Last week two court cases in the US went against the social media platforms. The first, in New Mexico found META guilty of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children. The second, in Los Angeles found META and YouTube guilty of building addictive social media platforms that harm children’s mental health.

It’s the oldest trick in the book. Threaten everyone with extinction; convince them that only you have the answer / ultimate weapon; deploy your weapon; save the world; lead your ecstatic followers into the land of plenty. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Except – it’s no threat, I don’t have the answer, there’s no land of plenty and it doesn’t all end happily.

There’s a group of individuals that’s grown both in numbers and influence across the industry over the last ten years or so. They have no trade body, no corporate structure, no common goal. They deal in ideas and opinions. We need them and their ideas more than ever, and yet they’re subject to rudeness, criticism, sneery little digs from those they dare to criticise.

“The circumstances of Molly’s death are far from unique. Technology plays a role in almost one-quarter (24%) of deaths by suicide among young people aged 10 to 19, equivalent to a lost young life every week.” ‘Pervasive by Design’: The Molly Rose Foundation.

Last Thursday Channel 4 screened the documentary film ‘Molly Vs The Machines’, the tragic story of Molly Russell who took her own life in 2017 aged 14. When the Coroner’s Court came to hear the case in 2022 (5 years of obfuscation from the platforms) the conclusion reached was: “Molly died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.”

Here’s a Cog Blog post from the time of that 2022 verdict.

I suppose this moment had to come eventually. This blog has steered away from the ‘Is YouTube TV or not’ debate on the basis that to me it makes as much sense as arguing whether or not a direct mail piece for my local pizza place is a newspaper, given that both are printed on paper.

But here we are. The debate rumbles on, an example of how the great debates of our industry have degenerated from things that matter to things that really don’t.