edit: grammar
There are plenty of things to measure. Just pick one and stop trying to play this ridiculous game of "what about-isms".
Really this lawsuit is just a meta for safety-ist culture that probably causes mental health issues in the first place.
It's like I spent hours per day playing soccer when I was a kid, and regularly got injured, broke my leg once. I got bullied there too on occasion, by some definition. Oh, and we used to play games where the losing team would bend over at the goal line and the winning team would try to kick the ball as hard as possible at their asses (or legs) from like 15ft - I dunno if this is bullying (I've done a lot of both bending and kicking), but I'm pretty sure someone has to think of the children...
So I guess the parents (or no, not parents - states!) shoulda sued the town that provided us with a public soccer field, cause "harms" happened there :)
EDIT: come think of it, unlike other cases - parents cannot control the other kids' behavior in school or out in the neighborhood - preventing their own children from using social media is comparatively trivial. So, there's also that - I guess if facebook is responsible for harms, all of the parents affected should be sued for neglect :)
If they 1) know of such bullies and 2) do nothing or even enable it, yes. I would agree with that. I don't know the legal details, but schools should have a moral duty not to promote harmful factors to kids, and to make sure kids are safe on campus.
> Or why ads, sue the media companies that publish them.
Depending on the ad, sure. Wouldn't be the first time. Ads targeting children have a ton of regulations behind them.
>Or maybe vendors that sell the magazines, or all of them - since they make up a platform like Facebook.
The magazine would be under scrutiny. I'm not sure if there are any laws against that (the national enquirer is still on my grocery store checkout line after all), so I'm guessing freedom of press overrides that. It's really just libel they worry about (feel free to look up Hulk Hogan vs Gawker for one if the few cases where the press loses such charges. Since Libel laws are very strong in the US).
>Majority of their time on social media" is not a harm. The rest are similar and/or not clearly linked to anything.
Not by itself no. The lawsuit seems to be arguing that meta knowingly deploys algorithms and utilizes data in a way that Is harmful. TBD.
>parents cannot control the other kids' behavior in school or out in the neighborhood - preventing their own children from using social media is comparatively trivial. So, there's also that - I guess if facebook is responsible for harms, all of the parents affected should be sued for neglect :)
Regardless of my opinion on that, children's anything (media, ads, internet websites) have regulations and the argument here is that meta had continually and knowingly ignored such regulation. It involves minors but summarizing down to "social media harms kids" belittles all this regulation setup over the years. It's not just about "being too addicting"
>They§constitute unfair and/or deceptive acts or practices under the state consumer protection statutes,violate COPPA, and further constitute unlawful acts under common law principles.
And given an example
>§For example, on September 30, 2021, Davis denied that Meta promotes harmful content, such as content promoting eating disorders to youth, when she testified before Congress, stating, “we do not direct people towards content that promotes eating disorders. That actually violates our policies, and we remove that content when we become aware of it. We actually use AI to find content like that and remove it. [Redacted]
There are 40+ plaintiffs and over 100 lawyers on the lawsuit so I'm not too surprised they have some basic definitions there. Will it be effective, who knows?