Every Frame Perfect ⇥ tonsky.me

Nikita Prokopov:

The rule of thumb is:

If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see.

Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of time to iron out the code. It’s a heuristic, but a reasonable one.

Prokopov lists several criteria, but this post is almost wholly dedicate to the last one: “precise animations”. More specifically, in the case of this article, a lack thereof, particularly throughout MacOS and its first-party apps. I loved this post, and Prokopov did not even mention one of the most glaring in MacOS Tahoe: the four-finger trackpad gesture, the one that used to show Launchpad, now displays the App Drawer before the animation plays, then plays the animation, then shows the App Drawer again. If animations like these ship, it certainly raises questions about what else was deemed unworthy of being fixed.

iCloud’s ‘Hide My Email’ Feature Becomes Easier to Block ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple on its Developer site (via Arseniy Shestakov):

Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com.

New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. […]

Previously, Hide My Email addresses were generated on icloud.com, the same domain as any other iCloud email address. This made it basically impossible for web admins to block registration using Hide My Email. After this change, they can just block signups that use private.icloud.com. Some similar third-party services have a list of alternative domains for creating an email account, and I hope it is possible to use icloud.com in addition to the unified subdomain — but if it were, Apple probably would have said that.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

I have previously noted I am not a fan of Ed Zitron’s writing on A.I., which I think is driven more often by adherence to narrative than by genuine skepticism. Even so, his newsletter is extremely popular, and occasionally that pays off with honest-to-goodness scoops. Yesterday, he got a big one — a smattering of OpenAI financial documents revealing the company’s spending and earnings for the past two years. In 2024, it made billions of dollars less than it spent — including over a billion dollars on sales and marketing alone — and its 2025 numbers look even worse:

The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability.

Zitron shared these documents with the Financial Times, which independently verified them, and added some much-needed context. In particular, that whopping $38.5 billion loss accrued in 2025 and highlighted by Zitron — including in his headline — seems far less dramatic:

Before OpenAI’s switch late last year to become a public benefit corporation, investors in the company received convertible interest rights rather than conventional equity. Under US accounting rules, those interests were treated as liabilities and periodically revalued as the company’s valuation increased.

As OpenAI’s worth rose, the increased value of those investor rights created a roughly $30bn charge, added the person. The charge is not expected to recur following the restructuring, they said.

That expense is not something that can be waved away, of course, but it does not seem to be materially related to the company’s actual costs of creating and selling its products. Losses without including that charge were, according to the Times’ “person familiar with the matter”, $8 billion, or roughly 60% more than in 2024. But that is against revenue of $13 billion in 2025, a significant increase over 2024’s $3.7 billion. (OpenAI, in the first three months of 2026, earned $5.7 billion.)

These juicy numbers were republished by outlets like Reuters, the Next Web, Stocktwits, Benzinga, and Startup Fortune. Shamefully, all attributed them solely to the Times without mentioning Zitron’s critical role. These publications — particularly Reuters — should be giving full credit to the original source.

That Zitron now has actual, verified numbers also allows us to check some of his own reporting. For example, in April, he was quite upset that “every outlet has continued to repeat that OpenAI ‘made $13 billion in 2025,’ despite that being very unlikely given that it would have required it to have made $8 billion in a single quarter”. It is unclear to me which outlets Zitron is referring to as I could find just one — Russia Today — using that quoted phrase verbatim.

Even so, Zitron goes on to write about some apparently conflicting numbers reported by Anthropic before concluding:

Though I cannot say for certain, both of these situations suggest that Anthropic and OpenAI are misleading their investors, the media and the general public. If I were a reporter who had written about Anthropic or OpenAI’s revenues previously, I would be concerned that I had published something that wasn’t true, and even if I was certain that I was correct, I would have to consider the existence of information that ran counter to my own. I would be concerned that Anthropic or OpenAI had lied to me, or that they were lying to someone else, and work diligently to try and find out what happened. I would, at the very least, publish that there was conflicting information.

