Big Tech faces scrutiny, the addiction isn’t worth it
For months, the whispers had been growing louder in tech circles: Influential tech companies are using techniques to grab so much of people’s attention that it bordered on fostering addiction.
The charges came from high-profile former employees and venture capitalists, who said the companies were doing it on purpose. Last week, those concerns spread to the investment world and ensnared another high-tech titan, as a prominent hedge fund and a major pension fund joined in an open call for Apple to offer parents tools to limit their children’s use of iPhones and other devices.
All this represents a marked shift among powerbrokers for the high-tech industry, where large firms like Apple and Google have generally been held in high regard among investors, even those concerned with corporations’ social impact. The reason may be, in part, that the ubiquity of apps and smartphones is only now being met with a focus on negative side effects.
The rising discussion also lays bare a fundamental tension in the tech industry: Profits are often linked to keeping consumers glued to their screens, despite evidence that the devices come with risks as well as benefits. The recent outcry may be an early sign of pressure on tech firms to align their business models closer to what’s valuable to consumers — shifts that some companies, including the pioneering social-media giant Facebook, already appear to be making.
“This makes sense for both kids and for Apple shareholders,” says Charles Penner, a partner at the activist hedge fund Jana Partners, which wrote the open letter recently along with the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). “Apple can enhance its brand by proving to parents that it takes kids’ safety seriously.”
The safety concerns are many, of course, including inappropriate content and online scams or predators, but one of the most basic is the sheer amount of an individual’s time the devices can absorb. “What the research suggests is that being on your phone up to about two hours a day is fine for happiness and mental health and well-being,” says San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood and a co-author of the shareholder letter. But when that daily screen time is exceeded, risk factors for suicide rise sharply, according to her research. And it’s not just kids who are getting hooked. “There’s a tonne of great stuff happening on these platforms,” Scott Galloway, a vocal critic of the big companies’ business practices and New York University marketing professor, told a New York conference in November. “But until about three months ago, that is literally all we talked about. We have to have an adult conversation about both the upsides and the downsides. And I feel for the first time, we’re having an adult conversation.”
Some of the sharpest criticism has come from former executives of and investors in the firms themselves.
In November, Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and the first president of Facebook, told Axios that the social network was deliberately designed with the aim of “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to ”consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.”
Parker’s remarks were echoed by Facebook-engineer-turned-venturecapitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who in an expletive-laden talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business in November expressed ”tremendous guilt” at helping to create “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops” that are “destroying how society works.” Even the creator of Facebook’s “like” button – Silicon Valley programmer Justin Rosenstein – now rues the feature. He uses an iPhone that has been disabled from downloading any apps.
Getting these companies to change is hard, when their entire business model depends on getting millions of users to stay on their platforms for as long as possible. That is why Jana Partners and CalSTRS, who between them control about $2 billion in Apple stock, have focused on Apple, whose iPhone is a huge conduit to the potentially addictive apps.
In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change to the company’s news feed. In light of psychological research, some carried out by Facebook, that shows that users tend to be happier when connecting with friends than passively consuming posts, Zuckerberg says that the news feed will place a bigger emphasis on posts from friends and family, while downplaying content from news media and other businesses.
The move could hurt profits, he wrote. “By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”
The pressure on the tech industry comes as watchdog groups have already been trying to help consumers find healthier behaviors. One movement called Time Well Spent offers a range of consumer tips, such as minimising the number of automatic notifications. It’s not clear if the criticism of techfirm “attention mining” has yet made a dent in the industry’s reputation among investors, even socially responsible ones.
“I don’t see it right now as an issue in the investment world,” says Shawn Lesser, co-founder of Big Path Capital, an impact-investing firm. Technologies “are tools .... It depends on how you use them.” — The Christian Science Monitor
Facebook news feed will place a bigger emphasis on posts from friends and family while downplaying content from news media and other businesses.