I’ve written a few times now about why Meta’s big “settlement” with the states is a bad deal. It’s Meta seeking to control how the rest of the internet is regulated in a way that, as Eric Goldman’s op-ed we republished explains, is anti-competitive. It’s also bad for kids (while everyone is pretending it protects kids). But lots of people have been trying to compare it to the big tobacco settlement from almost three decades ago, or even to the much more recent opioid settlement.
In the past I’ve talked about how dangerous and misleading it is to compare social media to any sort of “consumable” because when we’re talking about social media, we’re inherently talking about speech, not some sort of chemical compound you ingest that makes physical changes to your body.
But the rush to compare the Meta settlement to those others is strong, in part because people like a familiar story: bad industry gets caught, pays up, problem solved. And even if you want to take the analogy further, it fails. Studies show that the claims of social media addiction are massively exaggerated to the point of being harmful, and the claims about the lingering “harms” from social media seem to be lacking in the evidence as well.
The good folks over at the Connected Learning Alliance, an organization that brings together actual experts in how children and technology interact, invited me to do a Q&A about the Meta settlement, and why the comparisons to the tobacco settlement may not be that apt.
I’m not going to post the whole thing, just a clip, but I encourage you to go read all of it:
Question: What’s the critical issue?
Mike Masnick: Social media is not nicotine, and Meta’s recent settlement is not tech’s “Big Tobacco” moment. Meta has spent a decade looking for a regulatory moat to fend off competitors, and with this settlement, they got one. The technology companies are widely disliked, and for good reason, so this settlement can feel like something to celebrate: Meta is being punished and the product changes generally sound positive. But this settlement is no cause for celebration.
For years, Facebook has struggled to get younger users. Instagram has been successful, but even they have struggled at times, especially against upstarts like TikTok. And so Meta initially responded by buying up rivals — Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions — and then they copied features from Snap and TikTok. But at Meta’s size, the company can’t keep growing, so they’ve been looking to use regulatory policy to insulate the company from competition. The thinking is: if policy raises compliance costs high enough, then only big companies like Meta and Google can absorb them. The smaller upstarts can’t, and they won’t become a competitive threat.
It was a fun discussion, and it includes my suggestions for making a better internet for teens and everyone else.
Thanks again to the Connected Learning Alliance for having me. If you’d like more, they recently also interviewed two of my favorite deep thinkers about internet issues: danah boyd on how social media became parasocial media and Cory Doctorow on how youth and educators can fight enshittified tech.