Episode 15 Is social media becoming big oil or big tobacco?

Court rulings against Meta and Google, addictive design, online manipulation, and the mental health cost of engagement-driven algorithms frame a broader question about responsibility, regulation, and whether the legal system is finally catching up.

Social media’s business model depends on attention, and that raises the same uncomfortable question once asked of tobacco and oil: what happens when companies profit from harm they appear to understand better than the public does. Recent court decisions involving Meta and Google bring that question into sharper focus, especially around addictive design, child safety, and the psychological effects of engagement-first platforms.

The conversation connects those lawsuits to broader issues: monopoly power, weak guardrails, Section 230, GDPR, lobbying, online bullying, misinformation, deepfakes, and the way algorithms can amplify anger, anxiety, and social comparison. The result is a wider look at how digital platforms shape behavior, public discourse, and everyday life, and whether meaningful accountability can arrive before the damage becomes harder to reverse.

Episode Show Notes

Kevin and Emanuel examine whether social media platforms are entering a “big tobacco” phase, where evidence of harm is mounting while companies continue to defend their products and practices.

Topics covered

• The comparison between social media, big tobacco, and big oil
• Recent court decisions involving Meta and Google
• Claims around addictive platform design and mental health harm
• Child safety, exploitation, and platform responsibility
• The role of algorithms in maximizing engagement
• Social media’s effect on children, anxiety, and bullying
• Cambridge Analytica and political manipulation
• Deepfake ads and scam content on major platforms
• Section 230 and legal responsibility for user-generated content
• GDPR and the tradeoff between privacy protection and user experience
• Lobbying, antitrust, and corporate concentration
• Lina Khan and the future of enforcement
• Personal responsibility versus systemic incentives

Resources mentioned

• Deepfake video of Mark Carney promoting crypto tokens
• Section 230 (Wikipedia)
• Blog post: Why Your SEO is Affected by How Google Makes Money

People mentioned

• Mark Zuckerberg
• Elon Musk
• Sam Bankman-Fried
• Elizabeth Holmes
• Stellan Skarsgård
• Daniel Craig
• Donald Trump
• Mark Carney
• Yuval Noah Harari
• Lina Khan
• Reid Hoffman
• Matt Gaetz
• Stephen Graham

Organizations, companies, brands, and products

• ChatGPT
• crypto token
• Pepsi
• Coca-Cola
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Meta
• Google
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Facebook
• WhatsApp
• X
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• AWS
• Amazon
• Apple
• Theranos
• Cambridge Analytica
• Department of Justice
• Alphabet
• Microsoft
• Spotify
• Apple Music

Laws, regulations, and legal concepts

• Section 230
• GDPR
• First Amendment
• antitrust law
• consumer protection law

Books, films, and shows

•  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
•  The Anxious Generation

Countries, topics, groups, and named concepts

• Myanmar
• Rohingya Muslims
• Buddhists
• Overton window
• North America
• Europe
• United States
• Canada
• Persian Gulf
• Iran
• Russia
• Ukraine

Episode Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
00:00:18 Welcome and topic setup
00:00:51 Why social media is being compared to big tobacco
00:01:41 Big tobacco, big oil, monopoly power, and platform dominance
00:04:30 Oligopolies, cartels, and internal knowledge of harm
00:07:34 Consequences, regulation, and how harmful systems are allowed to grow
00:09:03 Recent lawsuits against Meta and Google
00:10:51 Cambridge Analytica, manipulation, and targeted persuasion
00:12:34 Algorithms, hate, loneliness, and the anxiety feedback loop
00:13:51 The Anxious Generation and social media’s effect on children
00:15:44 Myanmar, amplification, and algorithmic harm
00:16:39 Deepfake ads, scams, and platform moderation failures
00:17:04 Global laws, moderation limits, and violent content
00:20:18 Section 230 and whether platforms are responsible
00:21:47 GDPR, privacy law, and unintended user experience costs
00:24:10 Bullying, always-on platforms, and the loss of safe space
00:26:43 Reporting harmful content and friction in moderation systems
00:28:16 Cost, scale, and why platforms may resist better enforcement
00:29:40 Lobbying, politics, and regulatory imbalance
00:34:12 Returning to social media harm and economic anxiety
00:35:53 Advertising, engagement, and the scale of Google and Meta
00:37:50 What happens next for lawsuits and regulation
00:38:25 Lina Khan, antitrust, and enforcement
00:41:20 Is reform moving fast enough
00:42:22 Personal responsibility versus systems designed for engagement
00:43:53 The Overton window and shifting public opinion
00:45:24 Closing thoughts
00:45:37 Where to find Curious Pundits online

Episode Links

Deepfake video of Mark Carney promoting crypto tokens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoqivBR_Ezg

Section 230 (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

Google is an advertising juggernaut – aka Why Your SEO is Affected by How Google Makes Money: https://organicgrowth.biz/seo/why-your-seo-is-affected-by-how-google-makes-money

About the Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu, two curious minds exploring ideas, culture, and everything in between. Curious Pundits is a conversational podcast where each episode starts with a topic that caught our attention and unfolds into thoughtful, unscripted discussion. We follow curiosity wherever it leads, across disciplines, opinions, and perspectives, without pretending to have all the answers. Their main ventures are https://1307.digital/ (Emanuel) and https://organicgrowth.biz/ (Kevin).

