“You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.” Arturo Béjar said it at a hearing last week, and it hangs over Meta’s $18bn settlement with dozens of US states that accused the company of harming children with addictive products. Now Joan Donovan, writing in The Guardian on Sept. 4, wants the board to ask Zuckerberg to step down.
Her argument is blunt. If Meta means what it says about user safety, she wrote, the board should request his resignation and restructure so that safety outranks profit. The settlement, in her view, does little to answer the scientific question of how addictive social media really is. It is instead the end point of a fight begun in 2016 by journalists and independent researchers who looked at the design of the disinformation campaigns behind Brexit and the US presidential election. Zuckerberg, she wrote, is the one thread through Meta’s history of billion-dollar blunders.
What the deal changes
The settlement sets design limits. Teen accounts are capped at two hours a day, shut off from midnight to 6am, and silenced during school hours. They must be linked to a parent’s account, with stronger age verification. Donovan says it is unclear how that will work and warns it could become a privacy nightmare. The limits cut screen time for 13-to-18-year-olds, she wrote, but leave alone the question of how drugs, sex and gambling end up algorithmically recommended.
A tobacco comparison
Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, has made this argument before. In 2020 she told Congress that misinformation works like secondhand smoke, weeks after a former Facebook director of monetization compared building its engagement algorithms to how tobacco companies made cigarettes more addictive. Public health did not ban smoking, she noted. It restricted where people could smoke, set an age limit, made companies fund education campaigns and put cigarettes behind cashiers who check ID.
The whistleblowers
Béjar led safety work at Instagram when his teenage daughter was harassed there with sexist and profane messages. He estimated he met Zuckerberg more than 100 times before blowing the whistle. Donovan says many whistleblowers start by trying to fix problems through proper channels and are rebuffed, and she expects more to come forward.
She also describes her own cost. In December 2023 she faced professional blowback in academia after obtaining documents from another whistleblower, Frances Haugen, which she intended to publish in a public database. She says she acquired them legally. What they showed, she wrote, is that Meta, then Facebook, knew of the damage Instagram caused to teenage girls.
Through every scandal, she pointed out, Zuckerberg’s net worth has climbed to nearly $200bn, according to Forbes. Fines, she argued, mean nothing at that scale. She called shareholders to push back on his control.
Sources
- It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta | Joan Donovan
- It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta | Joan Donovan
