Premier Smith’s Warm Embrace of Meta

Not a word about the tech behemoth’s harm to kids. One disgusted jury awarded $375 million in damages.

Let’s get this straight. The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, dons a cowboy hat and gushes and glows over a $13-billion data centre project in Sturgeon County just outside Edmonton. Ah, the success of low taxes and less red tape, she enthuses.

Smith then salutes the centre’s big owner: Meta Platforms. Yep. That’s the same trillion-dollar company that thousands of people and communities are suing for going fast and breaking things with addictive social media platforms that imperil child safety and mental health.

And isn’t this the same company that also blocked and restricted Canadian news from its platforms? Yep. And the same company that Iowa whistleblower Frances Haugen accused of choosing profits over safety over and over again before the U.S. Congress.

Now Meta can do it over and over again in Alberta. No matter. Smith praises Meta for its “largest private sector investment in Canada.”

The massive project will be powered by separate $4-billion power station fuelled by Alberta’s fracked natural gas. The Meta centre will use more electricity than the whole city of Calgary to polarize more people with more manipulative algorithms. Just think of the emissions.

Alberta-made. During the press conference the premier chattered on and on as she tends to do. The project will occupy 30 football fields with several boxes and at its completion will employ 300 people.

Imagine that. For every $43 million of Meta’s investment in computer processing units, Alberta will get one permanent job. Smith calls this “responsible growth” and then praises the company’s “closed loop liquid cooling system” to minimize water usage.

But in her excitement, she forgets to mention that the power station energizing the computer chips will use about 1.2 million litres of water a day, and that fracked gas consumes tonnes of fresh water, too. During the proceedings not a word is wasted on the subject of human decency. Or AI’s threat to the human condition.

Isn’t Meta the same company that a New Mexico jury just fined $375 million for facilitating child sexual exploitation? And didn’t the evidence including Meta documents and testimony of whistleblowers show that Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms? How did New Mexico’s attorney general put it?

“Meta’s refusal to follow the laws that protect our kids tells you everything you need to know about this company and the character of its leaders.” And haven’t Meta’s own studies and global research consistently shown that millions of teens experience sleep deprivation and sexual harassment on Meta’s platforms? Has Smith forgotten the compelling evidence collected by Jonathan Haidt and others showing that social media, all powered by data centres, substantially increases the risk of anxiety, loneliness and depression among adolescents?

Or does she just not care? Did Smith really welcome to her province a corporate miscreant now lobbying the U.S. government to amend its laws to grant it legal immunity from thousands of lawsuits from young people and their families harmed by its products? Yes, she did.

Wearing a cowboy hat. She played sycophant to another a Big Tech bully whose systemic algorithm failures allowed paid s promoting child sexual exploitation to run on Instagram in India. But hey.

It’s “responsible growth.” Innovation.