I feel like a researcher’s dream might be to spend years on a massive, far-reaching study, then release it at exactly the right time to hit the news cycle.
Let’s start with the news cycle. Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James and a bipartisan coalition of 50 other attorneys general announced a settlement under which Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion and accept sweeping new child-safety restrictions on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta reported $200.97 billion in revenue last year alone, so that’s about 8.5% of one year’s revenue.
I’ve seen this described as the equivalent of a traffic ticket for Meta, although that’s not actually a good metaphor.
Imagine you got a $100 ticket for not coming to a complete stop before a right turn on red. That ticket would equal 8.5% of your annual income only if you made $1,176.47 a year, so the math would be off.
Still, 8.5% might be enough to notice, but not exactly crippling.
So we have to look at the rest of the deal. As Mike Isaac, who covers big technology companies for The New York Times, summarized, it includes:
stronger age verification
ways to prevent “unwanted contact from strangers”
controls allowing teens to stop autoplay on videos, along with hidden “like” counts for teens (wait, not everyone?)
Finally—and actually this is first in my book, but I ordered it this way for a reason—a default limit for under-18s of just two hours total per day across Instagram and Facebook (although I’m not sure how many under-18s actually use Facebook), with an exception for messaging, plus no access at all between midnight and 6 a.m., unless a parent overrides the restrictions.
Now, maybe you look at something like that and think:
Wait, two hours a day on social media works out to 14 hours a week, and approximately 730 total hours a year.
And this is how much Meta is agreeing to limit as the result of a major court settlement?
And yet, just a few days before the major settlement, we got news of a massive new study using 11 years of data from 183,000 adults, attempting to correlate the amount of time spent on social media each day with negative mental health outcomes.
Writing in the journal npj Mental Health Research, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and Northwestern University say they used more than a decade’s worth of data from the Media Behaviors and Influence Study, and found that intense use of social media was one of the most important predictors of self-reported depression.
“When it comes to depression and social media, the argument is salient across scientific test after test of those 11 years,” corresponding author and UC Professor Hans Breiter said. “It’s a damning picture. Social media is harmful for individuals across the lifespan. We should not subject ourselves to a product using addiction science to optimize our viewing time.”
See what I mean? The study was published on August 22; the Meta settlement was announced on August 26.
Sometimes you get lucky.
As the University of Cincinnati summarized it: “Researchers observed a correlation with self-reported depression among respondents who spent at least 150 minutes on social media per day. They observed the same result in each of the 11 years studied.”
You will notice that Meta’s new two-hour limit works out to 120 minutes a day—not the roughly 150-minute point highlighted in the study, but awfully close for comfort.
And there’s a big connection here. In describing the case against Meta, the states said they had sued the company for “designing and implementing features that it knew to be harmful to children and teens in order to maximize their time on its social media platforms.”
So, maximizing the amount of time people spend using these products was at the heart of the states’ case against the company.
Perhaps this counts as progress in the sense of Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec’s aphorism: “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?”
And yes, some very good timing.
Other things worth knowing …
LeMonde: Ukraine fired waves of drones at Moscow and the surrounding region early Sunday, September 20, killing two people and setting an oil refinery ablaze as Russians voted in a final day of parliamentary elections, officials said. The attack was the largest on Moscow since the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive in 2022 and involved some 1,600 drones, 450 of which were aimed directly at the capital.
NBC Washington: President Donald Trump said Sunday that the massive arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would become a “top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition. It is one more example of how Trump is insisting that his initiatives to remake the White House and Washington D.C. are also serving a defensive purpose.
Spectrum News: Reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House on Saturday, a day after President Trump said he was barring them because of reporting he found to be “fake news.”
NYT: California cracks down on influencers’ undisclosed political ads. Under a new law, creators could face fines of $5,000 per post if they don’t disclose that they were paid to make political content.
WaPo: How the surging cost of going out is changing American life.
WSJ: The race to save Florida’s orange industry from total collapse. After groves were ravaged for decades by a disease, new EPA-approved genetic technologies are giving citrus growers a chance to rebuild.
Hollywood Reporter | Instagram: AI “actor” Tilly Norwood glitched during a recent interview with Piers Morgan, suddenly switching from speaking English to Cantonese and leaving the journalist and fellow guest Tom Conti laughing. Norwood, a generative AI creation from Xicoia, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored to promote her feature film debut, Misaligned, when she malfunctioned.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Sean S on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!