Hey, they’re harming old people’s mental health too!
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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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.
Meta, the negging company:
“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 in a statement. “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.”
Go NY DA! Fuck all these assholes, she's doing what nobody else has the courage to do and we should be very grateful!
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!