“Traffic to my blog has plummeted,” a friend said recently. Over decades, he’s built a thriving community, and his core users persist. But Google was crucial for bringing in new readers – and its introduction of AI and changes to its algorithm have punished small sites.
This week, Sean Hollister reports at The Verge that Google is using its AI to replace the headlines on news stories. For Google, it is, as Charles Arthur comments at The Overspill, a “small” and “narrow” experiment – until it becomes a feature. For The Verge, however, the impact is noticeable: the headlines it crafts to market its journalists’ work are being replaced with boring titles that do not accurately convey the articles’ content.
Then, the week before last, Joe Toscano reported at Forbes that Google has patented a system that uses AI to rewrite website landing pages to produce customized versions for its users. Toscano links this to an earlier announcement in which Google announced a protocol to make websites’ structure more readable to AI agents. Toscano suggests that taken together the two elements allow Google to break websites apart into their component parts for reassembly by AI agents into whatever version they identify as best for the user they represent.
In the early 1990s, someone I met directed me to read the work of Robert McChesney, whose books recount the cooption and commercialization of radio and television, also originally conceived as democratic, educational media. Helping to prevent a similar outcome for the Internet is a lot of what net.wars has always been about. Now, Google, which would not exist without the open web, wants to eat the whole thing.
On Tuesday, a jury in a New Mexico court found Meta guilty of misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabling harm including child sexual exploitation, as Katie McQue reports at the Guardian. The jury has ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties. Meta will appeal. Snapchat and TikTok, which were also accused, settled before the trial began.
The New Mexico attorney general’s office says it intends to pursue changes to platform design including age verification and “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.
On Wednesday, a jury in Los Angeles found YouTube guilty of deliberately designing an addictive product. As Dara Kerr reports at the Guardian, the case was brought by a 20-year-old woman who claimed her addiction to Instagram and YouTube began at age six, damaging her relationships with her family and in school and causing her to become depressed and engage in self-harm. The jury awarded her $6 million, split between Meta (70%) and YouTube (30%). Both companies say they will appeal.
They will have to, because, as Kerr reported in January, there are more of these trials to come, and even to trillion-dollar companies thousands of fines can add up to real money. In a consolidated case, in California state and federal courts thousands of families accuse social media companies of harming children. Reuters reports that more trials are scheduled: a school district in Breathitt County, Kentucky in federal court against Meta, ByteDance, Snapchat, and Google, and one in state court in California in July against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.
In January, the Tech Oversight Project reported newly unsealed documents contained the “smoking gun” evidence – that is, internal email discussions – that the four companies deliberately designed their products to be addictive and failed to provide effective warnings about social media use. Certainly, the leaked documents make it sou9nd like a plan. Tech Oversight quotes one: “Onboarding kids into Google’s Ecosystem leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime.” It’s hard not to see the commonality with Joe Camel and so many other marketing strategies.
Key to these cases is Section 230 – the clause in the Communications Decency Act that shields online services from liability for the material their users post and allows them to moderate content in good faith. The plaintiffs argued – successfully in New Mexico – that the law does not shield the platforms from liability for their design decisions. The social media companies naturally tried to argue that it does.
At his blog, law professor Eric Goldman discusses the broader impact of these bellwether cases. As he says, whatever changes the social media companies feel forced to make by the potential liability of myriad jury trials and new laws may help some victims but almost certainly hurt other groups who were not represented at the trial. Similarly, at Techdirt Mike Masnick warns that features like autoscrolling and algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful; it’s the content they relentlessly serve that is really the issue; cue the First Amendment. And few who are not technology giants can afford to face jury trials and fines. Are we talking a regime under which every design decision has to go through lawyers?
In a posting summarizing the history of S230, Goldman predicts that age verification laws will reshape the Internet of 2031 or 2036 beyond recognition, killing most of what we love now. So much doom, so little time.
Illustrations: The volcano of Stromboli, on which JRR Tolkien based Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings (by Steven J. Dengler at Wikimedia.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Fining a business that lit $70–80 billion on fire for its Metaverse project—without any apparent consequences for its key decision makers—just $375 million is the most “punishable by a fine means it’s legal if you’re rich” thing I’ve ever seen.