Two days after this article, he again claimed that “every single story about OpenAI’s revenue other than my own reporting (which came directly from Azure) massively overinflates its sales”, which are more like “a mere $2.27 billion in the first half of last year”.

The numbers Zitron now has for OpenAI suggests this narrative is complete hogwash. Yes, these companies leak overly-optimistic annualized run rates, but if that was a factor in the audited financials Zitron obtained, he likely would have mentioned that. He does not — and neither does the Times, for that matter. “Due to the seriousness of this story”, Zitron wrote, “I am not going to do very much editorializing”, so we will see in a later issue of this newsletter whether he acknowledges this self-induced frenzy was all in his head.

This is why I read Zitron’s work in the framework of conspiracy thinking. He accused OpenAI of “massively overinflat[ing] its sales” and “misleading their investors” based on his own calculations using leaked Azure figures. But it turns out OpenAI did, apparently, have that $13 billion in real non-ARR-fudged revenue for last year, and its operating loss is shrinking. Real analysts, not me, can figure out whether this company is on a path to a functional business. Zitron conjured a whole fictional narrative out of misreading some numbers and then, it would seem with this latest update, misunderstanding them again because it is useful for the story. Still, he should be credited for this scoop.

Looking Back on Twenty Years of Intel Macs ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

What’s striking about the Intel Mac era is that Apple switched to and away from Intel chips for basically the same reason: It was looking for a more compelling processor roadmap and the best possible performance-per-Watt for its chips. When Intel was executing well—and during the decade between the mid-00s and mid-2010s, Intel was executing exceptionally well—Apple wanted in. It was only after years of watching Intel struggle that Apple wanted out.

Apple used Motorola CPUs for ten years, PowerPC processors for eleven, and Intel for fifteen. Unbelievably, we are already six years into the Apple Silicon Mac era.

Given the kinds of things made possible by the ARM-based processors in today’s Macs, it is difficult not to imagine this transition was inevitable, though perhaps catalyzed by the Intel models in the mid-to-late-2010s. I harbour a small fascination with the culmination of issues in that generation of Macs not limited to the processors; Cunningham points to a former Intel engineer’s comments that Skylake generation processors were a key point of friction. If you know a lot about the engineering story behind those Macs, like the keyboards, I would love to hear from you, perhaps on Signal.

Apple’s List of Features Coming in Safari 27 ⇥ webkit.org

Apple’s WebKit team has lots of news about what to expect in Safari 27, and maybe the best is customizable Select:

Customizable select is coming to Safari 27. With this technology, developers can fully control the appearance of <select> elements — custom arrows, option layouts, color swatches, icons, full visual styling — without the need for JavaScript libraries or an endless parade of <div> elements. And because it’s a built-in control, you don’t have to compromise on keyboard navigation or accessibility semantics.

If you have ever tried to build a really nice-looking site-specific <select> menu, this is probably a huge relief. It certainly is to the me of a past life, back when I did a lot more front-end development day-to-day. Support for the base-select value began rolling out to other browsers last year.

Social Media Policy Is Evolving Beyond Age Limits ⇥ disconnect.blog

Paris Marx, with a thoughtful take on the recently announced Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”:

The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit.

I also appreciated the implied nuance in the legislation; however, critically, those design standards have yet to be defined. Perhaps users will be granted actual control over what they see in their feeds; perhaps there will be legally defined promises for what notifications users may opt into or out of. These would be welcome improvements. But we simply do not know what they are yet.

Worse, by tying all-user policies on the one hand to an age gate on the other, I worry the outcome will be a compromise satisfying neither. Someone is currently supposed to be 13 or older to have an account with a social media service, both under Canadian law and in platforms’ terms of service agreements. Raising the floor to 16 is not the biggest issue one way or another. The real carrot is, therefore, weighing whether social media companies are willing to stop mandating their slot machine for feelings on every Canadian user in exchange for not having to verify their ages. Given the number of places already enforcing some age-gating and the development of infrastructure associated with that, I think many social media platforms will find it far easier to start carding people rather than changing their ways.

