Meta must face US state lawsuits over teen social media addiction

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Yahoo! Finance/Reuters

Updated Tue, October 15, 2024 at 8:38 PM EDT


(Reuters) -Facebook parent company Meta must face lawsuits by U.S. states accusing it of fueling mental health problems among teens by making its Facebook and Instagram platforms addictive, a federal judge in California ruled on Tuesday.

Oakland-based U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Meta's bid to toss the claims made by the states in two separate lawsuits filed last year, one involving more than 30 states including California and New York and the other brought by Florida.

Rogers put some limits on the states' claims, agreeing with Meta that a federal law known as Section 230 regulating online platforms partly shielded the company. However, she found that the states had put forward enough detail about allegedly misleading statements made by the company to go forward with most of their case.

The judge also rejected motions by Meta, ByteDance's TikTok, Google parent Alphabet's YouTube and Snap's SnapChat to dismiss related personal injury lawsuits by individual plaintiffs. The other companies are not defendants to the states' lawsuits. The ruling clears the way for states and other plaintiffs to seek more evidence and potentially go to trial. It is not a final ruling on the merits of their cases.

Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-must-face-us-state-202310454.html

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. Algos need to be regulated

[azureblue]

2. X

`````and no one say`s a word about how Elon Turned X into a mouthpiece for the right wing, and leaves right wing lies up, while censoring factual rebuttals to RW lies..

But, oh! Think of the children!

[SupportSanity]

3. jonathan haidt - a promient social psychologist - has been warning about teens and social media for years. One example:

https://www.instagram.com/jonathanhaidt/reel/C-iubf1PzKH/

Teenagers are spending **nine hours** a day on screens, including five hours on social media every single day, per @gallup.

This is not a normal adolescence, as these 5-9 hours come at the expense of other healthy activities — sleep, exercise, time together with friends and family.

For teenagers to be healthy, they need to wire their brains in physical proximity to other people. This is how mammals mature. It can’t be done through screens.

Screen relationships are exponentially more numerous than in-person relationships, and for that reason they are exceptionally shallow, because one person can only maintain so many connections in any depth. Shallow relationships don’t build mental health, they don’t give us a sense of security — quite the opposite, these relationships change at the flick of an algorithm, or whenever you are no longer what your audience of strangers and near-strangers expects you to be.

-snip-

[OldBaldy1701E]

4. What is frightening is when teens talk about their 'BFF'...

And, then you find out that this BFF who they swear is so close to them and more than family is someone on Snapchat who they have never seen in person and cannot even prove that the person is who they say they are. This is happening all the time and yet parents don't seem too worried about it because so many of them meet in online games and these airhead parents seem to think only fellow students would be there in the first place.

And yes, placing outsized importance on these internet lives is scary as well. Some kids really think that these sycophants are actually their friends. They think they are 'trendsetters' and 'influencers' and yet they only seem to bring stupidity and shallow mindedness to their followers. I don't know who is more pathetic: these so called 'social media stars' or their desperate followers.

It has to stop. Regardless of how many adults it happens to 'inconvenience'.

(I was telling the students at the school where I worked all of this. This was as these platforms were being created and implemented.
Everyone thought I was being stupid. Mostly the parents.)