Chat, I think we're cooked?
Weekly scroll: Nate Silver vs Elon, Social media lies, and games of football
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your source for the most interesting things happening on the social internet each week. Today, we’re talking about Meta’s litigation woes, exactly how insane social media lies can get, the Nate Silver vs Elon Musk feud, The New York Times’ strategy for surviving the age of mega-platforms, and a very good piece of web fiction.
Subscribe today to get access to every single post from Infinite Scroll.
Meta Removes Anti-Meta Ads
Here’s a fun scoop: Meta is removing ads from Facebook and Instagram seeking plaintiffs for lawsuits against Meta. This seems to be something they’ve given themselves the power to do via some obscure clause in their terms of service… but it also seems a little bit like scoundrel behavior… but honestly I get it?
You might have a mental model of lawsuits against big companies that goes like this: someone is harmed by a big company, then the victims find lawyers and sue the big company, and sometimes this works and the victims get compensated for the harm while the lawyers also make some nice money. This model is intuitive and also mostly wrong. The way it actually works is that lawsuits are mostly conceived by enterprising lawyers, who then go looking for victims. Yada yada yada, I’m skipping lots of nuance, but there’s a real sense in which lawyers are the ones hiring clients rather than the clients hiring lawyers.
And if you’re an aggressive lawyer who’s noticed that hey, Meta just lost a lawsuit and had to pay several million dollars to a young woman harmed by their policies, where better to find more victims of Meta’s bad behavior than on Meta platforms? Of course they wanted to run ads on Facebook and Instagram! That’s where the mentally ill, addicted-to-social-media teens are! Where else would you find them? And Meta’s now saying no, we would prefer not to participate in our own destruction.
This does kind of illustrate the point I made a few weeks back when the lawsuit against Meta was concluded: It’s hard to see how social media as a business survives if they can be held liable for things as vague as ‘using your service made me depressed’. The potential overall liability here, when judged at a ‘millions of dollars per depressed user’, is enough to put them out of business. And as much as I talk about how bad social media can be, I don’t think it should cease to exist based on that kind of nebulous legal regime.
Real 5th Century Vibes
