About five years ago, I sat down in a series of meetings with leaders from Reddit, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media companies. My goal was to discuss social media addiction and what might be done about it.
At the beginning of each meeting, I said something like, “You’ve got users on your platform who really want to use your product less, but they’re struggling to do so.”
Oddly enough, I explained, some people were actually using social media to help each other stop using social media! For example, some Facebook users had created Facebook groups specifically to help each other spend less time on the site. At that time, many tech executives didn’t know this was happening.
Then, I basically said, “If you’re able to find the users who want to stop using your products, you should try to help them. It’s an ethical obligation.”
Unfortunately, my advice fell largely on deaf ears. Now, regulators are trying to make all sorts of wacky new laws, including the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act, to get tech companies to reduce the risk of addiction.
