Social media companies collect, share and process vast troves of information about their users while offering little transparency or control, including over how it is used by systems incorporating artificial intelligence, the US Federal Trade Commission said in a report released on Thursday.
The report analysed how Meta Platforms, ByteDance’s TikTok, Amazon’s video gaming platform Twitch, and others manage user data, concluding that data management and retention policies at many of the companies were “woefully inadequate”.
YouTube, social media platform X, Snap, Discord and Reddit were also included in the FTC report, though its findings were anonymised and did not reveal specific companies’ practices. YouTube is owned by Alphabet’s Google.
Discord, a communications platform, said the report lumps very different business models into one category, and that it did not offer advertising at the time the study was conducted.