Outrageous Tech boss statement shows need for urgent action
A statement made by a technology boss yesterday is as helpful a guide as it is possible to have to why we need very major political regulation of technology platforms. It may mean one of two things but it doesn't matter which because both are petrifying.
The statement was made by Adam Mosseri in a California courtroom. He is the head of Instagram which is one of a group of technology companies being sued by a 19-year-old who is known only as KMG throughout the case. KMG is suing social media companies which she claims (KMG is female) knowingly got her addicted and caused her harm as a result.
It is a crucial case at the heart of which is that social media platforms are knowingly and purposely 'addiction machines' which have targetted people in ways that was inevitably going to harm them. Mosseri is the first senior tech figure to take the stand.
His statement is clearly outrageous. He was pressed on whether there was such a thing as 'too much Instagram'. The logic of this case is that he could not say yes or it would follow that pushing people to do something which you know is 'too much' and bad for them could lead to a courtroom defeat.
Of course the end point of this is that he stated on the stand that no, 16 hours of continuous use of Instagram every day would not constitute addiction. Allowing eight hours for sleep, the officially-stated position of Instagram is that it is deeply comfortable with you being on its platform every waking hour for every day without limit.
The most likely reason for this insane position is the legal peril of a courtroom – better to appear an idiot than a villain if admitting villainy is going to result in a major legal defeat. The stakes in this case are enormous; if KMG has a case, a very large proportion of the planet has a good case too. It ought to lead almost immediately to a massive investigation into technology companies.
The other possibility is that Mosseri actually believes that no harm would come for living completely and only through Instagram. This is not to be entirely dismissed since there are people in Silicon Valley who really do imagine a world in which, Matrix-like, most of us are plugged into immersive technology all of the time.
The point is that it doesn't matter which of these explanations is true – whether tech executives know they're actively causing addiction and potentially extreme harm to millions of people without any due care or concern or whether they are mad wannabe dictators whose aim is to enslave the human race in a permanent digital space which they control, there can only be one conclusion for the rest of us.
This cannot be allowed. The power and control that is now exerted by technology companies is utterly petrifying and the damage it is doing is no longer contested in any of the serious science. It is almost impossible to provide links to articles in medical journals demonstrating the direct harm of the digital environment because of the sheer volume of them.
Pick any aspect of harms you are aware of (addiction, gambling, excessive alcohol consumption, self harm, bully, suicide, low self esteem, poor concentration, low emotional regulation, rising aggression) and if you do a web search you will find medical literature confirming there is a problem
But it should be noted that there is a power imbalance here. This should not be ending up in courtrooms because government should have intervened. Why hasn't it? A quick look at the Scottish Parliament's (very limited) Lobbying Register will give you a clue.
In the last six months the technology companies who lobbied in Scotland include Apple, BT, Cisco, CoreWeave, Google, Hewlett Packard, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Siemens, The Independent Games Developers Association, UK Interactive Entertainment, Virgin Media O2, Vodafone and the industry lobbying body TechUK. These are only the names you are likely to have heard of.
We need an urgent response to this and this weekend Common Weal will be making our first contribution – a major new report on how to protect Scotland's children from the harm of social media. We will provide more information on this when it is published. But with this mindset among tech bosses, it can be only the start of a crackdown on technology abuse.