I’ve been thinking about the ‘Cobra Effect’ lately, particularly in relation to efforts made reduce harm in the social media space. For those who aren’t familiar, the story goes like this – concerned by a growing cobra population in Dehli the colonial British government offered a bounty for cobra tails. This resulted in cobras being bred by the locals before being released into the streets en masse when the bounty ended.
Its an admittedly apocryphal anecdote but there are plenty of real world examples of perverse incentives creating unintended outcomes. In the AI space Truth Social launched an AI chatbot to help promote Trump policy, only to have it directly contradict him. On X, facing similar challenges, Grok was updated to rely less on authoritative sources and political correctness – at which point it declared itself ‘Mechahitler’ and started generating topless Taylor Swift videos.
As fun as it might be to see bad actors undone by their own vanity projects, even efforts with the best of intentions can go completely sideways. Which brings me to Australia’s legislation to restrict under 16s from accessing social media platforms, now including YouTube. These platforms undoubtedly do huge amounts of harm to young people, but the enforcement of this policy may well be a boon for the platforms being legislated. This is because the result is that Meta and Google are not only now encouraged, but virtually compelled, to collect more of your data than ever before. We are already starting to see it in the US, a wave of users suspected of being minors have been requested to provide photo ID to YouTube before removing age restrictions.
In Australia under the new law social media companies can request photo ID, but must also provide ‘reasonable alternatives’. What those alternatives are isn’t clear, but creating the framework for these companies to house government ID data at all is a scary prospect. From a marketer’s perspective it could be a gold rush – imagine how much better first party data matching will be when platforms can tie a user to their full legal name, instead of whatever nonsense online handle they’ve made. Single users duplicated over multiple accounts? Not anymore if they want grown up features. And so much for the ‘unknown’ segments when it comes to age and gender.
How does the tradeoff work when it comes to the harm reduction from keeping kids off these platfoms? How much do we trust that Meta, X, and Google won’t use this extra data to sway another election or two?
I truly don’t know, but there is a lesson here. Not all outcomes are easily predictable, its not just what you plan to achieve, but how you plan to do it that matters. Something to be mindful of the next time you give an AI or blackbox system keys to your marketing kingdom. Meta’s fully automated marketing tool might give you all the cobra tails you could ask for, just don’t look in their back garden.
