Time to Make Internet Giants Pay Before It’s Too Late

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In the classic genie fable, someone is granted a wish (or three) that is then fulfilled in a way that is maximally unhelpful. For example, you might ask to be the richest person on Earth but that wealth materializes when you are in a plane that is experiencing a total engine failure and is crashing toward the ground. Oh, and you have stage IV pancreatic cancer, so enjoy that $1 trillion while you can.

It’s like that with the internet. Imagine that someone came upon a genie and said: For my one wish, I want all of humanity to be able to communicate more easily and have our combined knowledge available instantaneously. However, while the person making the wish wanted to foster peace and prosperity for all, he didn’t explicitly say so.

And, poof, the next thing you know, we have world-class assholes like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk making billions of dollars from social media sites that divide people into tribes while leaving them miserable, angry, and misinformed.

Sadly, for humanity, this is a familiar story.

More than 100 years ago, that genie gave us an awesome new way to move people and goods around, but now we have a million global traffic fatalities annually and are polluting our environment. But at least some oil companies and tyrannical regimes made gazillions of dollars.

At around the same time, plastic began revolutionizing industrial production, but now we are drowning in it. But at least some chemical companies (and those oil companies) got rich.

Just like they did when, a couple of decades later, scientists came up with forever chemicals that can be used to make neat stuff but are now also found in nearly every organ of every human body. And, of course, they are polluting our environment, from the deep ocean to the stratosphere.

The genie even gave us a plant to light on fire so that we look cool at parties, without mentioning that it caused lung cancer. But, you guessed it, at least the tobacco companies made a lot of money.

Unfortunately, while humanity has been great at creating these messes (and, to be fair, some of them started out as true innovations that greatly improved our lives before it became clear that there were massive downsides), we have been less successful when it comes to putting that genie back in the bottle.

In fact, with the exception of cigarettes, we have done an exceptionally poor job of demanding accountability from the corporations that first got us hooked on their products and then did nothing to fix the problems they created.

In large part, that’s because those companies spent some of their immense wealth on buying themselves influence which prevented laws from being passed or regulations from being implemented that would have protected consumers and the environment but hurt their bottom line.

The consequences for the planet and every person living on it have been devastating.

And while the parts of the internet that we are primarily talking about — i.e., social media platforms and misinformation sites — aren’t polluting the environment, they are poisoning the minds of their consumers. 

That makes them more destructive to society than combustion engines or mountains of plastic cups. Which is why we have to learn from the (missed) lessons of the past and act to curb their influence now — not only because of the damage they are currently doing but also because the same tech bros are about to do even more harm as they pursue their goal of trying to get everybody addicted to artificial intelligence.

The European Union is leading the attempt to save us from out-of-control AI through carefully drafted laws and regulations. In the US, where most of the social media giants are based, it is illusory to believe that the federal government will use that approach.

However, an even more effective tool can be used here that would hit the tech billionaires where it actually hurts: in their wallets.

Last month, a jury in New Mexico found that Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — enabled the sexual exploitation of children on its platforms and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties.

In the same week, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million to a young woman who had sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

Both verdicts are unprecedented… and yet they don’t go nearly far enough. That is evidenced in part by the fact that Meta’s stock went up after the New Mexico decision.

We need more of this — a lot more.

And we should get it because these verdicts have shown that the immunity shield that internet platforms have enjoyed for three decades is finally cracking.

For 30 years, companies like Meta and Google have been able to hide behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which offers them broad protection from liability for content generated by their users.

However, the lawyers for the plaintiff in the Los Angeles trial successfully argued that the platforms were much more than mere hosts because they actively encourage addictive behavior with endless scrolling, algorithm-powered “likes,” and notifications.

Just as importantly, the discovery phase of the trials revealed documents showing that the companies knew about the harm their products were doing — for example, describing Instagram as “a drug.”

These internal communications will undoubtedly resurface in other trials and they are reminiscent of the documents that clipped the wings of the tobacco industry. It showed that the companies knew about the addictive nature of their products and increased their nicotine content even though they were aware of the adverse health effects.

Of course, things don’t always work out that well for the victims of the predatory corporate practices. For example, the oil industry has known about global warming for decades but then spent untold millions on obscuring the science and has never truly been held to account for its role in the unfolding climate disaster.

We hope that, in the case of Big Tech, the truth will not only out but prevail.

Ideally, the EU would break up the social media platforms and they, and their billionaire owners, would be buried under an avalanche of lawsuits that sends each and every one of them to the poorhouse. And, in a perfect world, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al. would be held criminally liable as well.

While that is probably wishful thinking, at the very least the coming legal reckoning will make them sweat a little, lose them some money, and expose them and their companies as the self-serving exploiters they are.

And these trials, and those that will surely follow, might perhaps make the developers of AI tools, which have already led to teenage users killing themselves, think twice before rushing untested and deeply flawed products to market.