I do not think an imperfect law is inherently bad, however. Like Marx, I am encouraged to see a worldwide discussion among policymakers of how to rein in these specific kinds of businesses that have marketed directly to children despite their many design flaws for which these companies accept no responsibility. I am only skeptical these companies will do the right thing when they always prefer the cheaper and less accountable option.

Bill C–34 Punts Key Decisions to Cabinet and a Commission That Does Not Yet Exist ⇥ cbc.ca

Catharine Tunney, CBC News:

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, would force social media services — defined as traditional social media platforms, live-streaming services and adult content services focused on user-shared content — to restrict accounts for children under 16 years old.

However, services could seek an exemption if they implement what officials briefing reporters called adequate safeguards to protect children. The exemption wouldn’t apply to platforms offering adult content services.

The “adequate safeguards” are not yet defined and, it turns out, are far from the only things to be determined. It was striking to read the text of the bill and come across so many key pieces punted to a later date or committee. Some of these policies, for example, might only apply to services over some number of users, but that cut-off is to be established later. There is a whole committee, the Digital Safety Commission, with “three to five full-time members” but few specific details. Even things which appear to be strictly defined — removing CSAM within twenty-four hours of being flagged by a user — might be different “if a period of a different length is provided for by regulations”.

Michael Geist:

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

Will Adams, the Provincial Times:

The internet has plenty of problems that deserve attention. Predators exist. Addiction is real. Platforms optimize for engagement over well-being. None of those facts requires the rest of us to accept a system of digital ID that will follow every user who wants to comment on the news or express their position on whatever.

There is the tiniest, faintest shred of hope in that some platforms implementing “adequate safeguards” will not actually need to verify ages at all. I am not banking on that, to be clear, but it is at least a notion of something that could be promising. Then again, we have no idea about what that means or, in fact, any material policies in this bill. All we have is this framework, and it sucks.

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No Privacy Impact Assessment Was Conducted of Grok Imagine Until After Launch, Finds Canadian Privacy Commissioner ⇥ priv.gc.ca

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

An investigation by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that Grok’s AI image-generation tool was launched without proper safeguards or sufficient consideration of potential privacy harms.

This lack of protections allowed users around the globe to create and share non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes, many targeting women and children.

In a report released today, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne found that X Corp. and xAI violated Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law.

According to the full report, while a privacy impact assessment was completed of the previous version of Grok’s image generation model, one was not done for Grok Imagine until March, well after its July 2025 launch. Even then, the assessment “did not accurately reflect […] risks to security, safety and privacy”.

Grok is now owned by SpaceX, which is going public tomorrow in extraordinary fashion. It is still generating abusive imagery.

Elon Musk’s Age of Impunity ⇥ axios.com

Iain Gray, News Letter:

Tech mogul Elon Musk encouraged “repeated and loud” protests ahead of Northern Ireland’s immigration demonstrations, some of which flared into violence.

The owner of X, formerly Twitter, went on to comment that “only Restore Britain can save Britain” over the course of comments on a horrific knife attack carried out by a Sudanese man on the streets of north Belfast.

For context, Restore Britain is the political party for people who view Nigel Farage as a soft and cuddly liberal.

Zachary Basu, Axios:

Asked Wednesday why the world’s richest man spends his days in a bitter online culture war instead of enjoying his billions on a beach, Musk posted: “Nothing else matters if civilization falls.”

Musk’s definition of “civilization” is white people. He loves to cast himself as a saviour of humanity, but juggling multiple CEO positions apparently leaves him with enough time in the world to tweet with abandon. Musk has zero relationship with the people he is inciting to cause harm, yet his behaviour and his companies’ track records have no bearing on his finances or his influence. He will become the world’s first trillionaire tomorrow morning. He is just a guy, though, with a cushy white-collar job and an internet connection. It is upsetting to be reminded that much of our world is run by shameless psychopaths.