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Curious Pundits Podcast hosted by Kevin and Emanuel. They explore bits of everything through thoughtful conversations, prioritizing curiosity over conclusions, and they thank you for joining them. Now onto the podcast.

[00:00:18] Kevin: It’s time for another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. I’m Kevin.

[00:00:23] Emanuel: And I’m Emanuel. And curiouspundits.com is a place where you want to go to find out more about us, leave your complaints there, but also follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and your preferred platform of listening to the podcast, bits of everything.

Kevin and I are covering everything that there is to cover. Different topics, different subjects, history, culture, music, and today.

Topic of today is…

[00:00:51] Kevin: It’s a weirdly timely one considering there were two court cases decided last month, which support the basic thesis, which is big tech entering their big tobacco phase. The big tobacco phase being allegations that they know that their products and services are causing harm and they’re pretending that they don’t and that it’s not, and that everything is cool.

[00:01:18] Emanuel: I like it how you framed it. Big tobacco and before that was big oil. For context, before we dive right in, and I do have a couple of questions, but I’ll let you lead this one as well for context and for those who are not familiar, what does this big tobacco mean and a little bit more, more details and how would this potentially impact.

[00:01:41] Kevin: As many people in the world were starting to come to the belief that using tobacco products was harmful to our health. They started publishing study after study after study, and large tobacco companies hired their own people to conduct their own studies to refute all the other studies. And basically their effort was to, through the legal system, create doubt in the claims that other people were making.

These two lawsuits I made mention to were specifically against… the first one was against Meta and Google. The second one was against Meta. And the basic idea is not only are your algorithms harmful to, and I think they focused on children in particular, but you have internal communications, which we’ve gotten our hands on, that shows us that you were aware of this and you decided just to pretend otherwise.

[00:02:41] Emanuel: There are two topics here that I’ve touched. I understand they’re not the same, but also they are related. I mentioned big tobacco, I mentioned big oil and the split up. The fact that some of these companies got to where they are is also because they’re extremely powerful and have more money, and they don’t allow any competition.

We all know that the philosophy of winning for many in the tech space is to leave no competition. So most of them give obscene amount of money, and who could say no to billions of dollars sometimes just to kill a project.

But when I reference big oil was actually mentioning the split up of many companies that were essentially monopolizing the market into smaller companies. And can you see point it’s kind of happening the same with our tech companies and I believe, for example that YouTube could be as valuable as Google.

Instagram in itself can be more valuable than Facebook. AWS in itself is more valuable than Amazon, probably close to Apple, which is at the moment the most valuable company on the planet and so forth.

This episode is about how dangerous these social platforms are.

I would like to spend at least one or two minutes on the other one as well. They’re connected, right? It’s the same big company. So we’re not talking about others. They’re, the same. Right? And part of the fact that they became so powerful is because they hold the monopoly that inevitably give them the godmode status and kind of like do what they want and including harming people.

[00:04:30] Kevin: Technically big tobacco and big oil are not strictly monopolies because there’s more than one seller in the market. They’re what are called oligolopies…

[00:04:41] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:04:42] Kevin: Because there’s a very small…

[00:04:44] Emanuel: And cartels because they can set the price up.

[00:04:47] Kevin: Yes, absolutely.

But the specific issue relative to the comparison of big tobacco and big oil to social media companies is some of the behaviors that these companies do produce tangible harms. They’re like, I’m sorry, but your evidence of that is kind of flimsy. We have a lot of doubt as to whether you’ve performed your analysis correctly or rigorously enough or whatever, and we basically don’t believe you.

And yet we found internal documents at the tobacco companies and at the oil companies going back decades in which we know they knew. They were just publicly claiming otherwise.

[00:05:29] Emanuel: There’s a movie with Stellan Skarsgård and Daniel Craig. I forgot which one. It’s an adaptation. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or something like that.

It’s an adaptation after a Scandinavian movie. And they were investigating, I won’t be spoiling anything. They were investigating this company. An old company or a legacy company and there’s one scene. Are you afraid that they’re going to find anything?

Most certainly. We’ve been in business for a thousand years. We probably have things to hide that we don’t even know what they were hidden at one point. So to an extent, that’s not an excuse for them.

I’m going to make a reference to a previous episode where we discussed the fact that the English North American system permits you something unless explicitly forbids, whereas the rest of the world, or at least European one forbids unless you get permission.

And that pushes things to these extremes, I suspect. I believe that’s one of the reasons as well, because I don’t think that Zuckerberg or Musk for that matter, because he has a social network, not more toxic than any other… have started off… they were developers and setting up the company saying, I want to make sure that I control and influence negatively people and whatnot.

