The Big Tobacco Moment of Social Media

Bonjour fashion lovers,
this week a piece of news coming from the United States has shaken Silicon Valley.

A Los Angeles jury has ruled that Meta and Google, the companies behind Instagram and YouTube, can be held responsible for the way their platforms are designed. Not for the content posted by users, but for the very design of social media.

According to the court, some of the features we all know far too well, infinite scrolling, video autoplay, content suggested by algorithms, are not simple technological tools. They are mechanisms designed to keep users on the platforms for as long as possible.

The case that started it all concerns a young American woman, Kaley, who began using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine. During the trial she said that over time she developed an addiction to social media accompanied by anxiety, depression and self-harming behaviours already from the age of ten.

The jury sided with her.

The compensation awarded is not huge, about six million dollars, but the meaning of the ruling goes far beyond the amount. For the first time a court has established that the problem does not concern only what we see online. It concerns how the platforms are designed.

It is not surprising that many observers have already begun to speak of a possible “Big Tobacco moment” for technology. The reference is to the lawsuits of the Nineties against the tobacco industry, when it emerged that cigarettes had been designed to create addiction and companies were forced to radically change their practices.

If this parallel turns out to be correct, we may only be at the beginning. Because today Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in American courts, all based on the same question: were social media designed to create addiction? If the courts continue to answer yes, the entire digital ecosystem could change.

While I was reading this news, my mind immediately went to fashion. Because over the past fifteen years the fashion system has learned to live within the same mechanism. Once it was editors, buyers and runways that determined what became relevant. Today, very often, it is the feed.

What happens today? A dress goes viral. A bag appears everywhere. A trend is born overnight and disappears within a month. The speed with which desire ignites and fades is not accidental (not for nothing the success of fast fashion is there for everyone to see and is unstoppable). It is the result of a system built to reward what captures attention the fastest.

Fashion has adapted perfectly to this logic. Brands design collections that work on the screen of a smartphone, influencers have become central storytellers of contemporary visual culture, and every runway show is now conceived also for its life online. But if the algorithms that fuel this system were to change, what would happen? What would happen to the virality of trends? To the influencer economy? To the speed with which desire spreads across the world?

It is possible that nothing will really change. Or we might witness something more interesting: a slow rebalancing. A moment when fashion stops obsessively chasing the feed and returns to dialogue with something more lasting. After all, long before algorithms, fashion has always worked this way and perhaps it is worth remembering it right now.

I will be in the front row analysing every single change, every piece of news and I will be here talking about it with you in front of a soft cappuccino.

Always fashion. Always black. Always Paris.
Emanuela