Meta Faces Tennessee Trial Over Instagram Design

Diana Novak Jones, Reuters: Meta Platforms faces trial in Tennessee on Monday over the state’s claims that Instagram’s design is to blame for a youth mental-health ​crisis, one of several trials in the coming weeks testing allegations that the company’s social media platforms were intentionally built to be addictive. I imagine Meta will spend considerable time trying to nail down a definition of “addiction”. The lawsuit makes no attempt to define the term, though it does quote several internal Meta communications acknowledging this as an outcome of the company’s products.1 In a legal sense, this might be an important question. The term, however, seems loaded: is Instagram really comparable to cigarettes? As a matter of practicality and ethics, I have personally found it more useful to think of this in terms of whether Instagram and its competitors are intended to be hypnotic and compelling beyond users’ comfort levels. I believe they are. A social media app today looks more like…