No, but having no guardrails and getting away with so many things, got into this situation. I’m a proposal of an equilibrium, not like in Europe for sure, where you need permission from anyone essentially, but not necessarily as it is right now in North America, where you can get a way too easy without serious consequences with some things.

One thing I would like to say though, this is that whenever you do wrong and you get caught you pay and pay big. And I’m talking about SBF, Sam Bankman who’s going to spend a few years in jail or, I always forgot the names. Elizabeth Holmes…

[00:07:31] Kevin: Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. Yeah.

[00:07:34] Emanuel: So they…

[00:07:34] Kevin: Sometimes you pay big. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have included a lot of wrongdoing that was highly likely to be illegal, that people knew that they were doing, and there’s been no investigation. So sometimes if you act in a way that is harmful to a bunch of people you get punished, and sometimes you don’t.

It depends.

[00:08:03] Emanuel: It might seem that way, but from my life experience, I say that life has its own way of balancing stuff and some people pay at their level of tolerance. For example, somebody just losing their job would mean the world, or somebody just not being able to do that thing that they were doing.

Giving mortgages like left and right to your dog, essentially, or to the cat or to the fish at this time.

[00:08:25] Kevin: Right.

[00:08:26] Emanuel: Could have been more significant than somebody like you and I who are just simply didn’t get a new client that we were hoping for .

So I think that’s one of the reasons why we are here, because definitely the environment has allowed for this to happen.

That was a huge introduction, but I suspect right now is the time to actually go into the today’s topic and big tobacco moment. You mentioned two trials, two lawsuits that settled only last month.

We’re working on this early April, 2026. So late March, 2026. Can you share some details on it?

[00:09:03] Kevin: The first trial is against Meta and Google and has a part two, which is scheduled for May, although I don’t have the details on the part two. The jury awarded 6 million with Meta responsible for 70% and Google for 30%.

Both companies have said they will appeal. The jury found that Meta and Google are liable over claims that Instagram and YouTube were negligently designed, were a substantial factor in harming the plaintiff’s mental health and failed to adequately warn users about the dangers. The alleged harm is the addictive nature of these platforms.

The algorithms are specifically designed for maximum engagement. Regardless of the emotional wellbeing or mental health of the people whose engagement is being sought, that’s the allegation being made.

The other one, which was in New Mexico, is against Meta and it’s a case over child safety and exploitation.

A jury found that Meta violated state consumer protection law. After the state accused it of misleading users about safety on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and enabling child sexual exploitation. The jury on this one awarded $375 million and Meta said it will appeal.

In my mind, these are the initial cracks in the dam.

To the best of my knowledge, these are the first two lawsuits that were decided against social media companies against allegations that they were causing harm knowingly.

[00:10:43] Emanuel: In the United States.

[00:10:44] Kevin: In the United States, yes. I’m actually not aware of lawsuits outside the United States, but there may have been some.

[00:10:51] Emanuel: For sure, we need to go back to 2016 where many people say that President Trump, current president, first time he got elected due to… specifically Meta… Facebook at the time, manipulation.

[00:11:03] Kevin: Yeah, that Cambridge Analytica scandal.

[00:11:05] Emanuel: That’s a topic in itself, Cambridge Analytica.

It’s worth having a episode on it because in my mind I’m still amazed how many people complain about Cambridge Analytica, yet again how many people feed, at their own will ChatGPT and other LLMs with their own personal data. I know people that upload medical documents and say analyze this for me.

[00:11:25] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:11:25] Emanuel: Medical results and all those things.

We as marketers, that’s what we’re doing with Meta, right? We manipulate the results. And back then you didn’t have all the restrictions, and you could easily prompt, with a few bucks, to shift the view of certain categories of people within some regions. I say a few bucks, like a hundred or 200 bucks could easily get a few thousand votes, if not 10,000 or 20,000 votes within small communities that can easily be manipulated and piggybacked already on something that’s troubling them.

That’s what the algorithm shows as well. If you go to X for the first time or on TikTok for the first time, you’ll see that the algorithm will feed you all kinds of videos to get what you prefer. And they’re pretty good at it. And sometimes you don’t even need to go to too many things because they can access the information, the wifi, the location, the operating system, those things and start feeding what they think you are into. And one thing that for sure everyone responds to is hate. So they amplify the hate towards something.

Even…

[00:12:34] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:12:34] Emanuel: …something positive will… they’ll highlight the negatives even into something positive. So if you feel like the world is going to an end, it’s not you, it’s just the algorithm that’s feeding you.

And now if you put this on top of the loneliness epidemic that we discuss in other episodes as well, then you know many people think that’s the world. Which is, to an extent… I started off in advertising in paid television, TV stations, and I was monitoring television stations and I was watching the news, and if you look like at the news for two days, you think that the world’s going to end three times a day. And right now with what’s going on with a couple of war around the world, big war right… Iran, especially the fuel crisis that may or may not happen at the end of the day.

And I think we’re past the deadline that President Trump as of today gave Iran.

