When a young, accomplished, highly educated beauty queen — a literal beauty queen — takes her life over cyberbullying, it’s time we treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco: name it, shame it, sue it, and legislate for public health.
There’s more than enough evidence that social media is toxic by design, that Mark Zuckerberg is a psychopath, that online-induced suicides are regarded as little more than collateral damage.
What else needs to happen? Who else needs to die for Congress to show some teeth?
“We [Instagram] make body issues worse for one in three teenage girls.”
This according to The Facebook Papers, an internal trove of documents published by the Wall Street Journal last September.
Everyone knows. Does anyone care?
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” the papers said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
