Families Can Sue App Developer For Breaking Its Anti-Bullying Pledge, Says Court (theverge.com) 37
The Verge's Adi Robertson reports: An appeals court revived a lawsuit against the anonymous messaging service Yolo, which allegedly broke a promise to unmask bullies on the app. In a ruling (PDF) issued Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shouldn't block a claim that Yolo misrepresented its terms of service, overruling a lower court decision. But it determined the app can't be held liable for alleged design defects that allowed harassment, letting a different part of that earlier ruling stand.
Yolo was a Snapchat-integrated app that let users send anonymous messages, but in 2021, it was hit with a lawsuit after a teenage user died by suicide. The boy, Carson Bride, had received harassing and sexually explicit messages from anonymized users that -- he believed -- he likely knew. Bride and his family attempted to contact Yolo for help, but Yolo allegedly never answered, and in some cases, emails to the company simply bounced. Snap banned Yolo and another app targeted in the lawsuit, and a year later, it banned all anonymous messaging integration. Bride's family and a collection of other aggrieved parents argued that Yolo broke a legally binding promise to its users. They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent "harassing messages" to others. But as the ruling summarizes, the plaintiffs argued that "with a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did." Additionally, they claimed Yolo should have known its anonymous design facilitated harassment, making it defective and dangerous.
A lower court threw out both of these claims, saying that under Section 230, Yolo couldn't be held responsible for its users' posts. The appeals court was more sympathetic. It accepted the argument that families were instead holding Yolo responsible for promising users something it couldn't deliver. "Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to," writes Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. "While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty ... is the promise itself." The Yolo suit built on a previous Ninth Circuit ruling that let another Snap-related lawsuit circumvent Section 230's shield. In 2021, it found Snap could be sued for a "speed filter" that could implicitly encourage users to drive recklessly, even if users were responsible for making posts with that filter. (The overall case is still ongoing.) On top of their misrepresentation claim, the plaintiffs argued Yolo's anonymous messaging capability was similarly risky, an argument the Ninth Circuit didn't buy -- "we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk," Siler wrote.
Yolo was a Snapchat-integrated app that let users send anonymous messages, but in 2021, it was hit with a lawsuit after a teenage user died by suicide. The boy, Carson Bride, had received harassing and sexually explicit messages from anonymized users that -- he believed -- he likely knew. Bride and his family attempted to contact Yolo for help, but Yolo allegedly never answered, and in some cases, emails to the company simply bounced. Snap banned Yolo and another app targeted in the lawsuit, and a year later, it banned all anonymous messaging integration. Bride's family and a collection of other aggrieved parents argued that Yolo broke a legally binding promise to its users. They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent "harassing messages" to others. But as the ruling summarizes, the plaintiffs argued that "with a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did." Additionally, they claimed Yolo should have known its anonymous design facilitated harassment, making it defective and dangerous.
A lower court threw out both of these claims, saying that under Section 230, Yolo couldn't be held responsible for its users' posts. The appeals court was more sympathetic. It accepted the argument that families were instead holding Yolo responsible for promising users something it couldn't deliver. "Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to," writes Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. "While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty ... is the promise itself." The Yolo suit built on a previous Ninth Circuit ruling that let another Snap-related lawsuit circumvent Section 230's shield. In 2021, it found Snap could be sued for a "speed filter" that could implicitly encourage users to drive recklessly, even if users were responsible for making posts with that filter. (The overall case is still ongoing.) On top of their misrepresentation claim, the plaintiffs argued Yolo's anonymous messaging capability was similarly risky, an argument the Ninth Circuit didn't buy -- "we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk," Siler wrote.
so.... (Score:1)
the parents knew this....did they stop his access?
not saying what happened was right - just saying.....
A corporation being held to account for a promise? (Score:2)
Am I dreaming? Is it April 1st?
There must be some politicians out there worried it will happen to them next...
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No because the political system in your country generally as a representative democracy and specifically during the making of its constitution excludes Imperative Mandate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thank you, not a concept I'd come across before.
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Already happened: Some years ago, the leader of Australia rescinded a pledge with the phrase, "not a core promise".
Next, he promised the new labour board/industrial relations laws would not empower employers to blacklist employees: Employers happily proved him wrong.
Before and during all that, he championed most of Australia's "war on terror" (you have no rights) National Security laws.
Re:Obvious next steps (Score:5, Informative)
They promised to do stuff they didn't do, for money. That is fraud. Why are you pro-fraud?
Not a promise... a ToS violation (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't a promise, or even an advertising claim... Yolo put it in their own terms of service that they would de-anonymize users under certain conditions. And they didn't. Under Section 230 they didn't have to, and with a small staff, maybe they couldn't... but they claimed that they would.
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They promised to do stuff they didn't do, for money. That is fraud. Why are you pro-fraud?
You mean promising to do stuff like "You can keep your doctor"?
Or is breaking promises for power better than doing it for money?
Societal responsibility to kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Digital communications, and social media in particular, are extremely toxic to normal development. It amplifies neuroticism, it encourages narcissism, and it does enable unprecedented levels of digital bullying. The solution must not be a half-measure and 'do something' bromides - the solution should beoutright ban on all social media for anyone under legal age. This does not mean you must be prevented from accessing it, but it does mean that you must be prevented from being targetable/reachable (e.g., having account) on it.
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Of course they shouldn't have promised it (Score:1)
That said, nobody should have been stupid enough to believe it.
