An ugly gang of Big Tech, “ban-teens-from-social-media” culture warriors, and an abusive parent team up to exploit a vulnerable teenager
The “social media addiction” lawsuit against Meta exposes (again) how greedy interests re-victimize teens suffering violent, troubled families.
Kaley, the 20-year-old lead witness testifying to “social media addiction” in the civil suit against mega-platforms led by Meta, is a triple victim. Her testimony alleges childhood exploitation by Big Tech’s online algorithms and violent abuses by her parents. Big Authoritarian interests are seizing on her case.
“During her cross-examination, Kaley agreed that her mother was being physically and emotionally abusive,” including having “hit her,” testimony summaries report. Meta lawyers allege that “Kaley’s health records show a history of verbal and physical abuse and a fraught relationship with her parents, who divorced when she was three.”
“Meta and Google-owned YouTube have argued Kaley turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her mental health struggles… Her own lawyer has pointed to a recent internal study by Meta where teens with difficult life circumstances more often said they used Instagram habitually or unintentionally.”
Summarizing the allegations: “Both the defendants and the plaintiff have pointed to a turbulent home life for Kaley. Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, but attorneys representing Meta and Google-owned YouTube have argued Kaley turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her mental health struggles.”
Press accounts, atrocious as usual, wildly hype dubious “social media addiction” notions while sanitizing appallingly serious family abuses. Journalist Taylor Lorenz posts a devastating first-hand account of trial testimony, ending with a damning question: should abusive parents be allowed to sue social media to get rich while excusing the horrific damage they forced on their own children?
Kaley’s sad childhood is being exploited by a greedy gang of her mother, corporate, political, culture-war, and media interests to justify punishing all teenagers wholesale while radically enhancing authoritarian officials’ and Big Tech’s power.
The larger context
Civil suits apportion who’s responsible for how much damage to victims. In that context, suppose a hypothetical “American Association of Adolescents”* filed a class action suit against those responsible for making 30% of their number suffer poor mental health.
Using the latest Centers for Disease Control surveys of tens of thousands of teenagers as the evidentiary baseline, here’s a scientifically-based apportioning of responsibility for mental health damage to teens:
· Teens’ parents and household adults would be liable for around 25% of teens’ poor mental health,
· School factors for 5%,
· Known individual factors such as sunburn, lack of sleep, and concussion for 5%, and
· Unknown individual factors for 65%.
· Social media? Not even 1%.
Kaley testified to depression, suicidality, and self-harm along with violent and emotional abuses by her mother and father. CDC surveys show that compared to teens from healthy families, teenagers from abusive families are:
· 5.5 times more likely to suffer frequently poor mental health (odds ratio=5.52; 95% confidence interval, 5.02-6.08).
· 4.0 times more likely to attempt suicide (OR=3.99; 95% CI, 3.55-4.48).
· 4.7 times more likely to self-harm (OR=4.73; 95% CI, 3.66-6.09).
Note that parental-abuse odds ratios and strong effect sizes (d values from 0.76 to 0.89) dwarf the pathetically trivial numbers (d values of 0.20 or less; nothing) reported in the scores of “studies” trumpeted daily in media reports claiming social media harms teenagers.
Politicians’ grotesque double agency
While loudly and publicly lambasting Meta and mega-platforms for “failing to protect children,” political leaders obediently help Big Tech repress and endanger youthful and adult users legislatively.
Authoritarian governments and platforms share a common interest: fury at online podcasters’ “democratization” of the media that opens up refreshingly varied information and expression to challenge official views.
Touting phony “protect children” measures like the Kids’ Online Safety Act, lawmakers sabotage users’ well-being, privacy, freedom of expression, access to information, and democratic rights in a crusade with Big Tech to shut down unruly freedoms and restore official monopolies.
If politicians really wanted to rein in Big Tech and “protect children” (and adults), they would legislate their adherence to democratic principles, public good, and user privacy. Crickets on those fronts.
None of this sound and fury is about protecting teenagers like Kaley. Expect the usual Big Interest civil settlement to make her go away while exploitative interests rally to use her for their own causes.
I feel like people on here, as well as Taylor Lorenz, are missing one of the reasons why Jonathan Haidt sounds so appealing. It's his talk of overprotective/safetyism", the obsession with eliminating all physical and emotional risk—hindering child development, making them fragile. Haidt believes that, children are "antifragile," meaning they need stress, risk, and, unmonitored, free play to become strong, resilient, and independent adults. And you know what? That's music to my ears, because I experienced this personally in my upbringing. My social skills were rather poor and I was spending most of my time in my room which lowered my mental health considerably, just as Haidt says is happening to todays youth. Except in my case it wasn't due to social media and screens, it was due to church going overly strict parents who saw typical teens as more likely to misbehave and have bad addictions and who didn't hit the panic button when I was staying at home, because I was a good kid. This results in myself having very complex and mixed feelings towards Haidt, and negative feelings towards my parents. But because most Gen Z and today's youth have more equal relationships with their parents, they are more likely to look at other reasons for their poor mental health, from economics to screens. This is why they are, for the most part, giving Haidt's crusade against social media and screens a pass. Now clearly Haidt does have blind spots, from the role of economics to parents, and I believe that the former, in the minds of many, covers the negative factor of the latter. But, having said that, Haidt's economics blind spot, could come back and bite him.
As I have declined:
On the contrary, this moral panic is actually harboring a large number of culprits behind children's mental health problems. Recently, Meta was sued, and many parents' children committed suicide. I believe that many of these parents involved in the lawsuit are themselves responsible for their children's mental health issues. Parents are generally the primary cause of adolescent mental health problems. Many of these parents refuse to admit their mistakes, or even understand where they went wrong, so they shift the blame to social media. These parents are the most likely suspects of child abuse and neglect. But who dares to let child protection organizations investigate them? If they do, they will face public condemnation. These parents are now seen as being on the front lines of child protection; questioning them is tantamount to exonerating large tech companies. Therefore, their so-called protection of children is actually harboring the real culprits behind children's mental health problems. Therefore, I believe that for those parents involved in the lawsuit, Palantir could be used to analyze their publicly available experiences, reconstruct their family's true situation, and then collect evidence of their inadequate child protection. This will set things right and demonstrate to the public that child protection issues must not be tainted. Typical cases of child abuse can be compiled and reported to child protection organizations.