“A Los Angeles jury found Google and Meta liable for designing social media platforms that are addictive for children, awarding $3 million to a 20-year-old who claimed social media addiction harmed her childhood,” reported Politico’s London Playbook newsletter this morning, an insidery email newsletter for SW1 types who want to know what parties they missed the previous night.
It’s one of the biggest stories of the day outside of Iran, so of course Politico had to report it – even if it makes things a little awkward for the commercial side of the operation.
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The newsletter – owned by Axel Springer, the firm currently buying the Telegraph – is now sponsored by Instagram, meaning that, among its headlines, are paragraphs promoting the worthiness of Meta’s photo-sharing app.
Thus today readers were treated to ‘news’ such as “Instagram Teen Accounts have built-in protections to limit who can contact teenagers and the content they can see” and “The accounts have default privacy settings that restrict contact from people teenagers aren’t connected with and filter content and comments to help make sure what teenagers are seeing is age-appropriate”.
Bit awkward when interspersed among the news that their new paymasters are now forking out millions to those self-same teens ensnared in their ever more addictive web!
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