Ukrainian Russia…

[00:13:25] Kevin: I think we have 31 minutes left.

[00:13:27] Emanuel: Okay. So by the end of the episode, maybe we’ll know. I think coupled with that and the algorithm that’s feeding essentially just that… Oh my God.

And sometimes I’ve messed up the algorithm at one point because I was simply browsing and somebody call me and the clip played a couple of times. So the algorithm understood…

[00:13:48] Kevin: You’re really interested because you played this four times in a row.

[00:13:51] Emanuel: And I brought here a book that I hadn’t had time to read, but it came out two years ago, 2024. The Anxious Generation that talks about the raising anxiety that’s becoming a reality for especially the children. I’m happy to hear that some schools and some institutions are banning cell phones altogether.

This is amazing. I proposed this a few years ago. Things happen slowly, but that’s just a tip and there’s a lot of work to be done, and maybe there’s something we can do from now onwards, but what happened with the generation 10 years of being exposed to all this toxicity.

It’s Instagram for younger audience, but even for us professionals LinkedIn is as toxic as Instagram is for a certain audience because if you go there, you feel like you are missing out. You are the only one that’s not successful. You see all kinds of posts from people and now with AI, you know that they don’t talk like that and they don’t use those words.

So it’s funny because some people have a heavy accent; and I do have an heavy accent. I still edit my own post, but they have such heavy accent and they’ll definitely have such a short small vocabulary. Yet again they write this PhD thesis on LinkedIn about… today I hit my head by mistake when I opened the door, here’s what that taught me about leadership.

I don’t want to bash because I think you and I met through LinkedIn, I use LinkedIn daily, it has generated business for me and there’s good people there as well. But I’m not saying that it’s not as toxic.

And another book that I don’t have near me. Yuval Harari gives some great examples of how the algorithm… not being evil in itself, but just the fact that somebody consumes something enhances the feed with all that, and they were giving an example from Myanmar a few years ago… there’s a community of Rohingya Muslims…

[00:15:44] Kevin: And some Buddhists. It’s strangest violent conflict I’ve encountered. I can’t imagine Buddhists being violent towards their neighbors, but it’s happening.

[00:15:54] Emanuel: We won’t be getting into that at the moment. That’s a reality. And they were giving examples of how that propagated specifically in the book. I’m going to find the chapter because I think I made a note.

He was giving specific examples of how much it amplified the hate message, and how many people it reached, and how many people changed from being okay to actually hating that community just because they saw something on Facebook.

I’ll drop a link in the description with some deep fake videos that were circulating on Meta that were recent with the Canadians Prime Minister Mark Carney about saying the Canadian government has adopted a new crypto token and you sign up for this and then get benefits if you buy it. And essentially it was a scam.

It was manipulated, but it was so…

[00:16:39] Kevin: But it looked real.

[00:16:41] Emanuel: And most importantly, because that was paid advertising, right? So Meta and some other platforms allowed this. It’s a bigger conversation. Can they do better? Yes, they can do better. So that’s basically my main concern.

I’m working with Meta. It’s been working well for me, so I know the intricacies. But yeah, that’s my rant for today’s episode, essentially.

[00:17:04] Kevin: I know that Meta claims, and I suspect truthfully, that they put effort into complying with laws all around the world. And what’s missing from that statement is some countries in the world have very relaxed laws about content.

In some countries of the world, showing a picture of a soldier holding a decapitated head up would be illegal. That picture has to come down. Apparently in Myanmar in particular, that picture is not illegal and they circulate it. That also helps fuel the hate as you were commenting on. I have no idea which faction that soldier was with. I have no idea what side that decapitated head was with. Although, once decapitated, it doesn’t really matter to them. But people are making claims. This is a so and so, exacting violence on a such and such and you need to hate them. And apparently that is part of what fueled the violence in Myanmar.

I don’t know if Facebook is aware of the danger that they caused. People have claimed that they are and they just don’t care. And if they are, I don’t know if Facebook has owned up to it and taken responsibility

[00:18:20] Emanuel: Yuval Noah Harari has been a guest on Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast, so I’m assuming he reads his books, so I’m assuming he’s aware of the incident.

Now, that was a big example in millions of people, but we can see this at small scale. Schools, for example, and how Instagram, for example, influences the behavior of children at school. And there was last year, I think, or two years ago, I don’t remember, it was a movie released about the incel movement… he was a British short series with Stephen Graham; I forgot the name.

It’s a good show. Only worth watching once. I suspect it’s hard to watch it twice. It was also film in one shot, but it was essentially covering the situation, the reality of the paradigm that we live in, and what the repercussions are when you think, oh, they’re just on the cell phone, they just open up an account and watch this and that.

Not to mention, God forbid, who’s in there and who’s messaging what. And I either did a good job of building a fence around my feed and kicking out everyone that’s sucks in it. Right now Facebook is feeding me stuff that’s outside of who I’m following, but I was watching somebody else’s account, they showed it to me and what kind of messages they were getting, and especially pictures and whatnot. And if you’re a lady or a young lady you’ll have a totally different experience over there, which is definitely something that someone should be responsible for. And there’s things that you can do. And I’m not, to be honest, especially when we’re talking about young people, it’s not the platform’s entire responsibility, right?

