Buzz, Ping, Repeat: How Social Media Notifications Shape Our Behavior

6. Meta’s use of disruptive audiovisual and haptic notifications interferes with young users’ education and sleep.

299. Meta’s Social Media Platforms use incessant notifications that recall young users’ attention back to the Social Media Platforms when they are engaging in unrelated activities, such as attending school.

300. For example, by default, Instagram frequently delivers notifications to young users’ smartphones, [Redacted]

301. By default, Instagram employs a range of notifications when the application is installed on a smartphone. These include haptic alerts (vibration or pulse), banner notifications, sound notifications, badge notifications (persistently displayed red indicator encircling a number representing certain events that have not yet been viewed by the user), and email notifications.

302. These notifications are disruptive for all users but are especially intrusive and harmful for young users, who are particularly vulnerable to distraction and psychological manipulation.

303. Meta sends notifications to users, which trigger audiovisual and haptic alerts on users’ smartphones, when other users on the Platform take any of the following actions:

• Following the user;

• Going Live (i.e., starting a live broadcast);

• Liking or commenting on the user’s posts;

• Mentioning the user in a comment or tagging the user in a post; or

• Sending the user a message.

304-308. [Redacted]

309. Meta has employed notifications across its Social Media Platforms to drive increased user engagement.

310. Sean Parker, founding president of Meta, explicitly acknowledged this:

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them . . . was all about: “[h]ow do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators—me, Mark [Zuckerberg], Kevin Systrom on Instagram, all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway

311. As Meta knows, young users are particularly susceptible to these techniques and find it hard to resist applications that send them frequent and persistent alerts.

312. [Redacted]

313. Researchers have documented how these notifications, including Likes on Instagram, have an impact on the brain similar to the effect of taking stimulating drugs:

Although not as intense as [a] hit of cocaine, positive social stimuli will similarly result in a release of dopamine, reinforcing whatever behavior preceded it . . . . Every notification, whether it’s a text message, a “like” on Instagram, or a Facebook notification, has the potential to be a positive social stimulus and dopamine influx.[13]

314. Young users frequently re-open and re-engage with Instagram repeatedly throughout the day and at night when prompted to do so by the alerts and notifications they receive from Instagram on their smartphones.

315. By sending notifications to young users, Meta causes young users’ smartphones to produce audiovisual and haptic alerts that distract from and interfere with young users’ education and sleep.

316. Meta defaults young users into receiving notifications on Instagram and Facebook, [Redacted]

317. While users can technically disable notifications, Meta knows that requiring users to opt out of receiving notifications greatly reduces the likelihood that they will do so. [Redacted]

318-324. [Redacted]

325. Even so, Instagram does not offer users a setting to permanently disable all notifications on Instagram at once. At most, users can opt to pause all notifications for up to 8 hours at a time. Users seeking to permanently disable all notifications must disable each category of notifications one by one.

326. After users disable notifications, Meta pressures such users to reinstate notifications when they use Instagram. For example, Meta periodically sends a user the below nudge message after a user disables notifications on their smartphone and subsequently logs onto Instagram through a web browser:

327. Upon information and belief, the wording of the “Turn On” and “Not Now” options is designed to pressure users, including young users, to revert to the default notification settings even after they have attempted to disengage from Instagram by turning those notifications off.

328. [Redacted]

329. Through notifications and other features, Meta’s Social Media Platforms are designed to maximize user time, addict and re-addict users (including young users), and effectively mandate that a user’s experience is on Meta’s revenue-maximizing terms, even when users attempt to modify their own behavior to reduce the time they spend on Instagram.

330. Publicly, Meta touts its Social Media Platforms’ time management “tools,” creating the misleading impression that Meta’s Social Media Platforms are designed to empower users’ efforts to self-limit the duration and frequency of their social media use.

331. For example, on August 1, 2018, Meta published a post online titled “New Time Management Tools on Instagram and Facebook” that described “new tools to help people manage their time on Instagram and Facebook” because Meta purportedly “want[s] the time people spend on Instagram and Facebook to be intentional, positive and inspiring.”

332. Meta’s public representations concerning its time management tools are deceptive in light of Meta’s choice to default users, including young users, into a barrage of smartphone alerts that incessantly recall them to the Social Media Platforms and then pressure young users to revert to those defaults when they attempt to opt out.

[13] Trevor Haynes, Dopamine, Smartphone & You: A Battle for Your Time, Harv. Univ. SITN Blog (May 1, 2018), https://archive.ph/9MMhY.