Social media meltdown: platforms burn trust, promote addiction, and cozy up to US officials

Social trust is fundamental infrastructure for social media platforms. When users trust a platform, they contribute high-quality data and engagement. When that trust breaks, the platform faces a "death spiral" of declining user quality and fleeing advertisers.

Which might be a bit awkward for some of the big players this week as political tensions lead some platforms to take actions which may alienate portions of their user base. Let's start with the high-profile lawsuit which targeted Meta, Youtube, TikTok, and Snapchat. The lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old and alleges that these platforms caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

SnapChat and TikTok settled to avoid the courtroom. Meta is in the FO portion of the trial as internal memos may be “smoking-gun evidence” needed to prove that the company knew the impact of their actions and chose to spin it for a larger user base.

These documents include Meta seemingly bragging that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to” and an employee declaring, “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” likening all social media platforms to “pushers.” The outcome could influence how more than 1,000 similar personal injury cases against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube are resolved.

These memos certainly don't do social media platforms any favors as they attempt to dispute claims of promoting youth addiction and mental health harm.

Meta is additionally facing scrutiny in New Mexico courts for Zuckerberg's direction to allow younger users to interact with frisky AI chatbots. On the bright side, Meta finally decided to bring back some semblance of content moderation– by preventing users from posting links to Icelist, a website that hosts DHS whistleblower information about ICE agents.

Under new ownership, terms, and conditions

Despite dodging the courtroom in this case, TikTok has found themselves in the spotlight and potentially under investigation in California. The company shifted to US control this week, lead by long time Trump ally, Larry Ellison. This week users began reporting that the platform would no longer let them upload anti-ICE content or even use the word 'Epstein' on the platform. The company says that an outage at their US data center is to blame.

These concerns were further fanned as users began to dive into the company's new terms of service. Updates to data collection include "may collect immigration status, gender identity, religious and racial origin, and medical diagnoses". Under 'Compliance', TikTok also reserves the right to scan user-generated content, even while they are still in the “pre-uploading” stage. Additionally, "approximate” location based on your IP address has been replaced with “precise” GPS-based tracking.