States sue Meta for harming young people's mental health, collecting data on children
States sue Meta for harming young people's mental health, collecting data on children
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.
Go NY DA! Fuck all these assholes, she's doing what nobody else has the courage to do and we should be very grateful!
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?
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.
I am getting really tired of thinking about the children, and I'm getting real tired of the government forcing bullshit legislation over it. Let the parents think of the children and let's get the government working on some real shit for a change.
This stuff has been going on since the dawn of marketing. Should we also kill off makeup commercials? Maybe just not allow anyone even moderately attractive to post pictures of themselves online, in ads or appear on TV? Make them cover their faces in public? We can't have children seeing other humans and getting upset that they don't look like them!
If parents actually gave a shit about any of this, they would just not allow their children access to these things.
Data collection should be limited by the government, that is not a decision to an avarage parent.
I've got no love for FB, or social media in general for that matter, but why are they suing them for it instead of coming up with actual regulation to address the issues? It's all just a show and the fact that barely anyone sees it means they are winning. You're all victims of propaganda.
This lawsuit has nothing to do with data collection
I’m actually all for banning commercials and ads yes thank you. The rise of marketing as an industry has caused more toxicity than any other
Well, it is a capitalist nation. You also don't have to watch them and you certainly don't need to act on them. Commercials help fund television. If you don't want to see them, don't watch TV. Unless you think that should just all be offered for free. Actors should work for free, camera crews, sound, lighting, writers.. all free, right?
"But parenting is hard. I'd rather the government be my kids' parent."
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.
Doing something "for the children" is more important, apparently, than doing anything useful.
It's not popular to "defend" social media these days, but plenty of studies have found that an adolescent's online life is basically a reflection of their offline life. i.e. the social media effect is being overstated due to factors largely beyond the platform's control. But if people don't want to hear that from some rando online commenter, maybe they'll listen to real scientists:
The largest independent scientific study ever conducted investigating the spread of Facebook across the globe found no evidence that the social media platform’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.
Within-person changes in self- and other oriented social media behavior were unrelated to within-person changes in symptoms of depression or anxiety two years later, and vice versa.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563223002108?via%3Dihub
Eight-in-ten teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives, while 71% say it makes them feel like they have a place where they can show their creative side. And 67% say these platforms make them feel as if they have people who can support them through tough times.
Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives. In most cases, the effects of social media are dependent on adolescents’ own personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances—intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions that are afforded within many social media platforms. In other words, the effects of social media likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ preexisting strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.
https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use
The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.13190
Edit: The excess data collection is a separate issue, and one that really does need to be dealt with.
Great info, thank you.
Thank you for making this information available! It totally confirms what I'm saying. It's more important to appear that people are "doing something to protect kids" than actually doing something to protect kids like becoming part of their lives and asking them what they really feel and how theyr'e doing. I do not believe social media is any more evil than any other outlet or influence in their lives.
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.
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Hey, they’re harming old people’s mental health too!