For many, it's a long-awaited day of reckoning.
Social media companies are finally being forced to pay for failing to protect children from the risks of using their platforms, say industry observers such as Mackenzie Common, a lecturer in the University of Alberta's media and technology studies unit.
Two recent court cases have resulted in costly verdicts for Meta and YouTube - prompting some, including Common, to call this social media's "Big Tobacco moment."
"I'm very pleased," she says. "They've been given a long time to fix these issues, like 10 to 15 years of people talking about the harm to young people," including vulnerability to sexual abuse, damaged cognitive capacity and mental health concerns.
"We're fighting a losing battle when corporations are allowed to mark their own homework," she says, adding that although "they may not be intentionally malicious," a lack of regulation makes it easier for profit-driven tech corporations to hide their heads in the sand.
Having spent years working in the tech industry and serving as a researcher in platform governance at Oxford University, Common has an inside view. She wrote her PhD dissertation on social media content moderation and human rights at the London School of Economics.
Starting out in the industry, she was optimistic tech companies could ensure the safety of platforms on their own, she says. Some have made perfunctory attempts. But after seeing how companies like Meta operate, she became convinced government regulation is the only way to keep them honest.
"I think some are trying to implement safety measures, but the fact is, these are for-profit companies, and human rights are just not their top priority. Governments need to set the boundaries."
A legal reckoning?
Last month in New Mexico, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties for misleading users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and enabling child sexual exploitation, allowing predators to contact children and circulate sexually explicit material.
In California, YouTube and Google had to pay $6 million in damages to a plaintiff who testified she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, resulting in depression, self-harm, poor relationships, body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia.
The prosecution made arguments strikingly similar to those brought against tobacco companies in the 1990s, which highlighted the addictive qualities of cigarettes and companies' public denials of their products' harms despite knowing better. Some studies have even pointed to neurological explanations for social media addiction similar to substance abuse.
The recent cases are only the first of a staggering wave of lawsuits social media companies face for damaging the mental health of young people. There are some 1,600 cases pending in California, as well as 10,000 individual cases and roughly 800 school-district claims across the United States.
On the global landscape, Australia last December became the first jurisdiction to ban social media for children under 16, with numerous other countries considering similar bans. Manitoba is planning to ban social media in classrooms.
Common says she reserves judgment on whether that's the best approach until there is more data.
"Maybe young people shouldn't be accessing social media. It's not just that the ban protects them from sex offenders, cyberbullying and other kinds of abuse. There's also concern about how children are spending huge amounts of time on their phones, without a chance to grow and develop as people offline."
As with tobacco products, it will be impossible to keep all children from logging onto social media, because there are always ways around obstacles like age-verification software, says Common. But bans could at least offer disincentive, gradually shifting the culture, especially since many young adults raised on social media platforms admit it "was not beneficial for them." They can see the harm it has done to their lives.
They can also see how they were ruthlessly manipulated by design, she says, with companies deliberately embedding addictive reward systems in their platforms. Neuroscience has shown how they work on a developing brain in ways similar to gambling.
It's why, in the California case, the prosecution focused on design rather than content, a way to circumvent the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from liability for third-party content.
"I thought that was a clever argument, while still getting to the heart of the issue," says Common.
So what happens when we unplug?
The good news is that it appears the harms of social media addiction can be overcome. Noah Castelo, a professor in the Alberta School of Business, has studied the larger problem of all of us spending too much time on our smartphones.
In his latest study, covered by the Washington Post, he and co-author Kostadin Kushlev showed that taking a "digital detox" of just 14 days - using the app Freedom to block internet access on their phones - resulted in better sustained attention, mental health and general self-reported well-being.
Over 90 per cent of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes and spent more time socializing in person, exercising and being in nature.
The improvement in sustained attention was equivalent to overcoming 10 years of age-related decline, say the researchers, while the reduction in depression was greater than the effect of antidepressants and similar to cognitive behavioural therapy.
Perhaps most surprising, say the researchers, was that the benefits lingered after the detox, even for those who occasionally cheated.
"You don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev told The Post.
The damage of smartphones is more acute than computers because of interruption, say Castelo and Kushlev. The phone diverts attention from activities like walking with friends, or watching a movie or sports event. You pay less attention to social interaction when distracted by the phone.
On a cultural level, however, change will likely come incrementally, says Common. Shifting attitudes on smoking took decades, and that is hardly a done deal. But waiting decades may be a luxury we can no longer afford.
"We have to get this right, because we're making the same mistakes with AI."
