Will Social Media Change After YouTube and Meta's Court Defeat? (theverge.com) 54
Yes, this week YouTube and Meta were found negligent in a landmark case about social media addiction.
But "it's still far from certain what this defeat will change," argues The Verge's senior tech and policy editor, "and what the collateral damage could be." If these decisions survive appeal — which isn't certain — the direct outcome would be multimillion-dollar penalties. Depending on the outcome of several more "bellwether" cases in Los Angeles, a much larger group settlement could be reached down the road... For many activists, the overall goal is to make clear that lawsuits will keep piling up if companies don't change their business practices...
The best-case outcome of all this has been laid out by people like Julie Angwin, who wrote in The New York Times that companies should be pushed to change "toxic" features like infinite scrolling, beauty filters that encourage body dysmorphia, and algorithms that prioritize "shocking and crude" content. The worst-case scenario falls along the lines of a piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who argued the rulings spell disaster for smaller social networks that could be sued for letting users post and see First Amendment-protected speech under a vague standard of harm. He noted that the New Mexico case hinged partly on arguing that Meta had harmed kids by providing end-to-end encryption in private messaging, creating an incentive to discontinue a feature that protects users' privacy — and indeed, Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month.
Blake Reid, a professor at Colorado Law, is more circumspect. "It's hard right now to forecast what's going to happen," Reid told The Verge in an interview. On Bluesky, he noted that companies will likely look for "cold, calculated" ways to avoid legal liability with the minimum possible disruption, not fundamentally rethink their business models. "There are obviously harms here and it's pretty important that the tort system clocked those harms" in the recent cases, he told The Verge. "It's just that what comes in the wake of them is less clear to me".
The article also includes this prediction from legal blogger/Section 230 export Eric Goldman. "There will be even stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media." Goldman argues "This hurts many subpopulations of minors, ranging from LGBTQ teens who will be isolated from communities that can help them navigate their identities to minors on the autism spectrum who can express themselves better online than they can in face-to-face conversations."
But "it's still far from certain what this defeat will change," argues The Verge's senior tech and policy editor, "and what the collateral damage could be." If these decisions survive appeal — which isn't certain — the direct outcome would be multimillion-dollar penalties. Depending on the outcome of several more "bellwether" cases in Los Angeles, a much larger group settlement could be reached down the road... For many activists, the overall goal is to make clear that lawsuits will keep piling up if companies don't change their business practices...
The best-case outcome of all this has been laid out by people like Julie Angwin, who wrote in The New York Times that companies should be pushed to change "toxic" features like infinite scrolling, beauty filters that encourage body dysmorphia, and algorithms that prioritize "shocking and crude" content. The worst-case scenario falls along the lines of a piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who argued the rulings spell disaster for smaller social networks that could be sued for letting users post and see First Amendment-protected speech under a vague standard of harm. He noted that the New Mexico case hinged partly on arguing that Meta had harmed kids by providing end-to-end encryption in private messaging, creating an incentive to discontinue a feature that protects users' privacy — and indeed, Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month.
Blake Reid, a professor at Colorado Law, is more circumspect. "It's hard right now to forecast what's going to happen," Reid told The Verge in an interview. On Bluesky, he noted that companies will likely look for "cold, calculated" ways to avoid legal liability with the minimum possible disruption, not fundamentally rethink their business models. "There are obviously harms here and it's pretty important that the tort system clocked those harms" in the recent cases, he told The Verge. "It's just that what comes in the wake of them is less clear to me".
The article also includes this prediction from legal blogger/Section 230 export Eric Goldman. "There will be even stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media." Goldman argues "This hurts many subpopulations of minors, ranging from LGBTQ teens who will be isolated from communities that can help them navigate their identities to minors on the autism spectrum who can express themselves better online than they can in face-to-face conversations."
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They'll try to say that it's only AI that's providing the monitoring and filtering. They'll conveniently omit the part about the AI training itself on your kid's dick pics.
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Parents have extremely broad rights to manage their children's upbringings. Kids have no right to use end-to-end encryption without parental consent, although I don't think a court has held that parental consent is necessary.
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If I may, could I narrow down which of these two things you think is best? First, there's exactly what you said above..
Did I make it better, or did I make it worse?
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The parents do, and the teachers within a school context, but noone else should.
of course social media will change (Score:2)
The future of youtube (Score:4, Insightful)
I foresee almost all online services requiring an age verification (the kind everyone hates when porn services use it) and then an age tiered product being offered. I could easily see a 2 or 3 tier youtube, for example.
Tier 1 would be full adult access no different than today.
Tier 2 would be very limited youth access, utilizing big data to identify when kids are trying to cheat by using multiple accounts. This would have both content and time limits, but the content filters would be fixed based on the most restrictive criteria.
Tier 3 would be "premium" youth, unlocked with a subscription of course. It would by default permit both the restricted youth content, but also educational content that might have otherwise been automatically blocked by the generic tier 2 standard (things like biology class videos, current event discussions, etc). It could also have parental controls that permit modification of usage time limits and various filter settings to allow or block content such as "biology", "politics", "violence", "religion", etc.