Siri Takes on Siri, Now Old Enough to Drive

In March 2018, I compared the original 2010 demo of Siri against the then-current shipping version. That was eight years ago — closer, in fact, to the launch of the iPhone 4S and Apple’s version of Siri than to today.

Not much changed after I did that little experiment until Monday, when Apple announced a “profoundly more capable” Siri. Called Siri A.I., it will officially launch in beta with this year’s operating system upgrades. But I recently got access to the first preview of it in the first developer build of iOS 27 and, naturally, I had to try the same set of queries.

  • “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office”: Apple’s previous Siri implementation always — for me, at least — got tripped up by the “near my office” part. New Siri did this flawlessly.

  • “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio in San Jose tomorrow night at 7:30”: Outside attempting this demo in 2018 and again today, I have never tried to book a restaurant reservation using Siri, so my sample size is pretty small. Last time I did this, I once managed to get Siri to prompt me to make a reservation through OpenTable, but was otherwise greeted by an error.

    New Siri did one of two things: on some attempts, it told me it could not book a table for me, but suggested I could add it to my calendar or call the restaurant to complete the reservation. On others, it added the event to my calendar and asked if I wanted Siri to call the restaurant to complete the reservation. It is interesting to me that Siri A.I. does not (yet?) throw to OpenTable, and only suggests I make an old-fashioned phone call.

  • “Where can I see Avatar in 3D IMAX?” I swapped “Avatar” for a current 3D IMAX movie, and Siri A.I. showed me one theatre locally that is showing it in 3D but not IMAX, and one that is only showing it in 2D IMAX. This is, I think, mostly fine. I think Siri should clarify that no theatre nearby is showing it in 3D IMAX, but I think this is preferable to showing me the nearest theatre matching the query literally. As with the restaurant example above, there is no way for me to buy tickets through Siri.

  • “What’s happening this weekend around here?”: In the original Siri demo, this only showed nearby public events for the weekend. Apple’s version, in 2018, thought I was asking about the news and then, after rephrasing twice, threw to a web search.

    Siri A.I. interprets this differently than either. It showed me my calendar and the events I already have this weekend, and then found an event in a marketing email in my inbox “if you’re looking for something else to do”. There were no details presented beyond “a ticketed show” and no obvious followup, but after a followup question — “what is that event?” — it showed me more information and a button to open the message.

    In the original Siri demo, they ask a followup question “how about San Francisco?”, so I did the same, and it showed me events happening there this weekend. Just what you would expect.

  • “Take me drunk I’m home”: Siri got me driving directions to my house.

Though this is a test conducted on the very first version of Siri A.I. from a fixed point in Calgary, it seems to work quite well. So far, it is better than any version of Siri Apple has released yet and, as you can see above, it is almost as good as the original 2010 demo, before Apple acquired the company.

Siri A.I. Will Not Be Available on E.U. iPhones and iPads At Launch ⇥ audiovisual.ec.europa.eu

Apple:

Apple today introduced Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.

Thomas Regnier, a European Commission spokesperson, responded during a press conference:

We had a few contacts with Apple on this matter, this I can confirm. But Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential E.U. privacy and security standards.

Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA — and this for at least 18 months on top of it.

Guess what? That’s not an option. Because it would mean that no A.I. agent other than Siri A.I. — by the way, powered by Google — would have an equal chance to be chosen by iPhone users.

It is refreshing to see Apple and the European Commission arguing in public and on the record instead of by leaking information to the Financial Times.

Nicolas Lellouche, of Numerama, spoke with Greg Joswiak about this (machine translated; original in French):

To work, Siri AI builds a semantic index of all your communications and data so that you can find them when you ask them a question. Apple suggests that advertisers will use AI to retrieve this data if Europe forces it to open its accesses: its system is totally incompatible with European requests. A third party could “read all your messages, edit your files, delete things, delete your photos, take actions in your applications without you knowing or consenting,” lists Greg Joswiak.

