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U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
- gunshai 3y ago>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-b0fb-04238703c039.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_5 https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b68f2951-2a4b-4822-...
- safety1st 3y agoThe 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...
- nvy 3y agoEdit: Lol predictable response proving my point. You got your money, who cares if your product hurts people right?
- rokkitmensch 3y agoFirearms and rockets are clearly not built by Real Engineers, I see.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gunshai 3y agoThere 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.
- gunshai 3y ago> 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 3y agoWell, 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 3y ago> 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.
- diob 3y agoI wish they would go after addictive games instead, with micro-transactions built to raise young gambling addicts.
- HappySweeney 3y agoDon't many companies do similar things to hook kids? Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance? The same argument applies to breakfast cereal companies as well.
- daeros 3y agoNo disagreement here, but Instagram shouldn't be let off the hook just because cereal companies get people addicted to sugar too and do awful things as well. Remember two wrongs don't make a right.
- Auracle 3y agoUnequal application of justice isn’t justice.
- fsflover 3y agoYou can't pursue everyone at the same time. What do you suggest?
- tengbretson 3y agoCap'n Crunch has been out for 60 years. There's been time.
- hanzmanner 3y agoAn idealistic appeal to an unattainable equal application of an extremely multi-faceted legal framework is not an argument.
- dmoy 3y agoCivil lawsuits aren't really justice at all in the first place anyways. At least not by that measure.
- pixl97 3y agoI mean cigarette/vape companies have been successfully sued for this, so yea.
- superkuh 3y agoThis should be an easy to try case. Just bring in an expert witness about addiction. There is only one behavioral addiction in the diagnostic service manual: gambling addiction. And that one is basically just grandfathered in from before addiction was understood and had a clear medical/biological meaning. Nothing that happens while looking at screens is inherently bad or addictive. To use that word here is to devalue it and marginalize it's meaning in cases of actual addiction all just so they can try to sue to make noise and bring the DAs involved fame (so they can run for public office later) while exploiting the ignorance of the public re: medical science.
- kelipso 3y agoThere's an entire new field on behavioral addiction now and lots of current and past research in the field. You're just out of date.
- superkuh 3y agoI think you're mistaking privately run "internet addiction treatment" centers and the like for actual medical science published in journals. In reality they're more like the "treatment" camps for homosexual people: scams designed to prey on people's fear and ignorance with no science backing besides third tier pay for publish journals.
- kelipso 3y agoYou're really out of date. See wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction. Dopamine Nation by Anna Lambke (Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University) is a good pop sci intro. Plenty of other published research.
- superkuh 3y agoThat's an edutainment book written for profit (https://www.annalembke.com/events https://www.annalembke.com/events) by someone who's income depends on fearmongering and getting interviewed/giving paid talks. Especially the title, "Dopamine Nation" and the abstracts I've read. It harkens back to the 1970s when people still mistakenly believed that dopaminergic populations were responsible for the perceptions of pleasure in the brain. Those are implemented by glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Anyone writing a book about dopaminergic pleasure is still in the 1970s. Dopaminegic populations encode for wanting, not liking, and predict reward (necessary but not sufficiently encoded in the ventral tegemental area). But they are not reward. I'm not out of date. I read journal articles on this every week and have for the last 20 years.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago"Instagram owner"? You mean Meta, aka Facebook?
- pxeger1 3y agoPresumably they’re only suing about Instagram, which is why it’s called out explicitly?
- swatcoder 3y agoMost people outside of tech and finance still know the familiar product brands better than the new corporate identity.
- saghm 3y agoWhich is understandable, given that the "metaverse" thing was over in a hot minute. The rebrand is only going to continue making less sense as time goes on.
- martinky24 3y agoLiterally the first line of the article. Read it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoWere any individuals found liable in the Big Tobacco trials?
- proxiful-wash 3y ago[dead]
- Maarten88 3y agoSince when is it a crime to harm childrens health for money? Coca Cola has been doing it for 50 years, nobody seems to have a problem with that.
