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From their own internal metrics, tech giants have long known what independent research now continuously validates: that the content that is most likely to go viral is that which induces strong feelings such as outrage and disgust, regardless of its underlying veracity. Moreover, they also know that such content is heavily engaged with and most profitable. Far from acting against false, harmful content, they placed profits above its staggering—and damaging—social impact to implicitly encourage it while downplaying the massive costs.
Social media titans embrace essentially the same hypocrisy the tobacco industry embodied when they feigned concern over harm reduction while covertly pushing their product ever more aggressively. With the reelection of Trump, our tech giants now no longer even pretend to care.
Engagement is their business model, and doubt about the harms they cause is their product. Tobacco executives, and their bought-off scientists, once proclaimed uncertainty over links between cigarettes and lung cancer. Zuckerberg has likewise testified to Congress, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health, ” even while studies find self-harm, eating disorder and misogynistic material spreads on these platform unimpeded. This equivocation echoes protestations of tobacco companies that there was no causal evidence of smoking harms, even as incontrovertible evidence to the contrary rapidly amassed.
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Except, you know, tobacco companies are modern day tobacco companies. They were never defeated.
Muted in the English world. I argue junk food commercials draw a lot of parallels with cigarette commercials of the past. For some reason obesity isn’t worth prevention so the advertisements are pretty gross.
Soft drinks. Coca Cola especially really loves to tie emotions and sports/holidays to sugar water.
Well, considering all the tobacco companies entrenched themselves in food companies you’re basically right.
It’s why foods are addictive, and have very little nutritional value. It’s beyond “oh no its full of sugar” it the fact that everything is processed and is full of fake sugar (as an example).
Muted in the English world.
I don’t know think you’ve been to Europe much… Just a guess
They won’t stop mega corping like they used to, they got supplemented by cars then oil then banks and now tech/pharma
No company will stop attempting to achieve mega corp status in a capitalist environment. Gotta make that line go up and to the right!
it’s an analogy; the author is drawing parallels between them. Obviously Tobacco companies were not “defeated” but they were regulated to hell, and I’m sure the author would say that’s what we need to do with social media too.
The flaw in the analogy is that it assumes that those effects are limited to some companies when in reality every single company that existed in history has behaved this way if they weren’t stopped by regulation.
Most companies aren’t peddling a toxic product like cigarettes (or social media).
But they are peddling a toxic behaviour of unnecessary and uninhibited consumption.
Unless society as a whole is ready to move beyond capitalism that won’t change.
The flaw in the analogy is that it assumes that those effects are limited to some companies
no it doesn’t.
Yeah, it’s crazy how many commenters here are completely missing the point. I should really stop assuming people have any sort of intelligence.
The tobacco industry was monopoly busted, and heavily regulated for 30 years. That’s the point. Yes they still exist, but not like they did in 1970. We should do that to social media. It’s crazy how you missed that point yet harp about intelligence.
It’s crazy how you missed that point yet harp about intelligence.
I’m not sure why you said that. The person you are responding didn’t ‘miss that point’. They were themselves pointing out that other people have missed it. You are both criticising people for missing the same point.
You made me notice that a lot of companies learned from tobacco companies not just those XD
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How many vape, which is more harmful, more addictive?
How is it more harmful?
That article makes it clear it is less harmful.
Vape if you want.
Wait till you find out we still have tobacco companies, and they’ve been getting into the vape and weed game this whole time
The evil tobacco company is an outdated narrative. They were already regulated to hell 22 years ago when I started smoking and since then I’ve only ever seen the regulations increase now with the new apparent goal of outlawing nicotine. I can only speculate that people think this time we’re going to get prohibition right.
btw I quit smoking 7 years ago, and nicotine altogether 5 years ago.
It’s illegal to grow your own tobacco in more states now than it is to grow you own cannabis
Well, done quitting. Respect
It’s called “history”, not “outdated”. Op is comparing a historical behavior with a current behavior.
The current tobacco companies are no longer any more evil than any other business is my point. It’s a bad comparison for a modern day Social Media company, especially since so little of the population today was around for when Tobacco companies were at their worst.
Op didn’t say social media companies today are like tobacco companies today. They said social media companies today are like tobacco companies at their worst.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Philip_Morris
This was 1999. Just because you’re under 25 doesn’t mean most of the world population is under 25.
“Op didn’t say social media companies today are like tobacco companies today”
I don’t see how anybody wouldn’t infer it from the headline.
also, I read your source and they don’t go into any specific detail about the actions of the big tobacco companies with the exception of labeling cigarette packs as “light, ultra light, mild, etc…” I was around for that and nobody was under the impression that there was a safe cigarette. The remedy for that just changed from asking the cashier for a pack of “Camel lights” to a pack of “Camel blues.” -At this point in time the Tobacco industry was also already banned from most television and radio marketing, even bilboards ads were disappearing. If comparing social media companies to tobacco companies from 1999 is the standard we’re trying to establish here, then I would have expected RICO cases against Twitter, Facebook, and Google back around some time between 2010-2015 or earlier. -They are so much worse than that now.
If anything the oil companies are the most evil. They knew climate change was going to happen 50+ years ago.
I hate to alarm you but the entire planet knew climate change was going to happen 50 years ago because that was the 70s when this became well known.
Oil companies were noticing several decades before.
Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams says company targeted ads at teens based on their ‘emotional state’
[…] She said the company was letting advertisers know when the teens were depressed so they could be served an ad at the best time.
[…]
Have we collectively forgotten that Facebook tested manipulating users emotional states all the way back in 2014?
Where they tested to see if people with depression can be even more depressed if their social media feeds are manipulated to take away positive interaction.
That’s back when I attempted suicide
I’ve been telling this to family and friends, apparently they didn’t want to agree. At least there is article now. I do think current social media will be looked at in future like tobacco/smoking is currently looked at.
Wait. If tobacco companies do not exist anymore, then who are making cigarettes?
Or do they mean that Meta, X and Google are producing cigarettes like tobacco companies are doing right now, like with filters or that they are putting warning labels on their products? Because I haven’t seen any warning labels or Google cigarettes.
The title is very confusing.
Although I do think Google, X and Meta should have at least 75% of their banner state their platforms are brainrot and spreads misinformation. You know, like modern day tobacco companies have to warn for the risks of using their junk.
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i’m curious, what exactly is the advantage of getting a dumbphone vs just uninstalling social media apps from your existing phone, or just disabling internet access all together? doesn’t that achieve pretty much the same thing while still being able to keep things like navigation and being able to see when public transport is delayed
It’s like quitting cold turkey - removes the temptation to use these apps.
I got an e-ink e-reader in the pocketable form factor of a phone (Bigme Hibreak Color). Instead of doomscrolling social media, I read a couple paragraphs of the Oppenheimer biography. Next I’ll reread Neuromancer. It’s life-changing. 10/10 highly recommended.
Cool! What made you chose that over something like the boox that is the same form factor but without phone functionality?
Color screen and the fact that Onyx, the makers of Boox, flagrantly violate GPL terms.
But it was the Boox Palma getting publicity that made me aware of the form factor and start digging. I’m super happy with the Bigme Hibreak, but I don’t have a SIM card in it. I mostly use it in airplane mode as a dumb e-reader and don’t even install any apps besides the minimum needed to do that.
Ah ok, so do you carry a smartphone as well? I wonder what it would be like to completely rely on the bigme
I do. It’s not ideal but it still gives me something better to do than social media.
I’ve heard it’s quirky and kinda mid as a phone, but not unusable.
ok but like if I don’t have music and noise cancelling earbuds I will explode
pretty sure they are options
I would like wired earphones to make a comeback, though that wouldn’t stop certain assholes from watching stuff/listening to music without them on the bus with max volume
I mean you could walk around with an IPod, but that’s basically a phone anyway.
People tend to interact with technology on a default permit basis, which is partly why they have weather-vane attention spans and obliterated focusing capacity. They’re like Pavlov’s dog, responding to every notification and ping and service update; and social media is treated as the default use state until something else yells for their attention.
I have notifications denied by default. Notifications are lame and a known privacy threat. No one needs to be bothered because someone responded in a group chat or a new post surfaced on a Lemmy comm or a ‘deal alert’ got pushed by some marketing dipshit on the other side of the planet. That they exist at all for email is ludicrous. Email is an asychronous protocol - delayed responses are a feature.
Stop giving this stuff attention on demand and start allocating attention windows where it will get seen to. Email that gets in front of your eyes is 99 per cent transaction stubs if you’re doing it right; there is no more reason to pay it any attention outside 7pm for 10 or 15 minutes (say). Similar treatment should apply to most messaging to be honest.
Even though I knew about most of this, I never realized how striking the parallels are.
i wouldnt go as far calling them that, more like big box stores like walmart,etc.
I would liken them to the automotive industry. Both have deeply harmed society by isolating people from each other (it sounds counterintuitive, I know). Both have created infrastructure that prioritizes individual consumption over collective well being, restructured daily life around corporate products, and normalized a form of privatized existence that erodes public space, shared culture, and relational life. Just as cars gutted walkable communities and made human scale living subordinate to machines, Big Tech has gutted organic social interaction, subordinating communication and attention to platforms designed for extraction and control. #fuckcars #fuckbigtech
Don’t forget the cycle of buying up all patents and shelving them if they are a threat to their goals. What a future we’ve wasted.
Reminds me of a part I’ve recently read on The Dawn of Everything, comparing the Great Lakes natives’ freedoms to our corporate owned “freedoms”: while we’re busy with the “possibility of freedom”, they cared about the exercise of their freedoms.
Before the colonization, they were free to visit other places because they almost always had someone that belonged to their clan living there and who would receive them with open arms. They didn’t have to pay anything for the travel proper, but obviously needed to take some supplies to spend the days on the wilderness. For us, if we don’t have money, we don’t have freedoms: gotta pay for the car+gas (or plane or ship ticket), food, housing.
Cave men said the same thing about the horse. They gutted our communal caves and made human scale subordinate to a domesticated animal. #fuckmounts
Thank You for Posting (2025)
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20 years ago, as well
They are the asbestos of the internet.
asbestos at least was the best option until a couple years ago for numerous applications.
It probably still is. It’s a miracle material. It’s a real shame that it’s so toxic.
considering that tobacco companies are still here, it’s kind of a weird title
The US thrives on negativity 24/7. Its tiresome.
The news thrives on things that get the readers attention, and right now people are paying attention to bad things.
