Kaylee started YouTube at six and moved to Instagram at nine. A perfectly normal trajectory for our time, like moving from kindergarten to primary school. At ten, however, she suffered from depression, and at twenty she testified in a Los Angeles court, emerging vindicated and awarded 6 million dollars.
These twenty years in the life of the protagonist of this case—which passed largely unnoticed, as much as possible, due to the war in Iran—are the period in which social media platforms evolved into a second (if not primary) layer of reality.
The ruling against Meta and YouTube is not only the legal victory of a young woman. It is recognition of something we all eventually understood, even if we did not admit it: that platforms were not designed to entertain you, but to keep you from stopping. Infinite scroll is not accidental. The algorithm is not neutral, and certainly not innocent.
The “recommendation” of the next post is not friendly; it is an addiction strategy and a mechanism aimed at the average user’s need for ten minutes of peace—which never remain ten minutes, nor are they peaceful.
The framework now being built through court decisions in the United States, the EU investigation into Snapchat, and the controversial vote in the European Parliament on scanning child sexual abuse material, should have existed before Facebook celebrated its first birthday. It arrived twenty years late.
Twenty years during which children grew up inside platforms without rules, without age filters that actually worked in practice, without any adult in the room—not even an observer from next door. Twenty years during which Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and gave “lessons” on how the internet works.
In our small corner of the world, the Greek government has decided to introduce a law banning social media for those under 15, with no exceptions. It is a step forward or, more precisely, an attempt at detoxification. Of course, as with all addictions, beyond prohibition other measures are needed for the proper use of social networks. Children, after all, often react more intensely to total bans in order to reach what is forbidden to them.
Still, let us be optimistic—even if it is late. It might have been that nothing of this ever happened, that uncontrolled use never stopped. Like Kaylee’s infinite scroll as she sank into depression.
