Comment by robinanil
1 month ago
I'm a former Google engineer, now running a children's mental health startup (Emora Health), and my toddler is already on YouTube Kids.
So this verdict hits on every axis for me.I wrote up my full take here [1], but the short version: I don't think the "Big Tobacco moment" framing that NYT is pushing actually holds up.
Litigation is negative reinforcement, and if you've ever tried telling a toddler "no" you know how well that works long-term.The families in this case absolutely deserve to be heard. The harm is real. But courts can only punish — they can't redesign a recommendation algorithm.
The change has to come from people who understand these systems building better ones.
Haidt has been saying for years what this verdict just confirmed. The evidence was never the bottleneck. The will to design differently was.
I will give you a simple experiment. Try blocking Blippi from YouTube Kids, man, it's crazy, even if you block the main Blippi and Moonbug channels. 100s of channels have Blippi content cross-posted. And it keeps popping up. I know it's easy to build a Blippi block feature using AI that blocks across channels.
Thats the kind of solutions we need. I know we have the tools. Just need intent and purpose
[1] https://www.emorahealth.com/clinical-insights/social-media-v...
> if you've ever tried telling a toddler "no"
Parenting is rough! Good for you, for sticking to your guns.
> The plaintiff, Kaley, started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at 11.
Who was at the wheel here? If we call up all Kaleys teachers from this time frame and ask them "were Kaleys parents checked out" what do you think the answer would be? For as bad as education has gotten, I sympathize with with teachers because parents have gotten FAR worse.
It's not like we don't know these things about peoples behavior on devices... maybe it's something that should be talked about in school, along with how credit works, and how to file taxes.
Do we need to tell parents "it's 10am, have your kids touched grass yet?"... "It's 10pm did you take the tablet and phone away so they go the fuck to sleep?" --
"touch grass" as a meme/slang is literally people poking fun at the constantly on line. It's "hazing" and "bullying" to drive social correction.
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