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The Courts United States

NYC Sues Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health Crisis (abc7ny.com) 63

Posted by BeauHD from the damaging-influence dept.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a lawsuit against four of the nation's largest social media companies, accusing them of fueling a "national youth mental health crisis." From a report: The lawsuit was filed to hold TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube Accountable for their damaging influence on the mental health of children, Adams said. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, alleged the companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. The lawsuit pointed to the use of algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use.

"Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis," Adams said. "Our city is built on innovation and technology, but many social media platforms end up endangering our children's mental health, promoting addiction, and encouraging unsafe behavior." The lawsuit accused the social media companies of manipulating users by making them feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action.

"These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses," the lawsuit said. The city is joining hundreds of school districts across the nation in filing litigation to force the tech companies to change their behavior and recover the costs of addressing the public health threat.
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NYC Sues Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health Crisis More

NYC Sues Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health Crisis

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  • "Fueling a youth mental health crisis" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @08:35PM (#64240468)
    And the NYC Mayor has evidence of this? Because this reads more like a moral panic to me than a fact.
    • There is ample evidence, but the question of standing is what might make this PR scheme unravel.
      • The obvious solution is the simplest.

        Just make access to social media, 18yrs and older....adult only.

        The verification thing is a bit of a puzzle, but pass the law and the social media companies will figure it out.

        Maybe throw some provisions in there than the companies, if they require ID, that they are NOT allowed to store it after verification....and no information other than age can be stored at all.

    • As the summary says, this is a money grab, people like Adams see âoethe cost of addressing public health threatsâ as a thing schools should be funding. The big companies are just a vehicle to cash his schools donâ(TM)t have, because one of the other things he wants his schools to do is force kids out of school so the school can be used to shelter the homeless and illegal immigrants as his city provisions and budget in that area has also failed to keep track of the reality of his campaign prom

    • And the NYC Mayor has evidence of this? Because this reads more like a moral panic to me than a fact.

      This isn't about facts. This is about a politician looking for some form of monetary contribution to look the other way while publicly looking like a real hard-ass for standing up to the big meanie doody-head social media companies. Companies, mind you, that have become quite adept at throwing money towards politicians when the scrutiny begins to hit a little close to home.

  • I doubt NYC will succeed (Score:4, Informative)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @10:29PM (#64240694) Homepage

    I doubt NYC will succeed. Not because social media isn't detrimental to mental health (it is) and not because NYC lacks standing (someone has to pay for the consequences of poor mental health such as increased crime, homelessness, drug addiction, etc) but because the tech industry is too powerful.

    I think we've passed the point when large tech companies can ever be held accountable. They've fucked our society and there's little we can do about it.

    • Yep. They've progressed from privacy rape to brain rape & how the latest thing seems to be using AI bots to catphish victims into compliance & keep manipulating them for ever increasing amounts of their time & attention.

      Yeah, I can see NYC among many others being centres for this kind of technological "innovation."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      I doubt NYC will succeed. Not because social media isn't detrimental to mental health (it is) and not because NYC lacks standing (someone has to pay for the consequences of poor mental health such as increased crime, homelessness, drug addiction, etc) but because the tech industry is too powerful.

      It will fail because NYC won't be able to meet the standards of evidience.

      Remember there is what actually happened and what you can prove happened in a court of law.

      I think we've passed the point when large tech companies can ever be held accountable. They've fucked our society and there's little we can do about it.

      I disagree, however if you want it to change, you need to start changing your laws. Things like the GDPR are a very good start, however in order to do this you need to stop electing people who don't care about the citizenry. Notably the orange kind.

  • The problems of youth (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @11:13PM (#64240770)
    Are mostly because the economy continues to suck for anyone who works for a living as the middle class gets strip mined for all it's worth and we gradually bring back feudalism.

    Suburbs definitely make things worse too. Declining birth rates plus low density housing means that kids don't have any friends around. Everybody wonders why kids aren't hanging out and they kind of neglect to notice that there aren't any kids in their neighborhood and it's a 50 minute bus ride or two hour bike ride to a friend's house.

    You get old people who say who cares kids have nothing but time. It hasn't been like that in a long time. If a kid is in college-bound they are almost certainly screwed unless they can somehow do heavy machinery work like diesel engines or high risk work like underwater welding. Other than that they're looking at 15 to $20 an hour when a one bedroom apartment rents for $2,000 a month and up.

    That means college becomes intensely competitive and kids are inundated with massive amounts of homework. I remember it wasn't unusual for me to get up and go pee at midnight and find my kid still doing homework. They weren't a genius but they weren't dumb either, the teachers just assigned 4 to 6 hours a night of homework.

    How the hell is a kid supposed to socialize let alone spend an hour or two getting around town to hang out when you're faced with that much homework. They either give up on college and barely scrape by graduating so they can have some human interaction or they end up on social media because you can check in on Facebook in between the hours of homework.

    We put enormous pressure and expect too much out of kids and then we complain about their mental state and blame it on that newfangled social media computer stuff which gets us off the hook from having to actually solve the problems we caused and in particular it lets us avoid blame for the problems we caused
    • nailed it.

  • Prove it (Score:3)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:02AM (#64241220)

    ... recover the costs of addressing the public health threat.

    It's easy to shout "stop being sick" at the mentally damaged: It's much more difficult to put a cost on it (mostly because of the one-size-fits-all mental health-care), then prove that costs have increased and increased proportional to the use of Facebook, YouTube et al.

  • In some backroom somewhere in NYC, "Hey, I have an idea. Social media companies have lots of money. Let's sue them."
  • Since those formats also caused emotional/mental trauma to kids in the era that grew up with those as their primary entertainment/information venue.

    This whole thing is superfluous.
    • There's a vast difference between watching Sesame Street or saturday morning cartoons, and going on social media and seeing people with curated, perfect presentations passing themselves off as 'normal people' that kids then have to try to live up to.
  • "I heard in a news article that social media is to blame. We should really sue those guys. Plus, you know, it's an election year, and someone needs to think of the children"

  • All recent research shows that there is no correlation between social media and mental health, despite it seeming like there should be.

  • It's evident that social media is contributing to the mental health crisis we're seeing today [1]. It platforms and amplifies unhealthy views on sex, body image, mental health, financial success, etc. It's also been shown that social media is designed to be addictive [2] and that younger people are particularly at risk [3]. And while I'm generally opposed to government regulation of private enterprise, I do think there should be some disincentive for companies to behave in the way they have with social medi

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