It is for what they’re showing, but to the bigger problem and the consequences, it’s not the entire… platform’s responsibility, right? I suspect the school should have a say, and of course, the home should be the first place.

[00:20:18] Kevin: The question of does the platform have a responsibility, I think is now starting to be litigated in court.

And it may turn out that at some point we decide the platforms do have responsibility.

There’s this, I haven’t read the full law. In fact, I’ve only just skimmed part of the law. It’s called Section 230. And basically the idea is that the platform provider is not responsible for the content.

They simply provide a forum in which other people can exercise their free speech, and people who run websites where users provide input are concerned about the idea that the platform provider could be held responsible.

So on the one hand I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a company like Meta, for example, should have a responsibility for content moderation, which is, I’m going to call it fairly extreme.

They potentially could afford meeting a high bar. But let’s say that we have user comments on blog posts for our podcast episodes. We’re much smaller. We can’t adhere to the same level of responsiveness as a company like Meta can, so it really needs to be the case in my mind where how restricted you are is dependent upon how much damage you can do.

[00:21:47] Emanuel: And you serve the ball right to me, because I’m from Europe.

In Europe, there’s this thing called GDPR. Mm-hmm. Which is essentially a privacy protection law. And it was made specifically for companies like Google and Meta and the big players to restrict and have a legal framework where they can get fined if they play around with the data essentially that they collect from, the users, right?

And we need to know, remember that these companies are B2B, so Facebook… you don’t pay money to be on Facebook. That means that you’re the product and you know their business is to sell their product, which is you, the user.

[00:22:25] Kevin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:26] Emanuel: Other businesses, me, you, or bigger, larger, smaller companies as well that want to advertise on the their platform, same as Google.

And they have been doing well for the past years or so. Those are actually the most, both of them are top 10 most valuable companies on the planet. The consequences of the this GDPR, actually, I don’t think it’s as big for them as are for the rest of the sites and including the smaller ones because it created a very poor user experience.

I like to read sports, so whenever I go into that I’m bombarded with lots of, accept this, accept that, click this, click that, reject all those things. And sometimes they take up the entire screen.

We had an episode called Why Did the Internet Became Such a Bad Place… because we, the users, are paying the price of that.

Instead of simply just clicking and reading an article, you need to play around and click accept this. Another thing I wanted to mention, the law, I forgot which one, the section that you refer to about the platforms not being responsible… dates back a few years I don’t remember if it was 1990 something or actually even way, way, way before back into the newspaper days. I would think is adapted for that specifically.

But definitely it was not from the paradigm where a million people can comment at the same time and even as seen in the example, pay money to manipulate and to go towards it. Because even if I have a little bit more money than you, then I can go away and do more stuff.

[00:23:55] Kevin: Newspapers were held responsible for what was printed in the newspaper. So this concept of section 230 simply didn’t apply to them because if somebody sent a letter to the editor, the newspaper made a decision about whether it did or did not get printed.

[00:24:10] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:24:10] Kevin: Social media sites are saying, yeah, but that doesn’t work for us. And there is truth to that. There are too many messages coming in. However, there’s a difference between completely ignoring it, and making what I’m going to call a good faith effort at content moderation. And there are clearly incidences of harm.

Bullying, I forget who I had this conversation with, but I had this conversation just the other day and someone pointed out that prior to the advent of the Internet and social media, if a child was being bullied at school it stopped when they went home, it didn’t occur when they were on a family vacation, and now it’s 24 7.

There’s no way to turn it off.

[00:24:55] Emanuel: There’s no safe space anymore.

[00:24:57] Kevin: Yeah, that’s a extension of that idea, but it makes it very difficult for people who are being bullied to take a break from being bullied. And should the platform providers have some responsibility? I think some, yeah. But how much, and what are the details and how do you implement it?

And the concept I spoke about earlier of the rigidness of the rules that you need to follow should depend on how much damage you can cause. I believe that this should apply to every industry.

If you’re a really big bank, your regulation should be much tighter than if you’re a small regional bank. That’s right. If you’re a food processor who mixes hamburger in two ton batches, your rules need to be stricter than if you are a diner down the street, for example, who just for whatever reason happens to chop up their own steaks into hamburger.

The more people you can damage through your day-to-day operations, the stricter the rules ought to be on your operation.

And I think the same rules should apply to social media.

[00:26:04] Emanuel: Yeah. Some people proposed this kind like the same thing in tax. I think in Switzerland if I’m not mistaken, the fines, at least the speed fines are proportionate to your income. So it’s not uncommon for somebody more wealthy to pay more.

[00:26:18] Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. I heard about that. Although I thought I heard it was like one of the more northern countries like Finland or Sweden, maybe.

But yeah, they index your traffic fines to your tax return. The philosophy being that if you were caught in a serious traffic violation, the fine needs to hurt no matter what your income level is. And I think that’s a good idea.

