Designed to addict kids…

Spoilt for choice for Addiction Economy Thought for Today, but decided to go with META deliberately designing platforms to get children addicted, coming out in court documents.

This is exactly what our Addiction Economy project is exploring. How is this and other business models designed to addict seen as collateral damage in the fight for market share by companies and politicians until society fights back.

"Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called “teen fundamentals” which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development.

"The presentation discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity, and teenagers’ tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and asked how these asked how these characteristics could “manifest . . . in product usage”

"One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company’s business in a 2019 email.

"But a year later, the same executive expressed frustration that while Facebook readily studied the usage of underage users for business reasons, it didn’t show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger kids and remove them from its platforms."