Giacomo Tesio
The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.

“These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years
https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/

#BigTech #GAFAM #Google #Meta #TikTok #Snap #teens #mentalhealth #privacy #surveillance #addiction #drugs


TECH OVERSIGHT REPORT: UNSEALED COURT DOCUMENTS SHOW TEEN ADDICTION WAS BIG TECH’S “TOP PRIORITY” - Tech Oversight Project

New documents show the tactics Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok execs used to disrupt learning, prey on minors, and co-opt the PTA to control the narrative with parents WASHINGTON, DC – Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence […]

Tech Oversight Project
Feb 5 at 5:52pmWeb
Show threadEarthshineFeb 5
@giacomo from the desk of "no fucking shit"
Show threadHello, my name is DisappointFeb 5
@giacomo *THIS* is how you protect kids where social media is concerned. Investigate, document, send to trial, and severely financially punish the companies who knowingly harm kids. Not age-controls and age-gating the entire fucking internet; that's just a massive privacy invasion against everyone, kids and adults alike.
Show threadDavidFeb 6

@giacomo All good except the mistaken suggestion that #KOSA could make anything better. KOSA would prevent any effective access to privacy, including the minimum necessary to bypass ideological censorship or to stay safe from abusively controlling parents, while also facilitating government censorship and wholesale identity theft against adults.

It would render Signal and Mastodon—two of the most important technologies for free expression—unlawful.

Prohibiting addiction-oriented algorithms would be beneficial. However, enforcing online age verification (as opposed to on-device parental controls) is always harmful: in a multitude of ways.

https://infosec.exchange/@deFractal/115994076948088497

Show threadGiacomo TesioFeb 6
@[email protected]
Prohibiting addiction-oriented algorithms would be beneficial.
You can't wait for whistlebowers to be sure the algorithm employed are designed to addict.

So "prohibiting #addiction-oriented algorithms" is in no way enough: we need to make their application unfeasable.

Let's ban any centralized #SocialNetworks.

Let's outlaw any software that transfer one bit of data more than what is demonstrably required to fulfill users' request.

Let's completely ban #cookies, software fingerprinting, tracking, targeted ads and everything that fluel #SurveillanceCapitalism.

Let's ban "free services" based users' data collection and users' manipulation, starting from #GMail free tiers.

Let's break #BigTech like #Google or #Meta so that they cannot both provide services to users and sell ads or data.

This will work.

#AgeVerification is just giving these companies further data point even on people they cannot directly spy. It will further damage worldwide societies and #democracy withou any benefit to kids and other vulnerable people.
Show threadDavidFeb 6

@giacomo Those are all much better ideas than the deceptively named #KOSA (which the article favours), which is not actually a bill for anyone's safety: it is for surveillance, censorship, coercive control, and eliminating competition to centralized social networks.

https://www.eff.org/document/kids-online-safety-act-kosa

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)

2024.06_kosa_one_pager_final.pdf

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Show threadtyilFeb 6
@[email protected] If only the people in the country where all of this shit happens had access to guns and a right to use them to fight tyranny. If that were the case, something might actually happen.
Show threadStrypeyFeb 7

@giacomo
> These unsealed documents prove Big Tech has been gaslighting and lying to the public for years

To read this webpage I had to run allow it to run proprietary JavaScript from CloudFlare.com in my browser. As well as jsdelivr.net, which loads scripts from various Big Tech platforms. Oh the irony.

(Oh and actblue.com, whatever that is)

Show threadGiacomo TesioFeb 7
@[email protected]

Good catch!

I urge you to complain to [email protected]

Also, they are not on the #fediverse.

Yet I don't care much about them, and my post was not intended as an endorsement of their organization or future goals.

I just think that people should know why the mainstream #SocialNetworks are so #toxic and #addictive: it's a design goal of the #BigTech running them, and there is no wise or proper or smart way to wield them.

We can only quit them or be worthless puppets obeying their will.
Show threadStrypeyFeb 8

(1/?)

@giacomo
> mainstream Social Networks are so toxic and addictive: it's a design goal of the BigTech running them

At the risk of splitting hairs, they're social media. Not social networks, connect people to each other directly, not through algorithmic mediation.

I say this because although these terms had different meanings in the Web 2.0 era, the term 'social media' in mainstream use describes what I call DataFarming platforms. Not social software in general.

Show threadStrypeyFeb 8

(2/?)

For example, see Jonathan Haidt's interview on Hard Fork, where he says in no uncertain terms that young people shouldn't be on "social media". But later clarifies that he's talking about DataFarming platforms in particular, and doesn't think everything on the net ought to be age-gated;

https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork

Hard Fork

Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the rapidly changing world of tech.

Show threadStrypeyFeb 8

(3/3)

I point this out because not all discourse that rails against Big Tech is actually against Big Tech. Some of it is spread by AstroTurf groups trying to achieve regulatory capture *for* DataFarmers. So we need to careful what we spread, and whose websites we link to.

If a site depends on tools controlled by DataFarming corporations, that tells us its operators don't fully understand the problem of dependencies on technofascist corporations. OR are actually working in the interests.