Meta and Google have been found guilty of making kids addicted to ‘social media’. So fuck Meta and Google. They can afford the law suit which surely won’t amount to much more than… 5 million quid times… every kid in America plus… lawyer’s fees… errrrr… about 537 billion dollars. Plus change. Because the floodgates are open. The ‘Bill-Gates’ as they’ll now be known in this context. The American legal profession will be at every school in the land signing up kids for the class action suits, know here as either ‘Class 4B action’ or ‘Giraffe Class Action’, depending on the State concerned. In Mississippi it’s the Martin Luther King Class Action.

Firstly, for the defence. How do you apportion the fuck-uppage-ness of a kids mental state? Into what would normally occur in any teenager, and what is the ‘sole responsibility’ of social media input? How do you work that out? And much as I’m no fan of social media channels… other than WhatsApp which IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE!!!, kids are desperate to get on them. To ‘follow’ the same fucking imbeciles on Insta as everyone else does. To ‘conform’ as kids ALWAYS want to do. If these kids overdo their exposure, is that down to Mark Zuckerberg? Or their parents? More difficult is the ‘addiction’ bit. Which really is the key word here; the case was not about the evils of social media, that would be longest case ever, but specifically, that ‘they go out of their way to get kids addicted’. And definitions of ‘addiction’ aside, this is where I have to switch and make the case for the plaintiff.

Firstly, Meta and Google KNOW that kids under 13 are using their platforms. But do nothing about it. They get paid for high numbers of users, why would they reduce that willingly? But worse still, much more cynical, is Big Tech’s use of algorithms. Its ability to ‘know’, based on past usage, exactly what pushes each kid’s buttons and presenting them with precisely what they love seeing. Gambling sites use the same thing. Give the users exactly what they want, time and again, to keep them coming back. And whether that is ‘clever marketing’ or ‘cynical exploitation leading to addiction’ is the valid question of our times. But gambling sites are legally prevented from dealing with kids, whereas the Tech dudes are given much more leeway. They can only ‘try’ to detect underage users. And they obviously don’t try very hard. Much as they don’t with self harm issues, Manosphere promotions, suicide assistance, toxic pornography and a host of other ‘lovelies’.

The question then comes as to how much screen time should your kids have? The kids’ answer would be ‘as much as I could possibly get’ whereas grownups feel differently. And yet…

Often don’t exactly ‘lead by example’. If parents seem less obsessed with their phones, perhaps the kids wouldn’t become excessive users themselves. Possibly if parents left phones aside when reading to kids, doing homework with them, picking them up from school, playing with them, maybe the kids wouldn’t be constantly turning this ‘wonderful thing’ into something iconic and magical. Just maybe.

Or, we can fuck up the kids and get 5 mil each from Zuckerberg? What do ya reckon?

Happy Friday

A xxxx