Parents march on Meta HQ as Insta's chief takes the stand

#315: And as Adam Mosseri prepares to testify, an interview reveals him urging parents to limit kids' time on social as it's getting worse...

The parents of 45 children who died or committed suicide after being targeted by drug dealers and sexual predators on Meta just marched on its New York HQ.

Multiple protest groups laid wreaths for lost loved ones to demand that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg act on child harms and stop chasing profit at any price.

I’m in contact with many of these families, and their stories of unimaginable grief are an accelerating bowling ball that will eventually skittle Meta and social as we know it.

Yesterday’s march was a timely wake up call for me of why I do what I do, and why it matters.

The past few weeks have been about millions, billions and trillions. It’s been about the Metas, the MAGAs and the Googles.

But really, it’s not about that. It’s about people, and the best you can do to do the right thing with the tools you have for your community.

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I was 11 years old when I decided I wanted to be a war correspondent. I was inspired by the brave journalists I saw covering the front lines of The Falklands War.

A few years later, my school allowed my class to go on work experience, and I wrote to the editor of a newly launched UK newspaper called The Independent.

The founder was its first editor, so I was able to find Andreas Whittam Smith’s home address in the official company records. I wrote:

Dear Mr Whittam Smith, I’m 15 and I am going to be a reporter. I’d like to do work experience at your paper.

I know you are very busy so to show you I can do the job I’ve used my initiative to find your home address and written to you here.

I hope you don’t mind and take it as a signal that I am really determined.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you, Ricky Sutton.

My dad slapped his hand on his desk. That’ll do it, he said, and off it went. A few weeks later, Whittam Smith wrote back congratulating me and inviting me in.

In his office (glass windows, slat blinds) he gave me some advice that set my direction in journalism.

“News is about people,” he told me. “Never forget that. Lots of events happen, but it’s not what happens that matters as much as what it means to us, the people, and to society.”

A quarter of a century later, Whittam Smith wrote celebrating the paper’s 25th anniversary:

Independent minded people can be of any age, of any social class, of any level of education or of any income (or, for that matter, of any race, creed or political allegiance).

What they have in common is an attitude.

Two operating rules follow from this: Respect the reader; trust the writer.

They sound anodyne in the extreme. Who doesn’t respect readers or trust writers?

Respect the reader is fundamentally an injunction against dumbing down. Patronising attitudes are widespread in Britain.

In media offices, viewers, listeners and readers are often referred to as punters. Respect the reader means turning your back on all that.

Just explain what’s going on carefully with sensitivity to readers’ differing backgrounds.

He went on:

Trust the writer again sounds innocuous. Why would you employ somebody you didn’t trust?

But this is aimed at the way editors often want their prejudices confirmed and dispatch reporters to do just that.

Gypsies? Must be thieving. Nigerian women? Must be coming to Britain to have babies on the National Health. Single mothers? Must be feckless.

Trust the writer means sending out reporters to cover something in the news and waiting to see what they bring back. It will often be more interesting than you thought.

This is wisdom that Meta, Google, and the other platforms which put dollars before sense, profit before people, and money before mission, would do well to heed.

Failing to do so comes at a price, as Big Tech is learning in two courtrooms, half a world away in Washington DC, and 30 years later. Respect for readers stands the test of time.

In the dock later will be Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, the man many of the protesting parents in New York think has done unforgivable harms to children.

He’ll be groomed by armies of lawyers not to drop a loose word. He’s a Meta lifer. Inculcated since his mid-20s. An engineer and a never-been journalist.

But the father-of-three did give a less-guarded interview to Vanity Fair Italia, which dropped just hours ago. It’s pretty interesting.