Hey, they’re harming old people’s mental health too!
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.
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.
Fully agree, this is going nowhere
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.
Can someone explain to me why do they spy on children ? like I get adults ( they can buy ), but children !!!
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.
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.
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.
