts usually use these terms as follows: an addiction is something where you have a continuous and difficult to resist drive to keep doing/using something due to it being inherently rewarding. A dependence is something where if you stop regularly doing/using something you’ll experience some sort of withdrawal.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
A little further down then social media apps, but mostly the same. After all, it's the main source of outrage bait for those apps. If we're talking about Fox News or CNN there's less specific user targeting and the delivery mechanism is more constrained.
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.
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?
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.
...and postulate, for science doesn’t truly know why, and frankly, my guess is as good as any scientist’s. Much like in public education, policy makers in public health cater to and enforce the average. What a crappy way to do things.
>However, nicotine can also act non-associatively. Nicotine directly enhances the reinforcing efficacy of other reinforcing stimuli in the environment, an effect that does not require a temporal or predictive relationship between nicotine and either the stimulus or the behavior. Hence, the reinforcing actions of nicotine stem both from the primary reinforcing actions of the drug (and the subsequent associative learning effects) as well as the reinforcement enhancement action of nicotine which is non-associative in nature.
You can find other studies about the addictiveness differences between cigarettes, vapes, chew, patches, pouches, etc. Basically, the methods with the most ceremony and additional stimulus are more addictive.
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.
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.
this article isnt as relevant as when it was written. eg regarding price, cigarette taxation has skyrocketed in certain countries. furthermore, the depicted studies were performed prior to the proliferation of disposable vapes - i somehow doubt that the idea of infinite nicotine on tap was accounted for. as to your question, some individuals find cutting down to be easier than cold turkeying. personally i opt for the latter, although this strategy should not be universally applied (eg. alcohol withdrawal may induce seizures). at the end of the day i find smoking (not vaping or gum) to be a net neutral - controlled motivation, treatment of schizophrenia symptoms, and neuroprotectivity are balanced out by addiction potential, shortening of lifespan, and reduced red blood cell count.
As someone who values a conservative society, I hope we'd be exceedingly careful before releasing products to consumers before knowing whether they're addictive or not.
Why is it that these philosophical ideas about supposed personal freedom again and again make an appearance when it’s about the freedom of corporations? It’s always that. Either that or with the Free User pushed infront of them like a shield.
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?
> 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.
> "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?"
A statement that's been brought up even by HN commentators
Facebook is not a free market where you can choose. You're compelled to use it for several different reasons (and before some wiseass comments "you're not forced to. you can delete it" yes I know)
- They captured the early market. There was a small window of time in which to get users
- They ruthlessly bought up the competition
- They've deleted links to competitors
- They outright hijacked people's email addresses. It makes it hard to transfer users to another service or to email them outside the walled garden
- Even while they change privacy settings for users to make things more public, they wall off public pages. Your local neighborhood has a place where they post information? Even if everyone selects "Public" in the audience you can't see it without an account
Edit: Oh, and shadow profiles. And making it nigh-impossible to delete an account permanently
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.
Is designing for retention bad then? God forbid you write a story that captivates readers; if they don't stop reading after a few chapters, why, that's illegal mate
Lol, so then cigarette makers weren't deliberately modifying drug levels in their product to addict smokers, they were "designing for retention".
More to the point, though, your comments here are all straw men. This was specifically a case about targeting children with addictive features of their products.
Because they use smoking to fill a hole in their lives. If they are somehow forced to stop, they will just switch to another vice as long as the actual problem isn't solved.
I know lots of adults who talk about "curing their phone addiction". I don't think someone would find it necessary to write a book "How To Break Up With Your Phone" (using what's referred to as a "digital detox program") if there weren't a substantial number of people who wanted to stop infinite scrolling behavior on their phone but found it difficult.
I knew someone who had exactly that feeling about YouTube. It was a genuine struggle for them to stop even though the amount of time they spent on it was negatively impacting their life and the content was making them more anxious.
Should YouTube be banned then? YouTube provides a lot of value to a lot of people. I've learned a lot of math, physics, history, DIY from it. But it's addictive (to some)
Nobody is arguing for "banning YouTube". But "the algorithm", and many user interface features explicitly designed to keep you going to the next video or down "YouTube rabbit holes", is what this case is about.
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
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.
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.
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...