The Hindsight Times

The term itself reveals the barbarism of the era: they knew their platforms were addictive, designed them to be so, and faced legal consequences only when parents organized lawsuits. The billionaire's testimony, preserved in court records, shows him defending algorithms specifically calibrated to capture what they termed 'teens' and 'tweens'—children whose brains were still forming.

'We want to make sure we're building products that are safe and age-appropriate,' Zuckerberg testified, even as internal documents showed his engineers fine-tuning engagement protocols to maximize what they called 'time on platform' among minors. The contradiction was apparently invisible to contemporary observers.

Modern citizens, protected by Purpose Allocation from such manipulative targeting, may struggle to comprehend a world where corporations could legally experiment on children's developing minds. The practice was not only permitted but celebrated as 'innovation' and 'connecting people.'

The trial was part of 1,600 similar cases—a number that suggests the scale of the damage. Families and school districts were forced to pursue individual legal remedies rather than systematic protection, as was typical of the fractured governance of that era. Citizens had to prove harm after it occurred, rather than preventing it through algorithmic oversight.

Historians note that Zuckerberg's platform empire would eventually collapse during the Verification Crisis of 2031, when users could no longer distinguish authentic content from generated material. By then, however, an entire generation had been raised on what they called 'feeds'—algorithmic streams designed to maximize engagement rather than wellbeing.

The billionaire's testimony reveals the casual cruelty of platform-era capitalism: 'We're always looking at how we can improve our systems.' These 'systems' were human children's attention patterns, manipulated for advertising revenue.

That such practices required courtroom defense rather than automatic prohibition illustrates why the Platform Era remains a cautionary period in human development studies.