They could monetize the crap out of this, especially since many school districts have standardized on google classroom and you can't block youtube without also blocking google classroom, which can't possibly be an accident. Schools using google classroom would have to pay an additional premium to first authorize registered students into the age restricted service tier, and then they'd have to pay AGAIN to unlock educational content that would be somehow mysteriously blocked under the free tier 2 service.
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This already exists to some extent. We have Kids YouTube with "Pre School", "Younger", and "Older" content categories. The filters are pretty easy to get around, though. My daughter didn't have a lot of problems finding reuploads of things like uncensored music videos without parental settings on them.
I'm pretty sure that you can also block ads on Kids YouTube if you have a family Premium subscription, too.
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Yes, it'll just become mandatory with credit card or ID age verification even for free accounts.
Future of True Crime (Score:2, Informative)
This opens the floodgates to lawsuits for just about every single source of media given that a few people will consume it and have negative mental health. The media consumption will lead to the negative mental health or, importantly, bring existing mental health issues to the forefront.
True crime TV, podcasts, media -> paranoia
June 20, 2023 - True crime podcasts are popular in the U.S., particularly among women and those with less formal education
https://www.pewresearch.org/sh... [pewresearch.org]
women are almost twice
Vocal percent use social media to create problems (Score:2)
A percent of two of those excessively consuming true crime media to 'be informed of threats' will then go onto social media to
- lean heavily to first labeling behavior as a threat before evaluating risk statistics
- seek to label an increasing set of normal behavior as toxic (to make spreading warnings and awareness easier in the future)
- advise others that their personal safety is always threatened by default without regard to statistics
- seek to shame, insult, and guilt the entire group perceived as threat
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Together Google and Meta paid like 7 million because they lost these cases. They could afford to pay 1000x that without breaking a sweat. I'll bet the lawyer's fees on the winning side were much higher than the money the plaintiffs actually ended up recieving.
Yeah, if they keep egrigiously pushing addictive content on kids they MIGHT get more serious fees levied on them, but they have other options, getting politicians to make laws exempting them from lawsuits is a popular measure these days, for example.
Yo
Bodes ill for Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Am I the only person who has ever fallen into a tabby rabbit hole of Wikipedia or even TVtropes? If websites are going to start getting judged for addictiveness, some of them are going to need to become much lamer, and maybe refuse to serve more than n pages per day.
Is your site too good, as in, it might cost you many millions of dollars in fines?
Re:Bodes ill for Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is simple. The former sites are organically addictive to some people. The latter sites are designed by employees who are specifically hired to manipulate all their visitors.
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I think they're arguing that they are the third thing, a message parlor.
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Then again, there are sites where you get Stockholm Syndrome by viewing them. Eg. slashdot ;-)
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The problem is the hijacking of the addiction label. It started off as a medical term that then gained legal teeth. But then it was conflated with obsessive behaviours while still preserving the legal teeth.
Forming obsessive behaviours is a normal healthy trait. It means one will specialise and become a valuable contributor to society. It's just a question of directing that obsessiveness to constructive activities.
As for social media, that's really all about bullying, abuse, coercion, and the likes. Ba
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This is an interesting observation, but not entirely false. There are edits on Wikipedia that basically amount to "wiki link every word in the article". IMHO this could well be in violation of potential laws against algorithms. I'm not sure if Wikipedia should get a pass because it is "free" or whatever.
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Wikipedia doesn't have an algorithm and it's not trying to make you angry or in any other way manipulate your mental state. It's a rabbit hole because knowledge is naturally a rabbit hole. People enjoy learning new things, despite the best efforts of the culture warriors to convince you otherwise.
Nothing about this lawsuit has anything to do with Wikipedia and you have to seriously misread it to think it does.
Collateral damage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Will it cause collateral damage, or will it end (at least some of) it?
Does social media do anything but collateral damage?
Re: Collateral damage? (Score:3)
Age verfication could mean one thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
The trial lawyers and the corporations will work this all out, it just involves the proper financial transactions. After all, this is all for the children!
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They will have to or will go bankrupt (Score:2)
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This. This is a legal earthquake and existing law firms will pivot and new law firms will be created to dive into Big Tech social media settlement money. Plaintiffs will be groomed, "expert" witnesses will be retained for years, judges will get cushy property deals and non-show non-profit jobs for their clans.... the whole shebang is spinning up right now.
And "changes" will only mitigate (no preclude) future cases. This is all unprovable mental health stuff and "harm" can be attributed to anyone that's
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Changes will most likely be age gates rather than reworking the sites to make them less "addictive". If social media can't get adults to stick around doomscrolling all day, they'll go out of business. Kicking all the rug rats off (or walled off in a sanitized "kids only" section of the site) might be a slightly more survivable outcome.
Yeah, just like the cigarette companies of old, the social media companies have been operating under the assumption that if you don't hook 'em young, you may never get them
Pointless court case (Score:2)
Meta has infinite resources to take this to the supreme court where they have a 100.000% chance of victory. That will set a precedent, which will end these kinds of cases forever. This was an utterly pointless exercise by the plaintiffs.
