New York City filed a lawsuit against Meta, Snap, ByteDance and Google, accusing the platforms Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube of “deliberately designed addictive products” for teenagers. A procedure that resonates with one of our previous editorials: What if we regulated social networks like we regulated tobacco?
In its complaint of more than 300 pages, the municipality maintains that the companies knowingly used behavioral and neurobiological techniques similar to those used by tobacco and gaming industriesin order to maximize time spent online and advertising revenue.
“By drawing heavily on the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used in slot machines and exploited by the tobacco industry, Defendants deliberately integrated into their platforms a series of features aimed at maximizing the engagement of young users,” the complaint states (§3).
From tobacco to algorithmic dopamine
New York’s legal strategy is a continuation of Lawsuits filed against cigarette manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies at the origin of the opioid crisis. In both cases, the companies knew their products were addictive, but chose to continue releasing them to preserve profits.
The city is now applying this reasoning to digital technology, considering that attentional dependence is a modern form of addiction, where algorithms replace nicotine.
“Defendants’ platforms are designed and programmed to methodically — but unpredictably — space out dopamine rewards. This exploitation of the neural circuit is exactly what slot machines use to maintain addiction” (§118).
Each gesture of the user is equivalent to pulling the lever of a slot machine, the thread scrolls, the wait starts again, the reward arrives
“When we scroll through our Instagram feed, we are playing a slot machine to see which image will appear next” (§120).
These mechanisms, described as “intermittent variable rewards”are based on a well-known principle in psychology where uncertainty multiplies the wait and maintains the need to start again.
The adolescent, economic and vulnerable target
The complaint highlights that adolescents constitute both a fragile population and a lucrative target.
“Children and adolescents, compared to adults, have less impulse control and a reduced ability to assess risks or regulate their emotions” (§71).
“Children are financially lucrative, particularly when they become addicted or compulsive in using defendants’ platforms” (§68).
The documents produced by the city evoke a impaired brain reward circuitscomparable to that observed in chemical addictions.
“Like other addictive products, Defendants’ platforms hook their users by disrupting the functioning of the brain’s reward circuits” (§81).
“These brain alterations are similar to those associated with addictive behaviors such as gambling or substance use” (§177).
A social scourge with increasing public costs
The heart of the accusation rests on the notion of “public nuisance”equivalent to an attack on the collective good.
“This crisis has caused a serious disruption of the social order and public health…causing lasting and permanent damage to collective well-being” (§907).
“Each of the plaintiff institutions in New York City has had to devote considerable resources – funding, personnel, time – to respond to this youth mental health crisis” (§912).
The complaint mentions in particular a program of $77 million set up to recruit psychologists and social workers in public schools, funding set to run out in the coming months (§902). The argument is that as with opioids, the cost of digital dependence is borne by public authoritiesnot by those who provoke it.
Intentionality at the heart of the matter
The city’s lawyers believe that the platforms acted with “conscious disregard for the rights of the public”language borrowed from major public health trials.
“Defendants’ conduct constituted willful negligence and willful disregard of the rights of the New York plaintiffs” (§914).
“Defendants knew, or should have known, that targeting young people would cause harm and seriously disrupt the operation of schools and public institutions” (§918–920).
The objective is less to obtain reparations than to force a structural modification of the platform designin particular the removal of certain incentive functionalities (infinite scroll, “streaks”, filters).
A Californian precedent and a transatlantic battle
This case is added to a federal class action already in progress, led by the judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogersknown for having arbitrated the lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple. By 2024, it had refused to dismiss complaints based on public nuisance, paving the way for thousands of similar lawsuits.
Europe, for its part, acts in anticipation, thus Digital Services Act and the British code of child-friendly design already impose limits on persuasive design.
Towards the end of distraction capitalism
By assimilating attentional dependence to a public scourgeNew York inaugurates a new stage in the regulation of digital capitalism.
“The city has developed an action framework intended to protect young people from dangerous exposure to what could be described as an “environmental toxin”: unregulated social media” (§15).
The expression sums up the philosophy of the file, social networks are no longer seen as a simple communication space, but as a mental pollutant affecting public health. After tobacco and opioids, algorithms in turn enter the history of risky products.