- hanzmanner 3y agoThat's a fair analogy and numerous countries and states did introduce measures to combat obesity caused by sugary drinks (mostly through an added tax, which seems to have worked to reduce consumption).
- sushid 3y agoSo shouldn't countries and states introduce measures to restrict access to Instagram? Not sue them outright?
- hanzmanner 3y agoThat's the first step.
- uoaei 3y agoBefore Reagan advertising was subject to FCC regulations around producing and publishing advertisements aimed at children. Once it was deregulated the big toy companies went full bore on commercial ads and we have the familiar experience today of children begging for, needing, toys because of the manipulative tactics used in advertising. The experts call it "pester power".
- toasted-subs 3y agoI think there's a difference between what Coca Cola has done and what Instagram has done. I've had someone who isn't me have to visit mental wards (practicing doctor) and almost all the wards have a strict no FaceBook, no Instagram, no TikTok after leaving. Almost all return patients end up pointing fingers at those companies. Haven't heard of anything similar from Coca Cola products, extremely scary IMO.
- YeBanKo 3y agoShould they also sue all the garbage TV shows for kids and food companies putting sugar everywhere? Did they also sue TikTok? To my knowledge California and New York did not sue TikTok, but is way more dangerous that Instagram. Did they not want to upset Xi during his visit?
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Should they also sue all the garbage TV shows for kids and food companies putting sugar everywhere? There's a song about this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Threaten_Me_with_a_Good_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Threaten_Me_with_a_Goo... > Did they also sue TikTok? To my knowledge California and New York did not sue TikTok, but is way more dangerous that Instagram. Did they not want to upset Xi during his visit? Presumably, California (in particular) has an easier time investigating Facebook than TikTok, given it lies within their jurisdiction.
- YeBanKo 3y agoOther states sued TikTok. TikTok distribution channels are Google and Apple. They also use aws and azure, so Amazon and Microsoft. Hence well within California reach. Probably non negligible part of ad revenue comes from California as well.
- carabiner 3y agoThank God.
- tamimio 3y agoAs much as I welcome that since most of social media are garbage, but they should also go after the junk food, the TV shows, even some video games.
- ender341341 3y agoI'm hoping this is them ramping up on that type of stuff. From what I've read Meta's made themselves a pretty strong target because like the tobacco companies they have documentation that they explicitly know they're doing it and ignoring the effects cause money.
- everdrive 3y agoCurious if this indictment makes a clear distinction between chemical and behavioral addition. I’ve heard some pushback comparing this to smoking. In my mind, comparing this to gambling would have been more apt. Social media seems to employ many of the behavioral reward schedules which make gambling (or loot drops in video games) addictive. (Eg: literally using a variable ratio reward schedule.) Social media isn’t merely addictive in this way (It leans on crucially important things such as social standing, or perceived social standing.) but this is a major distinction which I often see people fail to make.
- bastard_op 3y agoWhen the business is entirely about marketing everything their users do against them, regardless of age, can you blame them for wanting to grow their business? This is why I've never had a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, etc. The poor bastards that do get what they signed up for and accepted in the TOS.
- gnicholas 3y agoWhat is the cause of action here? > 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. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, also claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents' consent, in violation of federal law. The federal privacy law part is crystal clear. But there is no description, or even mention, of what laws are being violated related to addictive products. Is this federal law? State law? What does the law say?
- rvz 3y agoGreat start. Time to go after the rest of the digital drugs merchants starting with Instagram and then going after the worst one which is TikTok.
- jvolkman 3y agoThere's also a lawsuit that Seattle Public Schools filed earlier this year. Not sure where that's at but it looks like there was activity as recently as last month. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66933258/seattle-school-district-no-1-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66933258/seattle-school...
- dang 3y agoMeta sued by states over harmful youth marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38000843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38000843 - Oct 2023 (443 comments)