We have to tame Big Tech

Ten years is an aeon in tech. It was nearly a decade ago, in what now seems like the Stone Age of social media, that former Facebook president Sean Parker admitted the question at the heart of the platform’s design was: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Engineers, he said, had built a social-validation feedback loop to hack the brain. “The inventors understood this consciously… and we did it anyway.” For a brief moment, Silicon Valley’s titans seemed to recognise the monster they had built. But the reckoning has taken until now.

Last week, in a California courtroom, a jury sided with a young woman, Kaley, who says she became seriously mentally ill after developing a compulsive dependence on social media as a child. Meta and Google were found to have negligently designed their platforms and failed to warn of the risks. She was awarded $6 million in damages. Days earlier, Meta had been ordered to pay a further $375 million for misleading users about safety while its platforms facilitated child sexual exploitation.

The defeats have left libertarians in a lather, spaffing out columns about the sanctity of personal responsibility. Apparently, holding companies accountable for the products they design is a grave affront to freedom. The collapse in young people’s mental health has nothing to do with social media. Addiction, we are assured, is a fiction. And yet the people who build these platforms understand their effects perfectly well. They simply accept the consequences being borne by other people’s children. (How libertarians came to act as the defenders of the world’s most powerful tech companies will doubtless be the subject of a subsequent article.)

Silicon Valley families have long gravitated towards low-tech schooling. At places such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, screens are tightly restricted. Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel limits his two young children to around an hour and a half of screen time per week, as does Snap’s Evan Spiegel. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg does not let his offspring sit in front of screens “for a long period of time”. Meanwhile, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has warned against a steady diet of short-form video, noting that “shorter content equates to shorter attention spans” and suggesting children might be better off sticking to videos longer than 15 minutes. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said he does not allow his daughter unrestricted access to YouTube’s algorithm, admitting that the prospect “freaks me out”. Even Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has conceded it “might’ve been a mistake” not to impose firmer rules. The protective instincts of Silicon Valley’s fathers, it seems, stops at the estate gates.

TikTok came roaring out of the pandemic and the attention economy went into overdrive. Instagram launched Reels in response; YouTube rolled out Shorts the same year. Even the terminally respectable LinkedIn is now dabbling in vertical videos. They would be foolish not to. Three-quarters of 16 to 24-year-olds say social media is their main source of news, and UK TikTok users spend nearly 50 hours a month on the app.

But the harms extend well beyond what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the great rewiring” of childhood. Sexual harassment and exploitation are not fringe phenomena but routine features of many platforms. In 2022, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 10,731 reports of financial sextortion, with Instagram and Snapchat among the most commonly used platforms in these cases. Meta’s own research found 13 percent of 13–15 year-olds experience unwanted sexual advances every week and 8 percent are exposed to suicide content each week. This equates to millions of teenagers.

The typical response to middle-aged columnists like me fretting over the state of the “youth of today” is that we have always been going to hell in a handcart. Perhaps. But this moment differs in at least three ways. First, online anonymity has stripped away the social constraints that once kept behaviour in check, while vastly expanding the number of ways in which strangers can reach one another. Second, technology is no longer something we merely use. It uses us as our attention, behaviour and relationships are harvested and repackaged as data. Third, the habits of scrolling and clicking are reshaping cognition itself, altering not just what we think, but how we think.

Behind the recent legal cases lies a growing cohort of families, some bereaved, who argue that social media has already proved fatal. In the United States, thousands of lawsuits are now under way against social media companies, while a number of British families are pursuing similar claims in the US courts.

One way to understand this moment is to see it for what it is: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Coined by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), this describes a reality in which the boundary between the human and the technological has begun to dissolve. And it is true: whether that’s the habit of turning to our phones rather than our own memories, or the pioneering technology of neuralink, we are no longer simply using machines but are enmeshed with them.

But the law has yet to catch up, and the frameworks we inherited were designed for a world in which products were external to us. Every industrial shift has produced its casualties, and each time the state has eventually been forced to respond.

In 1858 children began dying in Bradford. Soon adults too fell sick, and panic spread about the mysterious illness striking them down. The culprit was eventually uncovered: arsenic had been accidentally added to sweets after it was supplied in error instead of powdered gypsum, a cheap bulking agent. By the time the alarm was raised, 20 people were dead and more than 200 had been poisoned.

Victorian consumers were not told to take greater personal responsibility for their confectionery choices. Nor were parents blamed for failing to supervise their children’s sweet consumption. The scandal prompted the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act 1860 and, in time, stricter controls on food safety and poisons. Industry was forced to reckon with the consequences of its own practices.

The parallel is not exact but it is instructive. In the attention economy, users are not just customers but the raw material. That makes the traditional distinction between consumer protection and workers’ rights oddly blurred. We are all, in a sense, making products for these platforms by supplying our time and data.

These are not neutral platforms but engineered systems designed to capture and keep human attention at any cost

The recent legal cases suggest the courts are finally catching up. By treating platforms as products, they open the door to a framework in which design decisions can be scrutinised, harms can be quantified, and liability can be assigned. It is a belated reckoning, but a necessary one.

No one now argues that factories should be free to maim their workers, or that confectioners should be allowed to lace sweets with poison. Yet for years, social media companies have enjoyed precisely that indulgence, insisting their products are harmless while refining their capacity to addict, and be used for harassment and exploitation. The courts have begun to recognise what Silicon Valley has always known: these are not neutral platforms but engineered systems designed to capture and keep human attention at any cost. The only question is how much damage will be done before the law forces them to stop.