MDM - soashmeed

In 2023, I definitely missed Arturo Bejar's whistleblower testimony to Congress. I discovered it this week, through this WSJ piece, after watching "Molly vs. The Machines," a BBC4 presentation about Facetagram's devastating impact on the mental health of teen girls, in particular a fourteen year-old in the UK named Molly, who committed suicide after being repeatedly pushed thousands of pieces of pro-suicide content via Instagram.

The film is crushing, of course, for any parent (on non-parent) who cares about how the world's most successful tech companies are legally shielded from the harms they create for society's most vulnerable.

But the most devastating part of the film came toward the end, where a group of Molly's friends, who'd gathered to talk about her memory, while also describing their own experiences at the highly-targeted end of Instagram's self-esteem-slop-trough, briefly mention and chuckle about the fact that none of them had deleted Instagram from their phones.

(The clip above: a scene where the film utilizes court transcripts from a UK inquest into whether FB could be deemed legally responsible.)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/new-york-salaries-jobs.html

"To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said." ...

"Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls."

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/meta-buried-causal-evidence-social-media-harm-us-court-filings-allege-2025-11-23/

Most think the reason Musk, Zuck, Sacks, Bezos, Rogan and Tim Apple were on the dais at the inauguration is because they’re the richest — it’s not.

It’s because they’re the most powerful merchants of our modern world's most precious, finite, and incalculable resource: Attention.

Bouie knew it in his last sentence here in December, and we all know in our bones that sloppy Dems will drag their tired insincerities and boo-hooisms into losing at the polls again, unless they take the reins of attention and remake the rules of the game, which they failed to do in ‘24.

"I think Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to young people in our nation while making more money than any person in history."

https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/30-of-children-ages-5-7-are-on-tiktok

Nice aggregation of recent bad news surrounding the facebookverse. They spent 10 billion on Ar/Vr last yr, on a product that their own employees don’t like, and are being forced to use, via tracking. Lovely!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html

If you remember Facebook's VP of Global Public Policy, Joel Kaplan, sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh in support of his nomination to the Supreme Court, you'll appreciate the detail with which Benjamin Wofford assesses his career and influence, especially Kaplan's participation in the "Brooks Brothers Riot" in 2000 which tipped the Florida recount in Bush's favor.

"The Infinite Reach of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Man in Washington" https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-joel-kaplan-washington-political-influence/ (if paywalled: https://archive.ph/RtueB )

From the Humans of New York / Brandon Stanton profile in NY Mag.

The jokes write themselves:

“Other flubbed enforcement actions were taken against…Mr. Zuckerberg himself, whose live-streamed employee Q&A had been suppressed after an algorithm classified it as containing misinformation.”

another Great Moment on Instagram, tucked into this incredible profile of Deana Lawson from Jenna Wortham. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/magazine/deana-lawson.html

I tried to write something like this last night, but this is shorter, better, and to the point. https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-more-platforms-please-8f01445e

https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/

"Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort." https://t.me/s/durov/142 (news from Telegram)

One of my favorite things about trying to describe how the business model behind social media platforms is driving our clown car called America off a cliff -- is that to describe it, in a way that will be remotely understandable, you have to use metaphor.

Tristan Harris intuitively understands that, and is excellent in today's new episode of the world's most popular podcast everyone hates to love / loves to hate.

"If you have 40-50 million people who now recognize that we're living in this cannibalist system in which the economic incentive is to debase the life support system of your democracy, we can all wake up and say, 'that's stupid. Let's do something differently, let's actually change the system, let's use different platforms, let's fund different platforms -- let's regulate and contain these existing Frankensteins.'"

"The Social Dilemma" is great and essential watching and well worth your time Glad to see Tristan Harris finding a mainstream platform for his story (and non-profit) plus there's a Pete Campbell cameo.

Essential watching for anyone with a phone or a family.

If you haven't seen the full clip of Joe Scarborough going-off on Facebook, Zuckerberg and Sandberg this morning, here ya go:

When you post a single photo to Instagram because your photo friends are hosting a participatory thing and you want to support their effort -- and when it's over, you go to delete your pic but you can't, because you're on the web, as if you needed one more reminder why/how Instaface forces users off of open-platforms and standards to their mobile app... so you switch your browser's user-agent to an iPhone 6, and sure enough the delete option appears. Wash, rinse, never repeat.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/ben-sinclair-high-maintenance-youtube-playlist.html

So much quotability from Tristan Harris in his latest interview - this one with Nick Bilton. Ignore Bilton's questions and just listen to Harris roll.

"We've already created a runaway AI. The Facebook newsfeed is a runaway AI. Every minute you spend on it, it's generating more money off of you. It's extracting attention from you and making money, and then it's trying to figure out how it can hook you -- so it tries to enslave human beings -- it reinvests the money it makes into more prediction power to better predict what will hook all these human animals.

It shows better and better things to them, keeping them scrolling for longer and longer, so it makes even more money, so it can predict even more moves ahead on the chess board against the human beings it's facing, (to) better enslave them."

The digital divide has become the Facebook divide.

Holy Moses, someone added it to the wiki! (The “hard to have an original idea these days” divide.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide

They don't release news at 9pm on a Friday night because they want the world to know...

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/suspending-cambridge-analytica/