Social media makes us participate in behavioural modification experiments without consent

The summer hiatus is over for book club. I picked a short book for September since we're a week in already. For September we're reading Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. I understood that social media makes money by selling access to me. Instagram sells ads against my purchasing decisions so that hopefully I'll buy whatever scrolls by on my screen. What I hadn't thought about is that we're all part of a huge behavioural experiment that didn't have to get run by some ethics committee1. Because the experiment makes money for rich people who can then funnel it out to law makers, we have to participate in this experiment without giving consent. If behaviour modification via ads and algorithms was run by a research University an ethics report would need to be submitted. Then a bunch of people would need to look at the experiment and decide if it provided enough benefit for the harms it would cause on the users that were in the experiment. If…