Social Media Giants Must Face Child Safety Lawsuits, Judge Rules (theverge.com) 53
Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap must proceed with a lawsuit alleging their social platforms have adverse mental health effects on children, a federal court ruled on Tuesday. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the social media giants' motion to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits accusing the companies of running platforms "addictive" to kids. School districts across the US have filed suit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap, alleging the companies cause physical and emotional harm to children. Meanwhile, 42 states sued Meta last month over claims Facebook and Instagram "profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans." This order addresses the individual suits and "over 140 actions" taken against the companies.
Tuesday's ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn't be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don't shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don't "constitute free speech or expression," as they have to do with alleged "defects" on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.
"Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate," Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. "For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children's access to the platform or discuss platform use with them." However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other "defects" identified by the plaintiffs because they're protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children's accounts to adults, the use of "addictive" algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.
Tuesday's ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn't be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don't shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don't "constitute free speech or expression," as they have to do with alleged "defects" on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.
"Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate," Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. "For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children's access to the platform or discuss platform use with them." However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other "defects" identified by the plaintiffs because they're protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children's accounts to adults, the use of "addictive" algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.
Like Button Meets Gavel (Score:1)
Parents are at fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds to me like you bought your kid a chainsaw and then blamed Exxon for providing the fuel he used to cut a hole in the house.
Kids don't get on the internet without the hardware to do so. It is your job as a parent to determine when it is age appropriate for your kids to own a device which enables them to access the internet and on that device is where the restrictions and screen time limits should reside.
Children make up a minority of the population and we shouldn't have to restrict and regulate the internet because some parents would prefer that the government raise their kids.
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I think it goes "guns dont kill people, people kill people"
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How about instead of guns, a car analogy?
Imagine parents gave their kids cars in the same way that they do laptops, smartphones, and tablets. For the purpose of this thought experiment, we'll have to pretend that vehicles with kid-sized controls are a thing, since here in reality vehicles aren't even designed with the intention of being operated by children.
Now we've got all these kids in their kid-sized cars out on the roads and while most of them are surprisingly doing alright, some are clearly too immat
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Nowadays, being able to use the internet is almost as important as being able to read and write, so people have to learn it. There should be parental controls on stuff so that children are not exposed to inappropriate content though. Seeing that most people do not have the knowledge to set up their own router with the various filters, the filters should be part of the mobile phones and apps. It should be possible to disable them, of course, if you have the parental control password.
Also, websites, especiall
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Here's a better analogy. Imagine people could teleport and could also spoof their body shape to an extent. Should we expect that places like strip clubs and bars set up anti-child teleport systems that block those who are obviously children from partaking?
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Are we talking magic/superpower type teleportation, or Star Trek?
If it's the magic/superpower kind, then yes, you'd need some way of preventing children from teleporting where they're not supposed to be. I can't believe I'm actually going to cite a work of fiction, but in Harry Potter children weren't legally permitted to engage in teleporting until they reached a certain age.
Now if it's the Star Trek kind of teleportation where access to a teleporter is required, children shouldn't be granted access to op
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I consider social media to be similar, psychologically speaking, to gambling & we certainly do regulate that.
Gambling isn't regulated because it's addictive, it's regulated because it involves money. As we all know, the government has significant reach when it comes to regulating all manner of financial commerce. It is, however, perfectly legal to operate simulated gambling and even make it available to children, so long as the money only flows in one direction (and that'd be towards the business running the simulated gambling).
It obviously is at the discretion of individual parents to decide whether they feel i
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It sounds like you're proposing some very draconian regulations backed by some sort of licensing framework. That's a bit much for my taste.
Do we then try to create new regulations to make things safer for these young motorists, compromising the driving experience of all the adults on the road? [...] On the other hand, we could instead just do what we already do now and consider driving to be an age-inappropriate activity for children and not give them cars. Funny how that works.
