Former Facebook president Sean Parker stated that the Facebook site “was made to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible to exploit the vulnerability (the craving of social validation) in human psychology.”
That is a nice way to say the business model is based upon the vulnerability of humans to become addicted. Unfortunately, the vulnerabilities exploited by social media didn’t just end up being a time suck for people in need of attention and affirmation. Consequently, Mark Zuckerberg and company are on trial in Los Angeles in a landmark trial having to do with their companies’ success at specifically engineering addiction via the use of algorithms, infinite scroll, chatbots, and autoplay that have been proven to be harmful, especially to children and teens the world over.
The damage of the addiction includes anxiety, depression, eating disorders, dissociation from reality, self-harm, hyper-sexuality, higher rates of aggression, sleep deprivation, hallucinations, and diminished functioning such as emotional control, stability, calmness, and resilience in nearly a third of the next generation. That is, not to mention, the number of children and teens that were lured into sexual exploitation-trafficking and pornography addictions via the internet.
Multiple studies, including The Global Mind Project published in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities last summer, determined that kids who receive smartphones before age 13 face skyrocketing suicide risks. Girls were especially affected, with 48% of those who got phones at age 5-6 reporting suicidal thoughts, compared to 28% who got their phones at age 13.
The bottom line?
The younger children are when they first own a smart phone, the worse their mental health becomes by early adulthood.
The Global Mind Project drew data from nearly two million participants across 163 countries with the core analysis focusing on over 100,000 individuals between ages 18-24 yrs old, Generation Z, the first group to grow up with smart phones and social media from early childhood.
The study found that the AI-powered systems strategically exploited behavioral data and psychological vulnerabilities, potentially constraining children’s agency by eroding autonomy, diminishing decision-making capacity, and encouraging social comparison.
Of course, some of these problems are not limited to social media alone, as other problems arise with gaming, streaming videos, and the like. Witness the 11-year-old child, who, just a week ago was accused of murdering his adoptive father for taking away his Nintendo Switch and being told to go to sleep.
As reported by CNN, Meta and YouTube in the Los Angeles case, are accused of intentionally designing the addictive features that hooked a now 20-year-old woman, Kaley, as a child and harmed her mental health. Kaley began using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram at age nine. At one time, she was spending more than 16 hours on the platform at age 16. The addictive features, she claims, led her to develop anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts; she also experienced bullying and sextortion on Instagram.
The lawsuit is first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits to go to trial across America. One person in the hearing room clutched a picture of her late 15-year-old son who died after attempting the “choking challenge” he learned about on YouTube.
The CNN report goes on to say that Meta is also standing trial in New Mexico in a case accusing the company of creating a breeding ground for sexual predators and exposing children to sexually explicit material.
Unfortunately, what this all boils down to is something that the great A.W. Tozer warned about, in 1955 no less:
“The Great God Entertainment is ardently worshiped by many, for there are millions who cannot live without amusement. Life without some form of entertainment, for them, is simply intolerable. They look forward to the blessed relief afforded by professional entertainers and other forms of psychological narcotics, as a dope addict looks to his daily shun of heroin.
“No one with common human feeling will object to the simple pleasures of life, nor to such harmless forms of entertainment as may help to relax the nerves and refresh the mind exhausted by toil. Such things, if used with discretion, may be a blessing along the way. However, the all-out devotion to entertainment as a major activity for which and by which men live is definitely something else.
“The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin. The growth of the amusement phase of human life, to such fantastic proportions, is a portent, a threat to the souls of modern men. It has been built into a multi-million-dollar racket, with greater power over human minds and human character than any other educational influence on Earth. And the ominous thing is that its power is almost exclusively evil, rotting the inner life, crowding out eternal thoughts which would fill the souls of men, if they were but worthy to entertain them.
“The whole thing has grown into a veritable religion which holds its devotees with a strange fascination, and a religion, incidentally, against which it is now dangerous to speak. For centuries, the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognizing it for what it was, a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability.”
Time will tell if parents, educators, and legislators will finally determine that engineered addiction is not entertainment.
Andy Caldwell, Executive Director, COLAB
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