Hit Them Where It Hurts

Last week marked the beginning of one of the big consolidated social media trials that Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok will face this year. Some of you may remember me writing about one of these lawsuits last year, the one for which I was very nearly deposed. If you've read the news about this particular trial over the past few weeks, whether about the evidence found in discovery or the testimony provided by people like Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg, you might already be pretty angry. Based on everything I've seen in the news so far, the plaintiff's attorney is making Zuck and the other defendants look pretty bad. But to be honest, it's not that hard when you have evidence like this.

Have you read any of the court documents? I recommend taking a look at this one. Not because I want you to blow a gasket, but because all of us need to be clear about what we've been up against. As an ex-Instagram UX Researcher, it's still crazy to look through documents like this and see references to projects my coworkers and I were involved in, and to see conversations between people I'm pretty sure I know and can identify based solely on tone and style. But what's crazier still is seeing black and white evidence of how hard we tried to get leadership and decision-makers to listen to us and to our insights, to follow or recommendations—and how equally hard they rejected all of it.

So many of the humans who fought for these changes are no longer employed by Meta. Some aren't employed at all, because the industry as a whole followed suit with similar layoffs after Meta demolished its own UX Research community. You'll never convince me that all of this—the research released in the Instagram Papers, the evidence showcased in these legals cases—wasn't a major reason UX Research was gutted, and remains that way across the industry. It's easier to disregard the insights if they don't exist to begin with.

I'm coming down with a cold tonight, so I'm not at my clearest. Rather than make you read a newsletter and then read the court document, I will ask you to do the latter, and then come back to the comments and tell me your thoughts, so I can write about it in a future newsletter and we can talk about what we're going to do. Here's a bit I'd like to highlight, which is a project friends of mine worked on:

It does not matter how badly Meta, Instagram, Zuckerberg, et al. are judged in the court of public opinion unless we do something about it. Not even the courts can punish them enough to get them to change. It has to be the public. And what pressures do they respond to? Metrics and money. We're going to have to do it. We've got to change our behaviors at a scale to make them see it and feel it.

See you next Wednesday.

Lx