But we don't just "not give t
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You're overanalyzing it a bit. My point was that at least in the US, being able to operate a motor vehicle on public roads is an essential skill that we expect most adults to have and yet (except in very limited situations, such as go-karts/youth racing as you've pointed out) it's a verboten activity until a child is in their mid to late teens. Either through laziness or ignorance, we've got parents who somehow are convinced that their kids need to be on the full internet well before they're mature enough
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Either through laziness or ignorance, we've got parents who somehow are convinced that their kids need to be on the full internet well before they're mature enough to deal with the subject matter it contains.
Yes, we get you're very judgemental.
If your kid is at an age where you wouldn't trust them with a car, you also shouldn't be giving them a device with unrestricted access to the internet.
And how do you propose that works?
Something concrete, not just wooly distant judgement like they "shouldn't" and "arr
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Abusers emotionally target vulnerable people. I'm not talking about grooming, although that's obviously an example, but rather plain old cyber bullying.
So, in the car analogy, you've adults who purposefully try to ram child drivers off the road.
Short of rounding up the cyberbullies and deporting them to North Korea, there's not much the law can do. It's too blunt an instrument. Nor, in an age of instant global communication, can companies do much. About all that can be done is to legally require ToS to ban
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The government prohibits kids from many things permitted to adults. They could help with this. And parents need help. Parents are outnumbered and out gunned by other kids, by social media companies and by advertisers.
They could start by having K-12 schools prohibit phones on campus. [sun-sentinel.com]
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From the linked article:
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a 12th grader at Timber Creek who needs to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes.
A Florida law which appears well-intentioned on the surface but has ostensibly unintended negative consequences for "kids" who, in actuality, are late-stage adolescents? You don't say.
Yep, that's on brand for Florida.
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Keep a copy of the class schedule in their backpack, buy a disposable camera, agree to meet their friends at X place in the cafeteria, write the number down and put in phone later.
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buy a disposable camera
I wasn't aware those were still manufactured with the demise of film.
Thank you. Anything to replace "use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes"?
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The amount of high schoolers taking college classes is well under half a percent of a high schools population. With the amount of chromebooks floating around post-school closures and remote schooling, having the school allow those confirmed to be taking college classes use those during the day would not be a particularly difficult thing to set up. Moreover, they would actually be able to get real work done since you're going to learn very little using your phone to take a college class.
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Parents are outnumbered and out gunned by other kids, by social media companies and by advertisers.
If I had to raise a kid in this post-smartphone world I'd consider it something of a nightmare, too. Kids shouldn't be on the unrestricted internet, and most of what's on social media isn't appropriate for children. It is absolutely baffling that so many parents buy their kids smart devices and then don't even bother to set up the parental controls.
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It is absolutely baffling that so many parents buy their kids smart devices and then don't even bother to set up the parental controls.
Man. I used to be baffled by stuff like this, but then I found out that most people who have children are actually really fucking stupid.
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Given that the internet is used in schools and by most children, at this point preventing kids from accessing it is going to hurt their social development a lot. I remember it being bad enough for kids who didn't have cable TV at home, missing out on a lot of the culture that their classmates were into, and feeling excluded because of it.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask that services used by kids make some effort to protect them, rather than just banning all social media until they are 18. You might as w
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Children make up a minority of the population and we shouldn't have to restrict and regulate the internet because some parents would prefer that the government raise their kids.
While I agree with your stance, parents seem to have universally locked into this concept that electronics are babysitters. Perhaps because the internet age happened right at the time the kids raised by television were having their own kids. "It's just the new television. Surely it's safe!" It would, to my mind take a preposterous amount of non-awareness to take this stance, but it seems to be the one that's taken root. And the solution when a kid stumbles across something meant for adults is to scream loud
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The better analogy would be a world in which a parent buys their kid a bicycle which the kid then rides to the local bodega to buy cigarettes because the tobacco companies aggressively market their products to children and they also own the politicians who refuse to regulate the sale of tobacco to children.
You do realize that outside of the bro-bubble that is Sillyconman Valley, most people despise social media and all you
Oooh (Score:2)
The court docs will be lovely to read for this :)
Here it comes groomers. (Score:1)
It's comin' to getcha!
