Amidst all the troubles in the world, the recent Amnesty International publication ‘Driven into Darkness’ sank without notice. This is a pity, for the report documents the contribution of TikTok, the popular social media platform, to the youth mental health crisis sweeping the world. A companion report reveals how a “deeply discriminatory and invasive model of surveillance for profit” sustains TikTok’s business model. The Amnesty team’s research concluded that TikTok had maximised the addictive qualities of its content generation thereby “incentivising a race to the bottom between a small number of leading social media companies vying for the highest user numbers and engagement rates”. In plain language, social media companies were intentionally building algorithms to addict young people for the old-fashioned motive of profit. The consequence of this greed has been the sickening of tens of thousands of young people. Most perversely, social media companies now fund initiatives to promote youth mental health, while continuing to deploy algorithms which addict young people to their products.
The accounts of how corporations have enriched themselves and their share-holders while causing immense harm to society are a legion. Consider just two notable examples. The first example, though somewhat historical, is still instructive. Allan Brandt, a colleague in my department in Harvard, wrote a superb account (The Cigarette Century) of how the tobacco industry became one of the most profitable in history while selling a product which has killed hundreds of millions of people. The book documents the spectacular success of advertising and public relations in making smoking such a pervasive habit that over half of all men and a fifth of all women in the US smoked cigarettes by 1950. But, what is more to the point is that, even though the harms associated with smoking had begun emerging as far back as the 1920s, the tobacco industry was able to obfuscate public opinion by co-opting members of the medical profession, media and elected members of government to question the credibility of the science for 40 years before the US, and the world, finally cracked down. And when the evidence became too strong to refute, the industry responded by promoting “safer low-tar” cigarettes and, even more shamelessly, funding apparently independent initiatives to address the public health consequences of tobacco consumption.
The second example is not only more contemporary but is still in the early phases of unfolding. I am referring to climate change, the result of over a century of industrialisation and globalisation propelled largely by the fossil fuel industry. Even as the world counts, on a daily basis, the mounting toll of death and disease directly attributed to climate change, these are still only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of the catastrophe which lies ahead, as entire regions become uninhabitable due to flooding or heat. As with the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry has long known about the effects of its products on altering climate but succeeded in hood-winking the world by funding sceptics in the academy and promoting climate-deniers in governments. And, as the evidence became too compelling to ignore, not least when the destructive effects of climate change began to hit the rich and powerful, they started funding initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change or “diversify” into renewable energy, all the while continuing to drill for oil and dig for coal.
I could go on with the list of other corporate enterprises which have followed the same playbook. The real threat to the people, however, is not the corporate world. After all, they do what they always claimed they would do — make money. The existential danger, of course, is that the governments whom we elect to represent us, have metastasised into becoming agents of the corporate world, which is hardly surprising given that all major political parties rely on direct cash contributions and myriad forms of indirect contributions for their survival.
It was, therefore, a rare opportunity to celebrate when, in November 2023, 41 states in the US joined hands to sue Meta, alleging that the company harms children by building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook. The suit is the result of a major investigation which arrived at exactly the same conclusion as the Amnesty Report on TikTok. The federal complaint alleged that the company engaged in a “scheme to exploit young users for profit by misleading them about safety features and the prevalence of harmful content, harvesting their data and violating federal laws on children’s privacy”. As with the tobacco, cola and processed food industries, they intentionally trapped young people into their webs while knowing of the harms that would ensue. The recent shenanigans at OpenAI is, at its heart, an insight into a similar contestation between the competing visions of enormous short-term profits of AI versus its long-term threats to the very survival of humanity.
It is not an exaggeration to state that the collusion of corporate interests with elected governments is the single biggest threat to the survival of our societies and the planet. Even though most democracies are now simply a fig-leaf for a plutocracy, our votes and voices do count. We must demand from our political class that to win our support, they must truly represent us through appropriate prohibitions, taxes and punitive actions to ensure that the corporate chiefs and their boards are held accountable for the damages that result from their products. Moreover, we will need more than individual action, in the form of social movements. To quote Noam Chomsky, “as long as the general population is passive, apathetic and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the other, then the powerful can do as they please”.
The writer is the Paul Farmer Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School
Tobacco to TikTok: How the corporate playbook hurts us
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03.01.2024
Amidst all the troubles in the world, the recent Amnesty International publication ‘Driven into Darkness’ sank without notice. This is a pity, for the report documents the contribution of TikTok, the popular social media platform, to the youth mental health crisis sweeping the world. A companion report reveals how a “deeply discriminatory and invasive model of surveillance for profit” sustains TikTok’s business model. The Amnesty team’s research concluded that TikTok had maximised the addictive qualities of its content generation thereby “incentivising a race to the bottom between a small number of leading social media companies vying for the highest user numbers and engagement rates”. In plain language, social media companies were intentionally building algorithms to addict young people for the old-fashioned motive of profit. The consequence of this greed has been the sickening of tens of thousands of young people. Most perversely, social media companies now fund initiatives to promote youth mental health, while continuing to deploy algorithms which addict young people to their products.
The accounts of how corporations have enriched themselves and their share-holders while causing immense harm to society are a legion. Consider just two notable examples. The first example, though somewhat historical, is still instructive. Allan Brandt, a colleague in my department in Harvard, wrote a superb account (The Cigarette Century) of how the tobacco industry became one of........
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