Apple and the European Commission each cite privacy and security concerns as justification for their competing arguments. This is a little study in clashing definitions, but it rings a little hollow. To the extent Apple has concerns about third-party A.I. access, it will still launch Siri A.I. on MacOS, which remains a relatively unrestricted system where, I hear, dozens of third-party apps may already exist. A.I. assistants operating in this environment certainly have security and privacy risks, and the Commission maintains it should be a user’s choice about whether to assume those risks while government should regulate specific and egregious problems.

In its press release, Apple says its proposal for iOS and iPadOS involved the introduction of a “Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri A.I. for devices in the E.U.”, which Apple says it would have been able to release in the next year-and-a-half. This is the “exemption” Regnier is referring to. According to Lellouche, Apple claims “none of its engineers are currently working on solutions to open Siri AI to the competition”, so perhaps the Trusted System Agent proposal goes nowhere, or maybe it will re-emerge in late 2027. Given Apple’s self-imposed problems with Apple Intelligence since WWDC 2024, I question whether many people in Europe will find this particularly disruptive or upsetting, however.

The Verge Liveblogged a Technical Q&A With Craig Federighi and Others ⇥ theverge.com

Victoria Song and Nilay Patel, the Verge:

Fresh off the WWDC keynote presentation, The Verge has been invited to an “on-the-record technical deep dive into the bold new architecture enabling Apple Intelligence capabilities.” Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and his team will be there, and so will we.

No video, but it looks like there was a presentation and a few live demos totalling about forty minutes, then about nine minutes responding — sort of — to pre-submitted press questions. Apple has not returned to live presentations, but this press Q&A and the carefully shot presentation demos are clearly a deliberate way of avoiding questions about whether any of this stuff is real. Once bitten.

Alberta Separatism and Monetized ‘Content’ on Social Media ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, Jordan Pearson, and Christian Paas-Lang, CBC News:

You might think, based on the volume of her Facebook posts, that Nieta Aqila is an Albertan who supports separation.

“I signed the Alberta independence petition” because “Canada is not a great country anymore,” an account in her name wrote in a popular Facebook group called Alberta Independence that promotes the movement and has more than 100,000 members.

[…]

But the account owner, according to a CBC visual investigation, was posing as a Canadian and is actually a noodle merchant and content creator from Indonesia, who in some cases was just stealing content from real Albertans.

You might remember the Dutch YouTube channels running a similar playbook: find controversial and newsmaking topics, generate material, and rake in a cut of the ad revenue. In purely financial terms, it is not a bad gig, particularly for this person who lives in a region where minimum wage is about USD $220 per month. An extra USD $14 per month from Facebook, which is what they reported earning in April, can be meaningful. (A screenshot in this article shows a much lower take in previous months.)

The flattening of media into “content” is partly to blame for why this stuff can happen. It appears to get little attention as-is, but it would get none at all without the samey generic framing created by Facebook and YouTube. It is also unlikely a random person in Indonesia or the Netherlands would want to make these kinds of posts without the monetization programs provided by these platforms.

Small OS27 Details From WWDC ⇥ macstories.net

Today’s live stream was a little over an hour long — the shortest presentation since 2005 — but, if this big list of refinements captured by Jonathan Reed, of MacStories, is representative of what will be shipping in September, I am not disappointed. Some choice bullet points, in no particular order:

  • Uniform toolbars

  • [iOS] Lock Screen consistently stays awake while scrolling notifications

  • More distinct active windows [in MacOS]

  • Search for photos and videos using additional metadata

These are a few things I have previously complained about or filed feedbacks against. Plus, there are a whole lot of things that begin with the words “faster” or “more reliable”. I would like to see this every year, of course, but this appears to be a long-overdue correction.

