We continue our conversation with attorney Laura Marquez-Garrett and victim advocates Lori Schott and Lennon Torres about their fight to hold tech giants accountable for the damaging and even deadly effects of social media addiction on children and young adults. We’re also joined by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on several of the company’s harmful and manipulative practices in 2021. Haugen says mega-rich tech “oligarchs” like Mark Zuckerberg cared about teenagers only as people who could bring others onto the platform. “They worried about public perception, not the actual health of the kids,” says Haugen, adding that companies like Zuckerberg’s Facebook “under-invested in the safety of children,” ignoring years of warnings about the psychological impacts of their products on child development in favor of “optimiz[ing] for spending more and more time on these platforms.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.