I remember when I started getting involved in what was later termed Web 2.0 – blogs, photo sharing, social media. We were trying to understand what it could unleash, looking for an explosion of creativity, discussion, ‘democratization’ of so many things.
Those early years (say, pre-2008) were heady. Facebook and Twitter became like huge commons. Social networks expanded globally and temporally.
Fast forward to 2026.
Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap will have to face thousands of social media addiction lawsuits. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal filed by the tech companies, allowing more than 3,000 child safety lawsuits to proceed, according to Reuters. Source: Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap will have to face thousands of social media addiction lawsuits. | The Verge
Eh-social Media
Personally, I long left social media, only using it when required for work. These allegedly social media networks are not really ‘social’ in the sense of the early days when ALL the folks you followed, you knew personally. And gone are the days of folks giving a shit where you were, what you ate, what you did.
Social media has evolved into one big river of stuff flowing by all the time and we just dip our head in and out. The things we see are more from folks we sorta know _who_ they are but not really connected personally with. The mechanics are not really discussion, but vague thumbs up, views, and no fucks given for any attempt at smart discourse. [Even the ex-head of product at Twitter realized that social media was missing the ‘social’]
These lawsuits make me think back to the early days of social media. Sadly, I can’t seem to bring up any memories if we truly had a clue of the impact of unleashing a dopamine hack that would be hard to shake.
Cocaine rats
I keep thinking our need to flip-flip-flip thru a never-ending stream of vacuous moving images stems from our reptilian brain’s need to engage with things that move (it could kill us!) and maybe a part of us always wanting to connect to _something_.
Social media inadvertently hacks into that brain and makes itself so hard to escape. And the product designers not only know that, they documented they knew that, and documented how they designed their product for that, and now the backlash is here.
How innocent we were
I remember meeting a guy (2004?) who ran a very popular online game in Finland heavily used by children. He said he had analytics up the wazoo and knew how to get folks to buy things for their game. Naïvely, I thought that was so cool. Fast forward to now, I’d find that horrifying.
Sigh.
