Meta and Google Get Spanked in Courts over Teen Use of Social Media
They do ask you to RSVP especially if you need interpretation services but it is not required.
I feel like John Oliver saying this but "Now to our main story."
This headline says it all - Jury Finds Meta and Google Negligent in Social Media Harms Trial
From NPR:
The jurors concluded that Meta and Google should pay the woman $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta on the hook for 70% of that amount.
While the financial punishment is miniscule for companies each worth trillions of dollars, the decision is still consequential. It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers.
What appears to really stand out in this trial is not content - it's how its use is designed.
The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco, which forced the industry to to stop targeting minors with advertising.
What did the defendants have to say?
"This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site," said Google spokesman José Castañeda.
That Meta statement sure sounds like Mark Zuckerberg. Of course, teen mental health is not just affected by one thing like an app. But if you craft your app - deliberately - to attract AND keep certain users in the loop, you are part of the problem.
And YouTube's statement? I would agree that it's not like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok but I think their algorithm does function in the same way for teens.
There was another jury in New Mexico that also found against Facebook and Instagram (so just Meta). The difference in New Mexico is that it was a single plaintiff.
The verdict in Los Angeles came a day after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook. The New Mexico jury found Meta responsible for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms, declaring that the tech company had flouted state consumer protection laws.
That trial will enter a second phase in May in which a judge will decide whether Meta created a public nuisance and if the company must pay additional penalties to address harms. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he will also ask the court to force Meta to change its apps to make them safer.
This week's verdicts mark the first time juries have decided that tech companies are at least partially liable for online and off-line dangers kids and teenagers encounter after incessantly using social media.
The jury was not tasked with deciding whether Meta and Google had created Kaley's mental health woes, but rather if her compulsive social media use was a "substantial factor" in her struggles and if the defective design of the platforms was the direct cause of her distress.
Snapchat and TikTok were also defendants in the case, but both companies settled with KGM before the trial began.
Meta was not just up against a plaintiff but, from evidence presented, itself.
KGM's legal team showed the jury internal documents from Meta in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives described the company's efforts to attract and keep kids and teens on its platforms. One document said: "If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." Another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram, compared with competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old.
What has happened in the past?
For decades, tech companies have avoided legal liability over the content that appears on their sites because of a federal law known as Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says that tech companies are not legally responsible for what their users post. This has made it difficult to bring cases over social media harms to trial.
In the Los Angeles case, lawyers took a different approach by focusing on how tech companies built their platforms. They argued that features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, autoplaying videos and beauty filters made apps like Instagram and YouTube equivalent to a "digital casino," which young people found too irresistible to put down.
By taking this tack, the lawyers pursued a case alleging defective design that was able to get around the high bar set by Section 230. It's not what users post, the lawyers argued, but the very architecture of social media platforms.
"How do you make a child never put down the phone? That's called the engineering of addiction," Lanier said during the trial.
But also,
Were her issues pre-existing, or exacerbated by her home life, or deepened by social media? Lawyers for the tech companies also hammered the point that Kaley's own therapist never documented that social media use was a factor in her mental health problems.
From Reuters:
A separate social media addiction case brought by several states and school districts against technology companies is expected to go to trial this summer in federal court in Oakland, California.
Another state trial is slated to begin in Los Angeles in July, said Matthew Bergman, one of the attorneys leading the cases for the plaintiffs. It will involve Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat.
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