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If social media is grooming kids to be anything, it's consumers. That's nothing new, my generation grew up with half-hour-long toy commercials disguised as television shows.
This isn't to say social media is appropriate for children, but just that the social media companies really don't have anything more nefarious in mind than what Apple did when they sold heavily discounted computers to public schools. Someday those kids would grow up and buy *looks down at the laptop I'm typing this on* a Lenovo! Drat,
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Iirc it was to groom them to recommend Macintoshes at work.
What about Xitter? (Score:2)
Kids don't even use Faceboot, what's Meta have to do with any of this
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It's pretty sad when my pet dick-riding troll has to resort to grammar nitpicking.
Re: What about Xitter? (Score:2)
You clearly do since you hang on my every comment. But go ahead and tell me more about how you don't care while you ride my dick into the sunset.
Lazy ass parents (Score:2)
It's still not my job to raise your kids.
Either secure their devices so they can't use them without your supervision, give them up for adoption, or shut up.
What is the desired outcome here? (Score:3)
Do we as a society know where we want to get?
Lawsuits or regulations only serve purpose if we have some end goal in mind.
Do we want to deny children accessing social media?
Do we want different platforms for different age groups?
Do we want better curated content?
Do we want age checks everywhere?
Do we want better worded terms of service with more legalspeak?
Do we just want social media services to pay up? If yes, then to whom?
Without a goal, all this fuzz is irrelevant. Lawsuits yada yada yada, facebook will pay out some cash and the lawyers will edit some documents to put even more "obligations" to the users. But nothing would change.
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There's a lot to be said for kids not having any access to social media. There's a lot of toxicity and the nature of it is likely to impair brain development more than it aids it.
Having said that, there are zero effective ways of verifying age. Credit cards can be borrowed, other people's accounts can be used, accounts set up by adults can be sold to children, etc.
Probably the most effective solution would be to require Category III user certificates, since those require a lot of proof of identity, but cert
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I worked for a company that does age verification. It works. Not foolproof, but good enough for many cases.
There are solutions for anything.
The big question is - what do we want?
Not "what I want" or "what you want" or "what US lawmakers want", but can we as a global society agree on the cultural norms of the internet?
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It does need to be perfect, by any stretch. It needs to be 'good enough' that an attentive parent or person with temporary charge of a minor, say a teacher at school, has some hope of detecting abuse. At least if the child is habituated to violating the control.
Age verification is 100% effective when it comes to alcohol or cigarettes either a determined child can obtain them in many cases. However a parent that is making an attempt is likely to at least discover these things are in your child's life. "Why
Dislike the presumption of harm (Score:2)
I am uncomfortable with the presumption of harm so many folks make. Just because some people (including children) are worse off due to these social media platforms doesn't mean that the platforms' net effect is detrimental. In particlar, there are many children in rough family situations who find connections online that help them through it.
My own opinion is actually that for adults these social platforms have net negative societal benefit, and for adolescents it is net positive. I'm pretty sure I'm in t
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I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority with that opinion, but there you go.
That's because it is literally stating the exact opposite of what the available data show.
Good. (Score:2)
Then next, we can hope for aggressive and punitive lawsuits on behalf of detransitioning people who were brainwashed into puberty blockers or worse, surgeries, before what everyone recognizes is a reasonable age of consent (in any other context).
In a world where doctors have the right to overrule parents in the best interest of a child's health, I suspect there will eventually be legal ramifications for those who DIDN'T PREVENT (or *shudder* encouraged) heinous procedures to children, based on the children'
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"Hospitals" that mutilate children for profit or to validate the dogma of their crazy ass parents?
Yes, they are bad.
How would you think that's ok? You ok with FGM too then? Same basis.
I just hope... (Score:2)
...that this kills them dead.
Age Verification (Score:2)
Age verification implicitly means identification and tracking for everyone, not just children.
Conceivably a Children Only nework could be implemented but that breaks down in a hot second when the kids realize they can use the adult network anonymously. Even worse, if you somehow magically identify children, congratulations now you have a child tracker.
I appreciate the desired intent but wishing is not an implementable