[00:26:43] Emanuel: Certainly not a bad one. You said… should the platform be responsible? For sure, there should be some responsibility.

Can they do something about it? I can tell you for sure what they can improve right now is to make it a little bit easier to report, and their reporting system. Mm-hmm. Naturally, if you ever reported something on Instagram or Facebook, it’s not as easy as you might think, and although it doesn’t take you like an hour or anything like that.

It’s not intuitive, and even if you want to report something that’s harmful or it’s built with AI or is misleading, we need to select from a list of God knows how many options. It’s not suicide, it’s not self-harm, it’s not stuff like that, it’s fake impersonation and whatnot who is impersonating.

It adds a little bit of extra unnecessary steps in my opinion. I feel like it’s actually working against you as a user being able to provide that feedback.

I don’t have the data, they probably won’t share the data, but I suspect that the abandonment rate is very high from how many people click to report something and then actually went through to submit that report.

And also, I highly doubt their current filters because I reported some accounts that were obviously hacked, faked accounts that were promoting violence against other organizations or even other ethnic groups or other countries or other groups essentially. And it’s not just ethnic and countries wide or whatnot.

Even economic hatred as well. If you’re Pepsi you’ll benefit a lot if a lot of people start hating on Coca-Cola because they did this or that.

[00:28:16] Kevin: I suspect from their perspective, they view the people who will look at those reports as a cost. And they want to have reasonably as few of them as they can in order to reduce their cost and that they may in fact make it difficult to report in order to decrease the number of reports that their people have to sift through.

I don’t know that for a fact, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we found an internal memo or two or 20 that spoke in that kind of framing. And then the question is… is it really a cost or is it a quality of product or quality of service issue? And part of the problem, and I get back to this theme almost every episode, is corporate consolidation has kind of gotten out of control.

And these platforms, Google, Meta are so big and so powerful that they, to a certain extent, get to dictate the rules. Not because they have an overt ability to do it. Because if they break the rules, you take them to court, it takes two or three years. A ruling is against them. They file an appeal. It could be years before any of those damages that we mentioned in the earlier lawsuits are actually imposed on the companies. And in the meantime, they just keep doing what they’re doing. And if you’ve got a problem with them, just sue them again. What’s the big deal? It’s just money.

[00:29:40] Emanuel: And again, problem that I mentioned in previous episodes in this one as well. No consequences at the beginning, you get away too fast. And then you can easily work your way through the political system where you have in North America, it’s this thing called lobbyist. It’s actually a job. And essentially their job is to influence keyholders to allow some benefits to some entities, some companies. So influence either a tax break or some concessions and whatnot. Whereas in other places like Europe, this is punishable by law.

Whereas in North America you have like proper job, pay taxes on the income and everything else.

Perhaps I’m always in the middle. There’s always the answer, that equilibrium. That’s the answer. You’re about to say something.

[00:30:27] Kevin: I want to comment on the idea that it’s firms who are doing this, not because it’s not firms who are doing this, firms are doing this. But the legal basis for lobbying is in the first amendment… we have the right to petition our government.

That’s what these firms are doing. They’re petitioning the government through lobbyists.

That’s the legal basis for the whole thing, and they’ve taken it to a ridiculous extreme where some of the petitioning the government really looks like bribery, but it’s legal bribery because it’s protected speech under the First amendment.

I mean it’s a little bit surreal.

[00:31:04] Emanuel: And we’re having this conversation because it reached its pinnacle at, right now, right? We have a president that is doing what he’s doing and sometimes when you look at the social media, you think, okay, this is fake this can’t be true. It reminds us from…

[00:31:20] Kevin: Can I make a comment?

Because I have a weird thought on the current war in Iran and in order for the thought to be less weird I’ve gotta give a definitive timestamp. We are recording this on April 7th… it’s 10 minutes to four central time, so it’s 10 minutes to five Eastern time. So in 10 minutes we have that deadline.

And in theory, if Iran doesn’t come through, we’re going to bomb them back to the stone ages. So a part of me is like…. this is insider trading. This is just straight up insider trading. He’s not going to bomb it back to the stone age. He and his family and his friends are doing stock purchases and sales and he’s just in a position to swing the market because he’s the President of the United States.

Now am I right? I don’t know. But his rhetoric is so inflammatory, he’s all over the map. I don’t know how else to make sense of his behavior.

[00:32:26] Emanuel: I don’t think anyone has, but yeah, to your point, it might be just some business going on. I would prefer that as opposed to the consequences of literally killing… there’s always the innocent and the people that are help us that will pay the price for this.

Unfortunately.

[00:32:45] Kevin: Innocents definitely pay for it, but this is a situation where potentially the victor and the people who live in the victor nations, assuming that the United States emerges as the victor nation in a horrific destruction of Iran’s infrastructure, we would be paying for it as well.

This is a worst case scenario.

