what was so key about what we heard on 60 minutes is this woman saying no. they are amplifying it for the purpose of profit. she said the change in the algorithm went into place in 2018. facebook revenue has reportedly tripled since 2018, and she says that s the motive here, they re putting profits over people. asha, what is the answer? i think when we talk about regulation, we always get to content, right, like can they take it down, can we make them take it down. what about the first amendment. i think there s a lot of other ways that facebook could be regulated that could, you know, incentivize them to behave in other ways. there can be disclosure requirements, for example, about their data, what they know, their algorithms, how they re prioritizing information. they can be required to create, say, pauses in the rolling feed or create civic messages that tell user, you know, kind of
research about that. you know, we ve seen with covid-19, misinformation, it spills over into the public as well. i think that there are a lot of parallels here, and it could open the possibility for creative ways of looking at, you know, holding facebook accountable, the way that we did with big tobacco. i think everything asha said is important. it s hazardous to our health. it s hazardous to our democracy s health. i want to play the portion where they talked about teenage girls. they have the data, they haven t released but they knew internally how much it s hurting them. listen to this. one study says 13 1/2% of teen girls say instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse. 17% of teen girls say instagram makes eating disorders worse. and what s super tragic is facebook s own research says as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed and it actually makes them use the app more. and so they end up in this