Hey, they’re harming old people’s mental health too!
Go NY DA! Fuck all these assholes, she’s doing what nobody else has the courage to do and we should be very grateful!
This is going absolutely nowhere, I guarantee it. Meta is a business, so yes, they intentionally seek to increase engagement, this isn’t illegal (see every other industry with children as a demographic).
“Manipulative features” is incredibly subjective and hard to prove. “Lowering self-esteem” is also very, very difficult to prove, especially since an Oxford study came out recently showing no evidence linking Facebook adoption and negative well-being. On top of that, proving Meta did this all intentionally for profit is basically impossible, unless they have some sort of crazy smoking gun that I’m sure they don’t have, otherwise they’d be approaching this from another angle.
I know everyone around here wants to see big social media fall, but this ain’t it. At most they’ll settle for a small undisclosed amount, allowing the AG a “show of force” and Meta to avoid anything public.
Fully agree, this is going nowhere
This is going absolutely nowhere, I guarantee it.
My cash settlement from last time a state sued Meta says otherwise.
Pro tip folks: if your state is one of the ones brining this suit, sign up for the class action settlement. Cash is nice. You can spend it on things. I liked my cash from a previous Meta settlement.
Meta can apparently break the law all day long, but they do pay cash in settlement when they get caught red handed.
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children
You mean current and future products/advertising targets?
It’s simple. It’s so they can get them into that content pipeline early, that way they keep their eyeballs on the ads as long as possible.
Have you never seen toy and cereal commercials?
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Lol nothings going to happen.May be 1 or 2 mil fine🤣 and then its business as usual.
The problem is not social media, it’s that social media is you, a single person, interacting with a large system that presents to you a tapestry of complex opinions, videos and stories from a variety of groups to you, a person. You have your own internal system of views, opinions, values and personal feelings.
Being aware of this will naturally make you feel small and “weak”, a kind of mental health “bigorexia” if you will. And in extreme cases, enough to consider the possibility that multiple personalities to be the greatest semi failed attempt to empathize with as many individual lives as possible.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A group of 33 states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
“Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health and social media companies like Meta are to blame,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The broad-ranging suit is the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont.
It follows damning newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2021, based on the Meta’s own research that found that the company knew about the harms Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.
Following the first reports, a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press, published their own findings based on leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has testified before Congress and a British parliamentary committee about what she found.
Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now” from the harms of social media.
The original article contains 442 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 52%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So if any of these suits succeed that should mean that we’re gonna see more lawsuits suing companies for harming kids actual health right?
Mental health is actual health.
ok yes, you’re correct. I meant physical health, like air pollution. I just worded it badly.
What really irks the living s#it outta me is not so much that states are blindly suing social media sites just to get on the bandwagon of pretending they’re doing something to help kids – it’s that nobody, not one of those people in any of those states, NO ONE - has asked kids if they feel like they’re being harmed by social media. Outraged puritanical parental groups are making ridiculous assumptions right and left about what kids are seeing, and worse, assuming they know what kids are feeling as a result. They are wrong on this in almost every way. Any kid will tell you, they see worse stuff than this in other places than online almost every day of their lives. It’s popular to make social media the villain - but how can you just ignore input from the very people you’re pretending to be protecting.
Literally in the article:
One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.
You don’t usually have to ask someone if they’re being harmed by a person/substance/thing to see the negative effects it is having on their lives.
Socially media is already known to have negative impacts on adults. This means it WILL also have a negative impact on children and youth. Seeing as children and youth are even more susceptible to negative influences, due to their body and brain still developing, we need to protect them from what we can.
Even if kids are seeing worse things in their every day lives, that doesn’t make it okay to subject them to other less worse things.
What I see actually happening is, some adults have negative impacts from social media but mostly because they give their addictions free reign and look up pretty disturbing stuff online. And they’re projecting that onto other people’s kids. But kids aren’t using social media the same way adults are. And actually there are no studies at all showing that socially media is known to have negative impacts on youth at all. What really helps a kid’s brain to develop is having guidelines and helpful adult models to follow. I’m not saying kids SHOULD be exposed to bad things on purpose, only that kids aren’t made out of gossamer and unicorn farts and will fall apart mentally if they see anything negative or uncomfortable or have to face uncomfortable truths about the world. In fact, denying that such truths exist does more harm to kids than almost anything else. It’s not protecting kids to push their heads into the sand about the real world we live in.
While I get your point, and I totally agree with it, there are some actual dangers that must be recognized, and they are dangers to which everyone is exposed somehow, but that could probably affect children more. These are the privacy problems (the article is about Meta collecting children data probably without them caring about it) considering that a child could not know how to properly use the internet (again, it is not so obvious given the fact that there are probably more internet illiterates among the boomers and older population in general), and cyberbullism. Younger people could act less consciously, they are young anyway. But that has nothing to do with the dangerous content that our children should never see with their pure and innocent eyes. I mean, explicit and harsh contents on the internet do exist, and while it’s probably not desirable to voluntarily expose children to these contents, what disturbs me the most is the puritane posture that the adults take in relation to the Children, as you say. Yes, they are not really understanding the children, nor helping them
You should really watch this, because it’s clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7h7anorDy9A?t=205
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
