Series: Social media considered harmful. Maybe...
Five long-form posts, one a week, on how social networks are built to be addictive and on what the companies running them knew.
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Social media considered harmful. Maybe... (1/5): They knew
On 1 October the Pew Research Center published a survey, carried out in 37 countries and territories, of more than 45,000 people. The headline says that around the world a growing number of people are convinced social media is harming democracy. I’ve been convinced of...
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Social media considered harmful. Maybe... (2/5): Who's stopping them, or trying to
On 25 March 2026, in Los Angeles, twelve ordinary people locked in a room did what years of Congressional hearings had failed to do: they took a good hard look at Instagram and YouTube and decided, ten votes to two, that they had been negligently...
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Social media considered harmful. Maybe... (3/5): How to survive
In the first two instalments I explained that they knew, and that those who tried to stop them didn’t get very far: the odd jury, yes, laws hardly ever. Meanwhile, as the courts take their course and parliaments debate, social media stay exactly what they...
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Social media considered harmful. Maybe... (4/5): A human social network
In 2018 Facebook tried to make its feed healthier by rewarding “meaningful social interactions” between friends and family, and three years later its internal documents revealed that it had achieved the opposite: a feed that gave a louder voice to the angriest. Anyone who designs...