LGBTQ+ minors mentioned in TFS (Score:2)
What hurts LGBTQ+ minors is the political environment that considers such topics age inappropriate unless you're 18+. In saner societies, teens with teen-level site filtering set up are able to access the resources they need to understand that they're not broken and they do belong. It's just here in parts of the USA that we have certain backwards segments of the country that labor under the delusion that if you prevent a teenager from learning that there's nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+, they'll just "ch
Walk away (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like it, stop using it! I haven't shopped at Amazon since 2016. The trouble is the mass of people cannot turn away. I don't blame them I guess. I only deleted all my big social media accounts (FB, Insta, Xitter) ~4 years ago.
I agree with the lawyer who argued this will hurt smaller websites. The UK has effectively destroyed any and all small independent forums. They're trying to go after websites not even hosted or affiliated with the UK! It's insane.
Stuff like this could destroy the future of the fediverse.
Six years ago I wrote a proposal for Section 230 reform that I think is relevant:
https://battlepenguin.com/poli... [battlepenguin.com]
Children shouldn't be on social media (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bulllshit on this. Children do not have the maturity that is required for unfiltered access to the adult world, let alone for using a service designed around exploiting human fragilities for commercial exploitation. Sensitive kids, if anything, have a much higher chance of getting hurt by either the addictive mechanism of the service itself or by weirdos they can encounter online than the chance of meeting some "community" that can help them better than their parents or a specialist could. They'll have plenty of time for navigating after their brain has formed.
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LGBTQ+ youth getting tossed in with adults is exactly what happens when you don't have age-appropriate resources available to them. Back in the day, I hung out on adult BBSes and later the m4m AOL chatrooms, because nothing age appropriate existed when I was that age. Fortunately, younger me had enough sense not to do anything stupid in real life (the worst that happened was I'd initially made the mistake of including my real age in my profile on AOL and my damn Windows 3.1 computer kept crashing from get
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They'll have plenty of time for navigating after their brain has formed.
You may want to read up on LGBTQ+ suicide statistics. A depressingly significant amount of them never survive to that point.
I think the individuals behind each of the L, G, B, T, Q statistics would greatly prefer to stop being lumped together. Because a depressingly significant amount of issues stem from trying to de-stigmatize and normalize to the point of defending delusion, which is not how you help people. It’s how you hurt them. And it needs to stop.
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Unions are a real-life strategy because they work. Divide-and-conquer is also a real-life strategy, because it works too.
Thus, I think the truth of your statement all depends on whether you look at this conflict between government and the the people, from the point of view of the attacker, vs the point of view of the defender.
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What "age-appropriate" resources are we talking about that are supposedly needed? Porn? That is avaliable in large quantities catering to every sexual orientation and fetish. Something to reassure young people of non-traditional sexual orientations that what they're feeling is not unusual? That is needed, but that it looks to me that now this has been achieved, and then some. You do not want others to push young people to be something they're not, but that goes both ways. Children should be left to figure
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What "age-appropriate" resources are we talking about that are supposedly needed? Porn?
Since people tend to get a bit more squeamish when the subject is LGBTQ+ youth, the standard for what constitutes truly pornographic material should be the same as what would be applied for heterosexual youth. If we let heterosexual youth read about love stories between a man and a woman, well, let's try to avoid those pesky double standards of somehow seeing a similar story where the love interests happen to be same sex as being "corrupting", "filthy", or otherwise less appropriate.
My point is, the term g
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That's also another right-wing talking point intended to divide the LGBTQ+ community amongst itself, making it easier to "conquer". Basically, "Hey, you minorities should turn on each other, that'd make my job of oppressing you a lot easier!" Anybody who's actually picked up a history book can spot it from a mile away.
This right here is one of the biggest problems with modern identity politics, and current-day politics in general. And it's absolutely a product of binary American politics. There's an assumption here that "the right-wing" wants to "conquer" the minorities. Any minorities? For example Jewish descent people are a minority in US, albeit a significant one, I see no attempt to conquer them. Very rich people are also a minority. People with red hair are a minority. I mean forchrissakes, feminists would have all
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What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.
Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an exa
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But they used to. In the 1980s, nobody dared to say in public, that 17-year-old me should not be allowed to visit public (or even university) (or even medical) libraries. (Or if someone did, they were still very obscure and unpopular, little more than a glimmer in the left's eye.)
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Of course not. (Score:2)
At least not until you hit their pocket with thousands of lawsuits.
It was more Meta/FB that tailored kids... (Score:3)
I hope so, but probably not (Score:1)
I'd love to see Meta et al's business models banned completely, for everyone... not just kids.
The "engagement plus targeted ads" model should be illegal. It's obviously hugely detrimental to social media users and to society in general.
However, this is likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Meta can kick enough funding to the Trump regime to ensure a favorable SCOTUS ruling, and then it'll be business as usual for Zuckopath.
Easiest Appeal Ever (Score:1)