It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta | Joan Donovan

It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta Joan Donovan The CEO is the throughline in a history of billion-dollar blunders that have caused real harm, culminating in last week’s settlement L ast week, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, agreed to a settlement of up to $18bn after dozens of US states accused it of harming children with addictive products. The settlement’s regulatory implications for social media will affect every user, far beyond teens. But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users, the board should request the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg and restructure to put safety above profit. The settlement does little to resolve the scientific question about the degree to which social media is addictive, but instead is the culmination of a battle launched by journalists and independent researchers in 2016 that focused on the digital design of disinformation campaigns powering Brexit in the UK and the US presidential election. Zuckerberg is the one throughline in Meta’s history of billion-dollar blunders that have hurt real people. For the past 15 years, I have studied how science and technology produces social change, for better and worse . As the founder of The Critical Internet Studies Institute , I lead a team investigating harms caused by emerging technologies. We educate practitioners and professionals about the manifest and latent features of new technologies, warts and all . In 2020, I testified to Congress about misinformation as “secondhand smoke”. My comments followed the testimony of a Meta executive who likened the design process of making Meta’s engagement optimization algorithms to the ways tobacco companies made cigarettes more addictive. An $18bn settlement – and Zuckerberg barely blinked. The tech titans must be stripped of their power, and soon | Jonathan Freedland Read more In a series of op-eds, congressional briefings and research papers, I extended the tobacco case study to show how cultural attitudes about smoking as a personal luxury were upended by concepts such as secondhand smoke, and scientific confirmation that tobacco increases risk of cancer, whose true costs were passed on to families, insurance companies, and employers who lost time and resources to combatting smoking. The public health solution did not go as far as to ban smoking, but limited the areas where smoking was allowed, set an age limit for possession, made companies pay for public education campaigns on the hazards of the product, and most importantly, put products behind grumpy cashiers who validate IDs to purchase. Public health campaigns and warning labels were also important strategies. Similarly, social media companies make all kinds of critical decisions about how to deliver content to your feed. Some of those features are algorithmically engineered to increase the likelihood of users remaining on the app. The settlement comes with design restrictions ; teen accounts are limited to two hours per day, no access from midnight to 6am, and no notifications from school bell to bell. Teen accounts must be linked to a parent’s accounts, amid stronger age verification. It’s still unclear how that will be implemented, but it promises to become a privacy nightmare. While these interventions limit time for 13-18 year olds, they do little to address contentious content, such as how drugs, sex and gambling end up algorithmically recommended. It is clear that this latest settlement is the harbinger of a punishing future ahead for Zuckerberg’s businesses. Meta has litigated a number of issues, while avoiding any serious regul...