[Atrine]

Cyberbullying? Eating disorders? Majority of their time on social media? Increase in medication usage? Cutting? Depression? Suicides?

There are plenty of things to measure. Just pick one and stop trying to play this ridiculous game of "what about-isms".

[sershe]

Ok, so you should be able to sue schools where regular bullying happens, or ads that supposedly promote unrealistic beauty standards for eating disorders, right? Or why ads, sue the media companies that publish them. Or maybe vendors that sell the magazines, or all of them - since they make up a platform like Facebook. "Majority of their time on social media" is not a harm. The rest are similar and/or not clearly linked to anything.

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 :)

[johnnyanmac]

>Ok, so you should be able to sue schools where regular bullying happens, or ads that supposedly promote unrealistic beauty standards for eating disorders, righ

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"

[ayakang31415]

It is surprising to me that my comment is perceived as whataboutism and as if I am rooting for Meta (I do not see any such implication here). Far from it, as I do not like Meta and its product (I don't even have Facebook or Instagram app installed on my phone). I am merely saying that it is very tough to prove such case in the court as rigorous vetting is necessary and the onus to prove is on the plaintiff.