Meta and YouTube found liable in social media addiction trial

Shorts become disabled if watch history is off. I disabled my watch history because I did not want YubTube recommending me any content. The only tab active on my app is Subscriptions; this way I only see content I subscribe to. Shorts are on my Subscriptions tab but only Shorts from channels I subscribe to. Edit: I mean the tab labeled Shorts in the app will not show content. If you search for something or subscribe to a channel, you will see Shorts.

There’s an extension you can use called Unhook that forcefully removes and prevents you from seeing Shorts

* Firefox * uBlock Origin * Blocktube(blocks channels and videos) * Control Panel for Youtube * Sponsorblock Is what i have and youtube experience is like it used to be.

I just want to be able to block AI slop and channels that do that c***

Im kind of out of the loop. What is the issue with YouTube shorts?

most people in class actions get like 17 buck while lawyers get filthy rich sooooooo prolly not

>Including dead relatives that Meta has decided to use AI to post on their behalf? I'm sorry what?

Class action would mean everyone splits the payout and lawyers take a large percentage as payment When all said and done, everyone in the class action would *maybe* get 10 dollars each and the company would end up paying out what would amount to a fraction of their annual profits

Or all the dead relatives that died of Covid from being brainwashed by misinformation spread about the vaccine by these  sites? Can the dead children who died get justice for their families being brainwashed against vaccines? How do we even start to undo the damage social media has caused?

Check out "The Chaos Machine" by Max Fisher. I'm glad this lawsuit played out against Meta AND YouTube. These social media companies still have a LOT more to answer for.

You know, as someone with adhd, I KNEW to stay away from tiktok THEN instagram and youtube started doing short form video and I became absolutely addicted And it’s SOOOO much worse that these companies did it this way, of directly integrating it within their existing platform, because it had DECADES of data to mine from in order to perfectly nail what my interests and hobbies were to precisely show me content that would get me hooked. They should allow us to turn it off god damn it, i don’t have self-control and it’s not realistic to ask people to get rid of their smartphones either. There’s no “freedom” when a company knows exactly how to manipulate your impulses, at this point, the only thing that we can do to change the current state of affairs is to switch to a new medium, something in between a smartphone and a dumb phone. We’ve essentially created a tool so powerful that it now completely consumes our lives, and i think we’re starting to realize that we miss having a bit more seperation between our private, public and work life. It’s like, EVERYTHING is on our phones, and we’re only entrenching ourselves deeper. We need to disengage before it’s too late and forget how to function and socialize and work irl without our phones.

KGM's legal team showed the jury internal documents from Meta in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives described its efforts to attract and keep kids and teens on its platforms. One document said: "If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens," and another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram, compared to competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old. Zuckerberg is the scum of the earth

Go back and read the history of tobacco company litigation. First a trickle, then a flood.

Funny how history is littered with people like this: get a good idea, make it successful and a societal good/need, then push it well past the point of necessity to where it becomes overwhelmingly harmful and ruins what positive legacy they may have otherwise established for themselves. Heck, we have a handful of them living in the US right now: Zuck, Musk, Gates, Bezos.

Trash here, please don’t associate my kind with the likes of this man

Actually this might change things. It's not just about this judgement in this case. ANYONE can sue and at scale that is devastating for them. It's not like some bank getting fined a paltry amount.

Snap and Tiktok took settlements, presumably to stay out of the public eye.

Facebook is easily the worst think to come out of the invention of the internet. Look at the state of world politics and it's all because of their algorithms which other companies have copied.

I legitimately noticed my algorithm on IG changed about a week ago. They must’ve changed it because of this legal battle. I used to get recommended all these thirst traps that guys I knew were apparently following. For the last week it’s just been UFC and F1 which I am thankful for. I’m glad my wife never saw my phone because it was making me look like I was chasing random IG models that I had never interacted with. Hope it stays this way

Two things can be true at once. They also want to collect biometric data on their users.

