Larry Wilson: Dear Algorithm, We know you know what’s best

All your social media feeds come from, where else, our great state of California, those entertaining apps on your phone and your laptop, useful, time-consuming … addictive? Oops — that’s for a jury to decide.

And what better place to convene such a jury than Los Angeles Superior Court on Spring Street? It’s like the O.J. trial in downtown L.A. just now, almost. I was in a sushi bar on 2nd Street in Little Tokyo the other night and, to make conversation, presumed a fellow diner was heading to the same literary event I was.

“Nope,” she said. “I’m representing the plaintiff in the Big Tech trial!”

The plaintiff would be a 20-year-old woman from Chico known for jurisprudence purposes as Kaley G.M., chosen by the litigants from among hundreds of potential examples of young people and their families who say that Instagram and YouTube were designed to snare children and keep them hooked, just the same as the Sacklers got kids strung out on OxyContin.

TikTok and Snap were also sued but settled out of court.

Downtown may be California to us but it must feel a strange place to hang for Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta company owns Insta. He’s clearly much more comfortable in Palo Alto, not to mention Kauai’s North Shore. Wednesday he was compelled to testify in the case, had to put on a suit and a tie, looked and sounded a bit testy. And it’s absolutely fascinating that part of his defense seemed to be that he’s a bit of a klutz.

“I’m not — I think I’m actually sort of well-known to be very bad at this,” Zuckerberg told Kaley G.M.’s attorney Mark Lanier when asked about how he had prepped for the court encounter.

I suppose I had realized that Zuckerberg, who essentially began the global social media era in his Harvard dorm room by creating Facebook, a way to index who was hot and who was not among his classmates, and whose products are used by hundreds of millions, was not personally the most liked of human beings.

But I was astounded to read this in L.A. Times’ court reporter Sonja Sharp’s daily story on Thursday: “According to a study last year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, the overwhelming majority of American adults have an unfavorable view of Zuckerberg. The percentage of adults who view him very favorably is on par with the share who believe the Earth is flat or that aliens live among us. ‘It’s a very big deal,’ said Jenny Kim, an attorney in a related lawsuit. ‘The whole world is coming to watch him.’”

Crowds lined Spring to get a peek at the ginger-haired mogul. Under the gaze of the woman who said he’d turned her into a scrolling junkie, Zuckerberg told the court that kids under 13 have never been allowed on the platform, though Kaley said she started using Instagram at age 9.

“I generally think that there are a set of people, potentially a meaningful number of people, who lie about their age in order to use our services,” he said. “There’s a separate and very important question about enforcement, and it’s very difficult.”

Surely it is. But you’d think with a few billion dollars you could figure it out. And it’s not like this intentional addiction supposition isn’t well-known within the social media companies themselves.

In a separate lawsuit in Northern California, a Meta “user experience specialist” was quoted as writing to a colleague: “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” referring to Instagram. “We’re basically pushers … We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore.”

Meta’s defense: “For more than a decade, we’ve listened to parents, researched the issues that matter most, and made concrete changes to help protect teens online.”

I went to their blog post about how they’re helping adults, too, stop the doom-scrolling, as I’ve been known to stare at screens too long myself: “We’re rolling out Dear Algo, an AI-powered feature that lets you tell Threads what topics you temporarily want to see more or less of.”

Dear Algo! That’s it. Parents, kids, just give in. Talk to the algorithm.  She knows what’s best.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.