Facing Bans for Underage Users, a U.K. Social Media Executive Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Even for its youngest users, "habit formation" is the goal of social media companies.
THE U.K. GOVERNMENT has announced plans to outlaw social media accounts for kids under the age of sixteen.
“Children will be given back their childhoods,” the government said last month in a press release.
Predictably, technology companies are not happy about this. But the statement one social media executive made to the Times of London reveals how clueless and morally confused many of these people are when it comes to the effect their platforms are having on children.
The executive I’m talking about is Hugh Shepherd, founder and CEO of Liaura, a social media app made specifically for kids. Speaking with the Times, Shepherd said the announced ban could hurt his business by making it more difficult for his company to turn its young customers into habitual users.
“Things like push notifications, for example . . . if we were restricted from using them altogether, I think that could be deadly [for us],” Shepherd is quoted as saying. “When you’re building a technology platform, particularly when you’re trying to get off the ground, habit formation is an essential part of it.”
Shepherd is admitting the thing all technology executives and engineers know, but most have the sense not to say out loud: compulsive use is the goal—even for the youngest and most vulnerable users.
In our modern attention economy, profit is all about “engagement.” And nothing drives engagement like habit. As the technology ethicist and former Google employee Tristan Harris put it in the 2020 documentary film The Social Dilemma, “We’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction-and manipulation-based technology environment.”
What’s so alarming about Shepherd’s statement is that he doesn’t seem to get how his platform is part of the problem.
His company’s website positions its app as “training wheels for a kinder internet.” Based on their public-facing marketing materials, he and others at Liaura seem to believe that having children spend a lot of time on a habit-forming social media app is just fine as long as the content is candy-colored and playful, and membership is tightly restricted to kids and their friends. To me, this is a little like giving children candy cigarettes made with real nicotine; the fact that what you’re offering them is less bad than the grown-up alternative doesn’t make it good.
Reading Shepherd’s comments in The Times made me think of the book Careless People—a memoir by the attorney and former Facebook employee Sara Wynn-Williams about her years working in international policy at the social media company.
Wynn-Williams makes it plain just how blinkered and morally deficient the company’s leadership was when confronted with evidence that their business was destabilizing democracies around the world and harming its users, including kids.
In one especially appalling chapter, titled “Emotional Targeting,” she describes how Facebook built features that allowed advertisers to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds at moments when they felt “worthless,” “insecure,” or “psychologically vulnerable.” (One example: young girls were shown ads for beauty products whenever they deleted a selfie.)
The fact that Facebook employees built and deployed these features is bad enough. But when a journalist in Australia brought these tactics to light, Wynn-Williams says that most of her colleagues at Facebook seemed “unbothered,” and employees on the advertising team were openly dismayed to hear that they might not be able to tout these services to Facebook’s clients. “This is the business,” one incredulous colleague told Wynn-Williams. “We’re proud of this . . . this is what puts money in all our pockets.”
When I read Careless People, and again when I read the Liaura CEO’s comments to The Times, I thought of the old Upton Sinclair observation that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The CEO’s apparent lack of concern, or even awareness, of the potential harms of hooking young users with push notifications and other habit-forming design features is more evidence—as if we needed any—that the people in charge of social media companies can’t be trusted to build products that have users’ or societies’ best interests at heart.
“Tech giants had their chance and failed,” said outgoing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month when his government announced the bans for under-16s. “We’re stepping in to protect children.”
I’m not always in favor of government regulation. But when it comes to social media platforms and kids, it seems our elected leaders can’t step in soon enough.