Yep, it’s 100% this. They want to have kids lie to the OS instead of to them so they can still cater to kids but without the liability. What they absolutely don’t want to do is to have kids stop using their platform. They already could have done that, but they need the kids.

This is one case. There are many more to come. The tobacco and asbestos companies did not pay trillions of dollars to one single claimant, it was spread out.

I mean this was a single person and the case sets a precedent. If they had to pay out $3M to like 50M people that’s a LOT of money

So can all of us get 3 Mil or just this lady?

Theoretically millions of people would have similar claims though right? I’d expect a class action, plus i think there’s a much more significant lawsuit already ongoing in New Mexico. Also a company worth trillions doesn’t mean they have that much money or can afford to pay out billions without noticing. Cash on hand would be a better reference point than market cap which means little in this context ($80B cash on hand for meta)

I mean in all seriousness how did social media addiction cause this woman $3,000,000 in damages? This isn’t me shilling for Youtube or anything, I just can’t comprehend how this could cause $3m in mental anguish

Yeah this is a pretty predatory case for the big tech companies. They love shit like this because it makes everyone have a stupidly simple knee-jerk reaction that only empowers them (require IDs for everyone, destroy data privacy, increase censorship), while the actual hard work that would be required to help kids (education for social media use, mental health services, comprehensive online privacy reform) gets completely ignored.

Finally, someone who gets it. Nothing good can actually come from this. Companies and governments have a backwards way of thinking. On paper, it sounds nice, but when being put into practice by these people, it ends up being more damaging than if it was left well enough alone.

First off, most of that money will be going to the team of lawyers she hired for the case, they did a bang up job getting evidence that Meta and YouTube knew their algorithms were bad, and they did a great job convincing a jury that the companies knew, and didn't care. Second, most of that money is coming from punative damages, no funding trying to make her whole. It's similar to the hot coffee case in the '90s where the lawyers showed that McDonalds knew about the temp, or in this case knew about the mental health damages, and the jury is saying "since you knew this was a problem because of XYZ reason, you are ordered to pay more in damages because you did not take reasonable steps to stop this." Finally, in most cases that include punative damages, that amount gets reduced a lot during appeal. Again in the hot coffee case it went from about 3 million, down to around 600k, most of which went towards lawyers and medical bills. The best way you can try to get a settlement like this would be to gather evidence that your use of Facebook, Instagram or YouTube has cause financial harm to yourself either by psychiatric bills, or medical bills. You can always try to make the argument with lost wages, but those generally go nowhere. Then you would need to find a team of lawyers who are willing to take on your case which also won't be easy because although the precident is now set, these things take time and money to build up. It's easier now of course, and the lawsuit after the next will be even easier, but it is still time consuming and expensive regardless if you would have a "slam-dunk" case.

Infinite scrolling shit is so benign sounding. They’ve exploited people’s psyche to make a profit and used portions of those profits to further f*** society by buying influence in governments. Scum is being too kind

And helped give rise to these "influencers". Young people often now have no aspirations other than to be an influencer!

You mean your $0.38 cut of the $200 million the Lawyers are going to get?

Instagram used to have an option to disable reels. I disabled them and set my feed to only ones I follow, then one day all the reels popped up again. It turns out they disabled the option to disable reels, so I was stuck with them. I deleted the app and it was worrying how many times I opened my phone and swiped to where it had been without even thinking

This is a really good point. Personal opinions about responsibility and parenting aside. This case demonstrates that the court found that the social media companies engaged in deliberate actions that manipulated the minds and behavior of children.

Yup, this is quite literally, The Internet's Big Tobacco moment. They knew it was addictive. They knew it led to negative health outcomes. They made it *more* addictive intentionally, *and* they specifically targeted kids.

For two trillion dollar companies, with another 2 let off from settlements behind the scenes.

Doom scrolling is absolutely a thing. I can do social media, but I try to avoid TikTok and Reels because those are the apps that pull you in for hours and hours and I have the hardest time pulling myself away. I did a 30 day social media break not to long ago, and the number of times I opened one of the apps without even realizing what I was doing was alarming.