Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial

Evidence and mechanisms of “engineered addiction”

• Commenters cite discovery documents about Meta prioritizing teens and using mass notifications to provoke FOMO, including during school hours.
• Other anecdotes: internal materials at platforms teaching advertisers to “hook” users in fractions of a second; recommendation engines tuned to capture attention every 1–2 seconds (e.g., Shorts/TikTok-style feeds).
• Parallels are drawn to food and tobacco: flavor “bliss points,” “snackability,” and historical tobacco R&D explicitly optimizing for addiction.
• Some report strongly addictive personal experiences (e.g., hyper-targeted video niches) while others find the same products repellent, likening it to casinos: different brains, different vulnerabilities.

Ethics and responsibility of tech workers

• Large part of the thread debates whether engineers “knew what they were doing.”
• Explanations offered: high pay, compartmentalized work (tickets, metrics), corporate euphemisms like “engagement” obscure harms, and Upton-Sinclair-style salary-driven blindness.
• Others argue that at well-known ad/engagement companies, claiming ignorance is implausible, especially for highly employable software engineers.
• There’s recurring discussion of professional ethics: contrast with regulated fields (accounting, civil engineering) where codes of conduct and licensing bodies can punish unethical practice. Many suggest software should evolve similar structures.

Capitalism, externalities, and “the game vs the players”

• Many frame this as a predictable outcome of ad-funded capitalism: revenue is tied directly to time-on-app, so optimization naturally yields addiction-like patterns.
• Some insist individual engineers and executives remain morally responsible and cannot hide behind “the system” or shareholder duty. Others emphasize systemic failure, weak regulation, and lobbying, likening it to tobacco, leaded gasoline, opioids.
• Broader ideological arguments erupt over capitalism vs alternatives, but there’s consensus that current incentives underprice or ignore social harm.

Law, addiction, and children

• Disagreement over using “addiction” outside a strict medical sense; some fear this could justify heavy “control of screens” by the state. Others counter that legal language need not match clinical definitions.
• Strong view that children deserve special protection: developing brains, limited self-control, and evidence platforms knew youth harms yet didn’t mitigate.
• Several comparisons: past moral panics over comics and video games vs. today’s highly personalized, rapidly updated, socially embedded, data-driven feeds. Many argue this makes social media qualitatively more powerful.
• Skepticism about outcomes: expectation of fines, settlements, and limited structural change, though some hope for a “tobacco trial”–style turning point and stricter regulation (age limits, liability, ad rules).