The Meta Settlement Does More Harm Than Good

The Big Tech giant Meta has recently agreed to an $18 billion settlement with coalition of U.S. states to resolve a massive, landmark lawsuit alleging that apps like Facebook and Instagram intentionally designed features to addict children and teens, and harm youth mental health.  And while we at Twenty-One Debunked are clearly NO friend to Big Tech whatsoever, and broadly agree that they should have been held accountable for their gross misdeeds over recent decades, we also believe that the settlement is highly problematic in the following ways:

• First and foremost, $18 billion is NOT a lot of money at all to Meta, who currently holds a whopping $90.26 billion in total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities alone, and has a net worth of approximately $1.45 trillion (with a T!) based on its total market capitalization.  Hardly a deterrent!
• Young users (under age 18) will face more restrictions (including on Constitutionally protected speech), and very questionable and privacy-compromising "age assurance" (which will also backfire on adults too) will be built into every one of their products going forward.
• Most of the changes that Meta are required to make to its platforms are NOT actually corrective of any real problem, and many are in the wrong direction and therefore worse than useless.  Even if some changes are marginally good.
• The toxic algorithms and surveillance advertising business model are both still left intact, and will continue to further warp our politics, our economy, our society, and our culture for the worse, as they will continue to amplify the very worst of humanity by design.
• And things like comprehensive data privacy requirements for all ages were not even on the table, apparently.

To quote David Greene of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who described it very well indeed:

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests. And the data minimization and security measures don’t keep states from using data collected under the agreement for other law enforcement purposes – which could include things like criminal investigations of abortions or gender-affirming care. 

And renowned sociologist and youth rights activist Mike Males has also written some excellent articles about this as well.  Not least because this doesn't doesn't even scratch the surface of the elephant in the room:  the real problems that young people are facing (primarily offline, and primarily from parents and other adults), and from which they are using social media as a refuge.

Thus, Big Tech is still smiling like Joe Camel. And as always, young people and other marginalized populations will ultimately pay the price.  As we like to say, Big Tech can go EFF off!

What If We Have Gotten "Age At First Use" All Wrong?

What if we (as a society) have gotten "age at first use" all wrong in regards to addiction?  The conventional wisdom is that the younger a person is when first trying a given substance (whether it's alcohol, tobacco/nicotine, cannabis, or otherwise), the more likely that person is to become addicted or dependent on that substance, and the more severe the problem they will develop, all else being equal.  This idea is often paired with the controversial (and half-baked at best) "gateway drug theory", namely that the use of lesser substances (alcohol, tobacco, and especially cannabis) increases the risk for subsequent use and/or addiction to other, harder substances.  But while the "gateway theory" is relatively easy to debunk, the "age at first use" theory has had much more staying power to date, mainly due to the fairly strong, and seemingly rugged and robust, correlational evidence, often combined with relatively superficial knowledge of human brain development.

However, a new study (albeit not exactly a new idea) strongly implies that at least much of the observed association between earlier age at first use and greater likelihood of addiction is actually due to reverse causation.  That is, kids who were at greater risk of addiction actually showed measurable brain differences compared to those who weren't, even before they took their first sip or puff.  This is truly a paradigm-shifting study indeed, and one that will require everyone to fundamentally rethink their approaches to substance abuse prevention.

That is NOT to say that using substances at an early age (especially before 15) is actually a wise idea, of course.  It still appears to be at least somewhat riskier overall, and the results of twin studies (which completely control for genetics, and largely control for environment) of the past still have yet to be completely explained away.  (For the record, Twenty-One Debunked does NOT endorse or encourage the underage use of any such substances.)  But this latest study shows that the reality is far more nuanced than meets the eye, and that "delay, delay, delay that first drink or use at any cost!" is also probably not the wisest approach to prevention either.  And, of course, by implication, the 21 drinking age (and smoking age and toking age) now has even less support still from The Science.

(We should also note also that people who actually do wait until 21 or older to use such substances, especially alcohol, tend not to be very gung-ho about such substances to begin with, and thus tend to be non-drinkers, non-smokers, and non-users.  That is true for both age at first use, as well as age at first regular use.  It's basically tautological.)

Perhaps this why Denmark and Iceland, who each famously take diametrically opposite approaches to teen drinking (i.e. very permissive vs. very restrictive, respectively), still ultimately end up with remarkably similar alcoholism rates among adults.  Just like the USA vs Canada, basically.