[gunshai]

>Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.

Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b68f2951-2a4b-4822-...

[safety1st]

The CBC article doesn't mention what's arguably the most interesting thing about this lawsuit, which is that it goes after Meta on the grounds of product liability. This of course a pretty established area of law and a central feature of the decades of legal battles that Big Tobacco was embroiled in, but applying it to online publishers is very new.

I think the states have an interesting point. Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact? Doing so is illegal and I think your average HN'er would agree that this is bad when applied to say Big Tobacco or some manufacturer selling a product that contains toxic chemicals or whatever, but what about Big Tech?

Of course there's a big can of worms here. We've known that watching TV "rots your brain" on some level for years, and there's a fair bit of research which claims that porn is bad for you too. So where do you draw the line and when is litigation the correct recourse for society in dealing with these issues vs approaching it another way?

Hard to have sympathy for a company like Meta at this stage in the game though...

[gunshai]

> Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact?

With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.

There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.

[safety1st]

Well, you're definitely going against the grain on this if you say yes. This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages for the health consequences of their products, and get them to add warning labels to their products. I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

[gunshai]

> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages

I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.

Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).

My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.

> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.

The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.

[nvy]

Edit:

Lol predictable response proving my point.

You got your money, who cares if your product hurts people right?

[gunshai]

There are trade offs and harm for nearly every product/thing.

If you can think of something that when used does not have unintended harm please let me know.

I agree that the topic of future liabilities is pretty sticky and seems highly case dependent.

[rokkitmensch]

Firearms and rockets are clearly not built by Real Engineers, I see.

[diob]

I wish they would go after addictive games instead, with micro-transactions built to raise young gambling addicts.