Tech Companies Have Never Had to Answer for One of Their Worst Crimes

They've caused countless fatal crashes knowingly tempting drivers into looking at their phones.

I’m excited to see social media companies facing a huge lawsuit over the harms they have caused children.

I basically agree with the critics of these platforms, people like Jonathan Haidt, that say they knowingly ruined kids’ mental health. Every day, another horror story comes to light about Roblox or Chat GPT or SnapChat, and I think we’ve barely scratched the surface.

FWIW I also think these companies destroyed journalism (this is the industry I used to work in) and undermined democracy AND made a hefty contribution to the whole country being lonely, depressed and at each others’ throats all the time. If it turns out Zuckerberg himself was running interference for Epstein using a special pedo island he created in Meta, I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised.

One thing I think is interesting though, and maybe I’m partly a tiny, tiny, bit responsible for this, is that social media companies have never really faced a lot of scrutiny about one of the worst things they’ve done: for sure killed a lot of people on the roads.

One thing tech companies have going for them here is that we don’t have great information about this. That’s because people who cause crashes while they’re checking their Facebook notifications generally aren’t very forthcoming about it. And we typically don’t investigate even fatal car crashes that thoroughly in the US. Also our “privacy” protections protect bad actors a little bit.

NHTSA — the federal agency that tracks this kind of stuff — says about 300 people a year are killed in crashes caused by cell phone distraction. 300 deaths a year caused by a consumer product is nothing to sneeze at and would open a lot of normal companies to major liability.

But NHTSA are relying almost totally on police reports for that information, and like I said, police don’t typically conduct the kind of investigations that could determine someone was distracted without a shadow of a doubt. So IMO, there’s a strong possibility that NHTSA’s data is a VAST undercounting.

Many researchers have tried to investigate this more thoroughly. A meta analysis of studies that tried to determine how many crashes were caused by cell phone distraction found wide variation. Studies found the percentage caused by cell phone distraction could be anywhere between .4% and 45%. But the median, the meta analysis found, was 3.4 percent.

This is just me extrapolating from this study for illustrative purposes. But if we accept the 3.4 percent rate, that would mean 1,390 deaths a year caused by cell phone distraction and about 75,000 injuries. And again, that may even be conservative. At least some research has guessed that the number would be WAY higher.

Regardless, that is a lot of people killed, torn from their families, and injuries — laid up in hospitals, missing work etc. I add that just because I think we get numb to these numbers. If you’ve ever had someone in your life suddenly killed in a car crash, you know, it’s traumatic.

So what responsibility to tech companies have for preventing this? That hasn’t been discussed as much as it should be imo. I said earlier I take a little bit of responsibility for that. I was focused on traffic safety in reporting for years and I think I was able to influence the discussion a bit. But I have been more focused in my career in holding automakers — another bad actor — responsible.

Here’s the thing though. When I was traveling around and speaking about rising pedestrian deaths, people always brought up cell phone distraction. And you can see it when you’re out and about. Everyone seems to be staring at their phone while driving. I even see people doing things like making turns while looking at their phones. This is not a harmless thing. It’s similar or worse to drunk driving. I also think it’s bad to discount public perception. The public is not dummies. They are observing this phenomenon because it is real.

What most people don’t realize, I don’t think, is the tech companies KNOW you are looking at your phone while driving. They have ALL sorts of information about you, where you are, the speed you’re traveling. They are selling this information essentially. They even know what position you are IN the car — the driver’s or the passenger seat.

IF these companies cared about being good corporate citizens and saving people’s lives they could simply “brick” people’s cell phones when they know they are driving. What they actually do instead is continue to use all these psychological tricks, honed and perfected by the best paid professionals in the world, to tempt you to pick of your phone and interact with it, so they can sell more ads and make more money.

And it works. And the result is a lot of gruesome crashes with an enormous social toll. Regular people’s lives are ended and ruined. And these tech companies are never held accountable, so why should they change anything?

Anyway, I’d love to see a similar lawsuit against Meta or X or whatever the most addictive algorithm is now in a similar lawsuit against the families of people who were killed because they were being “ping” “ping” “pinged” like it was a five alarm fire because their cat meme got liked or whatever.