Online safety campaigner and Naked Politics editor Adele explains why it’s time we organise against the misery caused by Meta.
Adele Zeynep Walton
I’m a member of Gen Z - the guinea pig generation that has grown up seeing the world through the lens of what we post and consume on social media. I was 13 when I started posting on Instagram. Every day after school I would spend hours taking selfies, contorting my hips, sucking in my stomach and comparing my teenage body to others. I learned to equate my value to how many likes and comments each post would get.
With each year that has gone by since I started using these apps, I realise more how much they take away from my life. After dedicating two years of researching on this topic, interviewing online safety campaigners, policy makers, and people with lived experience of online harms for my book Logging Off, I’ve realised I’m far from alone. In fact, the majority of people are losing out in today’s digital world.
It isn’t that Meta doesn’t know that people like me and countless others are experiencing these harms - it’s that they don’t care. The only metric of success they have is profit.
Company documents leaked in 2021 by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Meta knew its products were harming children and promoting eating disorder content to teenage girls. In 2023, 42 U.S. state Attorney Generals sued Meta for designing apps that harm children’s health and safety. Meta even estimated how much they could profit from each teenager in their lifetime. It wasn’t millions, it wasn’t thousands. It was $270. That’s what each young life is worth to Meta.
Between 2010 and 2015, suicide rates among 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167 and 92 per cent respectively. In 2024, leading psychologist Lotte Rubæk who advised Meta on suicide prevention and self-harm quit her role, accusing the tech giant of “turning a blind eye” to harmful content and repeatedly ignoring expert advice.
If Mark Zuckerberg is truly sorry for what bereaved families have gone through at the hands of his platforms, then he would act to protect young people, and remove the addictive algorithms that send us down rabbit holes of despair. Safety by design would look like removing harmful content that leads to mental health crises in the first place - content that promotes self harm, eating disorders, suicide and violence. But this kind of content is only going to become more common now that the CEO has ended fact-checking.
Safety by design isn't an unrealistic ask. Just apply the same logic to any other product you use daily - be it your toaster, your hairdryer or your car. We all rightfully expect to be able to use these products safely because these products are tried and tested before their released, and where harms do occur the companies are held responsible. But when social media companies are found to promote content that encourages self-harm and suicide to teenagers, they carry on business as usual the next day.
Big tech can no longer expect to avoid responsibility for the harms it causes. User safety is a universal expectation, but social media is treated with a culture of impunity and exceptionalism for the harms already happening in the here and now. That’s why it’s so important that young people deeply impacted by this exploitative business model are fighting back.
This Children’s Mental Health Week, I’ll be part of a stunt with Mad Youth Organise, a new Just Treatment campaign, targeting a range of corporate sectors that are driving and profiting from the youth mental health crisis. They believe that the UK government should tax corporations like Meta to pay for young peoples' mental health care. Research conducted by Flourish Economics found that a levy like this could raise £5.2 billion per year, a drop in the ocean for Meta's profits but a sum that could go miles for young people.
It is time we organise and stop Meta shareholders profiteering from young people’s misery.
Read The Mad Youth Manifesto here: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/54f71178f7.html#page/1
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