There is no universally accepted definition of "bullying" anyway.
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That said, nobody should have been stupid enough to believe it.
There is no universally accepted definition of "bullying" anyway.
Exactly. Today, there are even crybullies, who instead of standard bullying, we have some people expressing simple disagreement as bullying, and are extremely upset about it.
Kids need to be taught how to handle bullies, otherwise they will end up a big mess when they find out there are bullies everywhere, even as adults.
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And now we have the "BULLY STOPPER 3000 AI" being used on social media including YouTube. Only the BS3K isn't really doing anything to stop bullying, and it has a nasty tendency to drop the sword on users posting things that don't fit the political narrative the company has pledged allegiance to, which includes unpleasant and inconvenient historical facts that is unfriendly to said narrative.
Isn't that Youtube stuff crazy? People showing say disturbing footage from WW2 get cancelled. Not like people actually getting killed, but Concentration camp survivors on screen will get demonetized, de-platformed, or the channel has to blur out the screen so no one gets scary fe-fe's.
Yeah, it is fscking disturbing! But it is a documented fact. Watching it really hammers home just how fscking horrible we can be and that not fighting against it will just continue to enable it.
That's life. There are some
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"so no one gets scary fe-fe's." The oversensies are starting to move into adulthood, and they are discovering the hard way that people generally aren't going to walk on eggshells around them, nor do they give a flying fuck about their "sensitivity". The world is a harsh brutal place that will eat someone alive sometimes for no reason whatsoever. I'm 47, been through some real hardcore shit myself, so I know from experience.
The clue is "the world" as you note. While so many of the young are in therapy because they found out that that the world isn't going to place them on top immediately after their first job, that making a difference is for the very few, and that passion is not a mild interest in something, it is a white hot pillar of flame that drives the very few that have it, and that catering to the weakest of the outrage set simply allows the weak outraged to find a new thing to go reeee about.
There will be people tha
does that mean ... (Score:1)
Does that mean we can have a class action suit against Google for violating, "Don't be Evil"?
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Google abandoned that one long ago. It was changed to "be good" if I remember correctly, which is a hell of a tell.
Old one was simply "do not engage in things that are bad". It didn't mandate action, it mandated inaction. That means that no matter how you define evil, at worst it results in lack of beneficial action.
The new one mandates action without defining what that action should be. That means that at worst, this will mandate horrific actions.
Differential outlook (Score:1)
There are even crybullies, who bully from a weakness perspective.
As far as I know, this will not ever stop. It is part of humanity, and usually stems from insecurity or in less common situations, pathological personas.
We have to define bullying - there is an entire spectrum of definitions, starting with simple disagreement, and microparsing of everyone's words and interaction.It's hard to get anything
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back when it wasn't talked about??? (Score:1)
Bullying has been featured on mass-market television since at least the 1950s.
Ancient fiction and non-fiction works talk about one group of people bullying and demanding tribute or worse.
Granted, that's not the same as modern-day childhood bullying (for one, the stakes were a lot higher), but I'd be surprised the topic of what we now call childhood bullying wasn't featured back then in morality tales or other well-known stories.
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Speaking from an American perspective, I think our society has contributed a huge amount to the current bullying/crybullying that goes on, and our society is "toxic" as hell. Sending mixed messages, pushing fierce "competitiveness" (I don't want to "compete" with anyone, I mostly just want to survive and be left alone") laws that are enforced on some people and not others (it's always been this way, starting with race but now moving toward class/age), lots of uncertainty and instability, and yes *RHETORIC FROM TRUMP* (probally asking for a downvote but fuck, it needs to be said). There is no way in hell all of this is NOT contributing to the bully problem. The second issue is should the app be banned or even had been made to "make a pledge to stop bullying" (I don't think they did this very willingly because Apple's "walled garden" is a dictatorship) because of the issue at hand? Back in the old days, when most people didn't even have a personal computer, the bullies would find your home phone number and make threatening calls from a payphone. Should've the phone companies been held responsible for this misuse of their system?
I don't have much issue with what you wrote. I'll just note I was at that being bullied stage of my life in the mid 1960's. And rather than anything with my family, the bullying consisted of getting the crap beat out of me constantly.
Bullying tends to come from insecurity. Those that find being a bully somehow satisfying do not pick on others that can retaliate.
What is grimly amusing is the present day idea that "Bullying has never been worse!". As if getting an email saying the recipient is a worth
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There will always be people that will subvert the system, and this "bUlLyInG hAs nEvEr bEeN wOrSe" current moral panic might be inspiring psychopaths to indeed make the problem worse. I don't know about anyone else, but I never heard of 30 teenagers swarming a man's car to beat him up and rob him happening even in the worst crime epidemic in LA during the 1980s and 1990s: https://ktla.com/news/local-ne... [ktla.com]
Something similar with the African guy who told a woman in Central park that her dog was supposed to be on a leash, and she wnt nuts on him calling the police. Problem was he videoed it with his phone.
But more troubling is the rise of violent women. I watched a vid of another black guy being assaulted by a white woman over something stupid, like she wanted his parking space. . After he third punch to his face, he defended himself and smacked her back, she fell on the ground with an expression of shock
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There have always been bullies, and there will always be. Young bullies grow up to be adult bullies.
There are even crybullies, who bully from a weakness perspective.
Oh noes! I scared a wimp with mod points! "To the safe room Margaret! there's someone being mean. Lock the doors, and I'll get you scheduled with our therapist!"
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