The deadline comes. Donald Trump orders a massive destruction of Iranian infrastructure, energy generation, water plants, the whole bit. Iran, unbeknownst to our intelligence has a good capability of responding, so they in turn start destroying infrastructure around the Persian Gulf. Let’s just pretend for sake of argument that we destroy the infrastructure that helps us produce 20% of the world’s energy.

Well… in a realistic way GDP is the exploitation of energy. If we shrink our energy use by 20%, we shrink our GDP by 20%. There’s just no two ways about that.

So depending on the outcome of what happens in the next… now… five minutes. This could be very expensive for everybody, not just the innocence who are killed in the bombs.

I hope that makes sense.

[00:34:01] Emanuel: Very much so, unfortunately.

[00:34:03] Kevin: Sorry to be so depressing. I realize that we segue way off topic, but with all that’s going on, it was just on my mind.

[00:34:09] Emanuel: That’s a reality. But coming back to social media…

[00:34:12] Kevin: Yeah, let’s get back to a brighter topic, social media companies causing harm.

[00:34:16] Emanuel: Glad we’re not talking about depressing stuff anymore. So that’s why we’re having this conversation. It all accumulated, right? And the bubbles about to burst because you have this, you have that now, you have all this tension as well. The insecurity that more and more people are experiencing, unfortunately.

And it’s even in North America, especially the young generation as well. Not the ones necessarily that are affected but are influenced by the social media anxiety and the other stuff happens from that. If I think about it, even myself, I don’t own a property.

And if you let the algorithm figure out that, you might be into it, then they’re going to make sure that you’ll feel really small and that you are worthless and that that’s all it matters in life… to own something that you cannot afford, essentially, or cannot afford with an tremendous amount of effort.

Something that your generation, for example, would have easily get access to, right? Because a property, a home was like, three to five times the yearly income or something like that of one person or a household. Whereas now it’s like 20, 30 something.

[00:35:31] Kevin: I’d have to look up the details. So I’ve purchased two houses in my life.

My ex-wife has the second one. The first one was like $200,000. The second one was $425,000, and that was in 1992. I bought the first one on my own. The second one was with her, but we could afford it. It was a stretch, but it wasn’t…

[00:35:52] Emanuel: You not have to. Yeah.

[00:35:53] Kevin: …an unobtainable stretch. And today there’s many, many people where the idea of buying a house, it’s an unobtainable stretch.

And yeah, to tie this back to social media doing harm. We do have this concept of, and this comes straight from the advertising industry, trying to sell people stuff that you have problems and the solution to your problems is… buy our products. This is the basic concept of advertising and social media just allows us to ramp that up to just unprecedented degrees.

People don’t realize… people talk about how Google disrupted search. Google disrupted advertising. I have a blog post on the Organic Growth website where I talk about how much advertising money is spent in the world and where it goes, and I’m not sure if I updated it in 2025. I know I updated it in 2024, but the last time I updated… more than $1 in five spent on advertising in the entire world went to Google. A single company sucked up more than 20% of the global ad spend.

[00:37:08] Emanuel: Might be more.

[00:37:08] Kevin: That’s just weird. That’s just bizarre. And Meta, who was not even a close second… the difference in ad revenue for Alphabet versus Meta is extreme, but Meta generates more ad revenue than every radio station in the United States combined.

These platforms are advertising juggernauts and to help them become advertising juggernauts they want to keep us engaged, and to keep us engaged, they tune the algorithms for polarization and anger and all that quote unquote good stuff… meaning it’s good for revenue, good for income, good for margins.

[00:37:50] Emanuel: Where do you see this going right now? What is your prediction based on the last filings and I think the last two decisions that are going to be appealed by both Google and Meta, but they’re not the only trials going on in the United States, correct? I think there’s a few more.

[00:38:12] Kevin: There’s quite a few more.

In fact, going through the complete list of them would take a long time. But I do want to bring up something that kind of gives me personally hope. Do you know the name Lina Kahn?

[00:38:25] Emanuel: Can’t put a face for the name at the moment.

[00:38:27] Kevin: She ran the antitrust division at the Department of Justice under President Biden.

[00:38:34] Emanuel: Okay.

[00:38:34] Kevin: And she was on a podcast episode at some point and someone asked her, what is your philosophy towards antitrust? And her answer is, understand the law and enforce it.

It’s actually a pretty good answer, right? So a lot of the corporate mergers that have been approved in recent decades are actually in violation of antitrust laws that go back as… 1890, 1920, et cetera, et cetera. And those laws are just basically not being enforced while these mergers move forward.

[00:39:08] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:39:08] Kevin: And under her leadership, the antitrust division at the Department of Justice was starting to take action. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they were involved in either of these two lawsuits in some capacity, although I don’t know that for a fact.

So anyway, Trump comes in, she’s out, because that’s just how it works. And I just recently learned that she’s forming a think tank with a bunch of guys who in my mind, I don’t know all of them, but the few names I know, it’s like, oh, those are the right guys, and their whole thing is to explore, investigate, examine the ways in which laws shape the economy.