One more thing I would like to highlight:

  • New keyboards for Indigenous languages including Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Kiowa, and Tsuu’tina

For about ten years, third-party keyboards from an app called FirstVoices have provided support for these and other Indigenous languages, and it is encouraging to see first-party attention, too, for languages at risk of extinction. While there are around 2,500 people living in Tsuut’ina Nation, located adjacent to Calgary, the Tsuut’ina language is spoken by only about 150 people as of 2021 thanks to a history of concerted efforts by colonial powers to stamp it out.

Update: It is disappointing that MacOS 26 is the last version supported on Intel Macs, meaning there are a bunch of people who updated to the slow and janky version of MacOS who will not receive any of the speed, stability, or performance improvements coming in MacOS 27. This is a little like a Mac OS X Snow Leopard year all over again. That version dropped support for PowerPC Macs and was only available for Intel models. Perhaps dropping legacy support is one reason for these refinements.

Meta Says A.I.-assisted Account Hijackings Began in April ⇥ this.weekinsecurity.com

Zack Whittaker, This Week in Security:

According to the data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office late on Friday, Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised, including 30 people in Maine.

[…]

According to Maine’s listing, the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week, when Meta said that it had secured the chatbot. Instagram reportedly started notifying affected individuals earlier this week by sending a password reset notification, even as some reported that the hacks were ongoing.

It got worse again. That is a large number of accounts but, more notable to me, a long duration for this vulnerability to be live, from less than a month after the A.I. support bot launched until last week.

Meta Removes Code It Added to Support Facial Recognition Feature That ‘Does Not Exist’ ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

Once again, the pugilistic but ultimately cowardly Meta communications team had no comment of substance for what is, despite their public protest, a worrisome feature that is clearly moving through development.

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Sanctioned Russian Bank VTB Sneaked an App Into the App Store ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

But on Friday morning, a random productivity app called Cириус broke into the top three.

[…]

The reality seems to be that the app is a Russian banking app disguised as a Pomodoro timer. Activity on Telegram this week points to the app actually being a client for Russian financial institution VTB Bank.

The link on “VTB Bank” goes to Wikipedia instead of VTB’s website, where the first tab on the home page slider is currently advertising this app. (Update: It has since been removed.) It is barely disguised. In Russian media, the developer says there are other apps lined up to take the place of this one after it is inevitably removed. Apple and Google have repeatedly failed to catch apps violating U.S. sanctions.

Hall:

The app will almost certainly be pulled soon, but it’s always surprising that existing systems in place sometimes miss detecting apps disguised like this.

I suppose the App Store review process could always be worse, but it is no longer surprising that its team, too focused elsewhere, does not catch egregious rule-breakers.

Documents Show Social Media Companies Specifically Marketed to Schoolchildren ⇥ nytimes.com

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, New York Times:

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

[…]

The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.

I do not think it will be surprising to many readers that these companies had strategies to increase usage by children, even during school hours, but I do think it is notable to see it spelled out in these documents. The popularity of these apps is not organic or foretold; it is, at least to some extent, created. There is no reason why Meta would need Instagram “ambassadors” at schools (PDF) to “drive product adoption” if it were not trying to increase Instagram use among teenagers.

Valentino-DeVries:

Members of the company’s [Google’s] education department were often excited about products they thought could improve learning, such as affordable laptops and educational YouTube videos, according to court documents and interviews. They worked alongside product managers, however, who were focused on a different upside: increasing YouTube’s viewership.

YouTube is maybe the trickiest of all these platforms to govern within schools because it has no alternative. There is a vast library of genuinely educational and informative video on the site, and then there is the rest of YouTube. It therefore makes sense to allow its use among students and within schools. However, YouTube has also been honed for boosting engagement, something which affects all users. That is not to say we should have exactly the same standards for children and adults, but it highlights the difficulty of using a singular platform with general-market financial incentives in an educational setting.