And I thought, boy, does this give me hope. It means like in five years, 10 years, 15 years, we could actually have antitrust enforcement that starts to break up the big cartels. And to give you an idea of how she, to a certain extent is a cross party figure.

You would naturally think she’s a raging liberal and she may well be, I don’t know.

So Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn, and now he’s a very rich billionaire associated with Microsoft because Microsoft bought LinkedIn. He wanted her fired. Matt Gaetz, the… I’m going to be a little harsher, but the… kind of a nutcase, ultraconservative, MAGA member of Congress from somewhere in Florida, he loved her. He described himself as a Khan-servative.

So the idea that someone who you would think would naturally like her, wants her fired and someone you think would naturally hate her, loves her, like it defies the usual political way that we categorize people these days, but it just gave me hope to realize that they’re forming this think tank and that the focus of it is the way laws shape the economy.

Because they totally do and yet we pretend that markets are natural and organic. You just find them in nature and they have nothing to do with laws, which is not true.

[00:41:20] Emanuel: 5, 10, 15 years. Is that soon enough though? Because the world seems to be moving too fast paced. And you notice how we didn’t mention AI and the, its advancements these days and how AI will play in all this within the social media, within the algorithms and every other stuff, right?

So is it fast enough? And how much can they actually influence? Okay, think tank. They come up with solutions, but how do we enforce it? And again, that’s a very good answer. Enforce the current rules, it’s a start. Just enforce those and run the numbers a little bit more.

Also we as individuals should take a little more responsibility. And I’m fighting this hard as much as everyone else. Not go on Facebook, not go on Instagram, not go on LinkedIn. Yet I’m guilty as everyone else I follow, we’re in there. We encourage people, follow us on YouTube, follow us on… there as well.

But we also need to be responsible for ourselves, to educate ourselves, to try to be better and restrict some consumption…

[00:42:22] Kevin: There’s a limit to how much we as individuals can do when a system is kind of stacked against us. And I say that social media platforms are a system stacked against us because the basic psychology of being human kind of is what it is.

They have PhD psychologists trying to figure out how to get increased engagement, and we’re supposed to just from sheer willpower, disengage from that? I mean…

[00:42:51] Emanuel: Don’t underestimate.

[00:42:51] Kevin: …To a certain extent… what’s that?

[00:42:53] Emanuel: Don’t underestimate the power of the will.

[00:42:56] Kevin: It comes in handy sometimes, but it’s not as effective as we like to believe. In some cases…

[00:43:04] Emanuel: Don’t take this for me.

[00:43:05] Kevin: Systems need to change.

Now to your question of this 5, 10, 15 years, quick enough. Probably not. But if the other option is do nothing, I’ll take it. And part of the problem is when you try to quote unquote fix the economy through the legal system.

What that means is that you file a lawsuit. Well, these lawsuits take years to wind their way through the court, so it’s not going to happen any faster, but… it can potentially be like a snowball rolling downhill.

You get one favorable ruling and those two rulings last month against Meta and Google, and then against Meta… may be the first ones and then you get a few more later, a few more later.

Are you familiar with the concept of the Overton window?

[00:43:53] Emanuel: Over tin?

[00:43:55] Kevin: It’s probably named after a guy named Overton. But the basic idea is it’s what society generally finds acceptable. So I’ll use a tangible example of… should gay people be allowed to marry?

If you go back 30 years, the vast majority of us said no. If you come up to today, the vast majority of people say, it’s got nothing to do with me, what’s the big deal? So that’s a shift in the Overton window.

Collectively, something that we, the majority of us, decided was not good, is something that, well I don’t see the problem.

That’s a shift in the Overton window. So there may be a shift in the Overton window regarding antitrust, as antitrust decisions more and more impede ways in which these mega corporations, specifically social media ones, are able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize engagement in ad revenues regardless of what it may or may not do to the users.

We’ll see. Time will tell.

[00:45:04] Emanuel: Same thing about the last episode that we talk about alcohol consumption, the perception. You just…

[00:45:10] Kevin: Yeah. That’s a shift in the Overton window.

[00:45:12] Emanuel: I think we covered a lot of stuff and more than the subject. Anything else to conclude, Kevin?

I don’t have any. I gave my 2 cents.

[00:45:24] Kevin: I’m torn between, nothing comes to mind, and my mind would flooded with like questions and answers, like somewhere in between.

I’m going to go with, that’s enough for now and we’ll bring up some of these topics again later.

[00:45:37] Emanuel: Speaking of which, if you go on Facebook and search for Curious Pundits Podcast, our page might show up.

If you go on Instagram and search, our page might show up. TikTok, we’re on LinkedIn wherever, including curiouspundits.com, where you’ll find links to this episode, previous episodes, future episodes, transcriptions and everything.

You can drop us a message. Also there you’ll find links to follow us on your favorite platform where you listen to podcasts, Apple Music, Spotify, and everything else.

Until the next episode. My name is Emanuel.

[00:46:09] Kevin: My name is Kevin. Thank you for listening.

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