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Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#211

Post by ProjectArcturis »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
bsimpson wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline). Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you. Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… bei…

> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline). Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies. I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and t…

You neglected to mention: - It was company policy to keep coffee excessively hot (180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home). This was to make customers drink it more slowly and request fewer refills

- Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy

McDonald's, then, was willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers in order to save themselves a few cents in coffee.

In light of those facts, I think a $2M verdict was too low, and the executives who decided to continue keeping the coffee that hot should have been criminally charged with reckless endangerment.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#212

Post by edgyquant »

spencerflem wrote: post #170
hash872 wrote: post #29

At least even money that an appellate court throws this verdict out entirely. Reminder that the US is the only developed country that uses juries for civil trials- everywhere else, complex issues of business litigation are generally left to a panel of judges. It's not that hard to rile up a bunch of randomly impaneled jurors against Big Bad Corporation. The US is kind of infamous for its very large, very unpredictabl…

Maybe if most people would agree the corporation is big and bad and should have penalties, it’s more democratic to go with that decision that the decision nine unelected philosopher kings come up with.

Democracy is flawed which is why our system has checks and balances both democratic ones and non-democratic ones. Mob rule is not preferred thanks

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#213

Post by dmitrygr »

gzread wrote: post #190
dmitrygr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that that is actually an oversight. One needs to consider the entire chain. For example, with proper parenting, there would be a lot less youth demand for drugs. It doesn’t make what a drug dealer does any less bad, nor does it make the efforts of the police to arrest the drug dealer any less important. But it’s suboptimal to consider a small piece of a system, without thinking of the whole.

It's also suboptimal to jail parents for not convincing their child that drugs are bad.

> It's also suboptimal to jail parents for not convincing their child that drugs are bad.

I never suggested that

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#214

Post by danny_codes »

twoodfin wrote: post #79
SoftTalker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be differentiating between physical and psychological addiction, and saying that only physical addiction meets the technical definition of addiction?

I’m saying society should tread extremely carefully in attempting to regulate citizens’ potentially psychologically addictive behaviors.

Good news, social media has been extensively studied and found to be addictive. So we have little need to tread carefully, we already know it’s addictive.

Fortunately it also has minimal to no value to society, so even if we overreacted and banned it completely it’d be fine

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#215

Post by aprilthird2021 »

bogwog wrote: post #58
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...

Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before. (EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly,…

> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.

It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.

Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#216

Post by aprilthird2021 »

lokar wrote: post #161
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #23

I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc. Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of pr…

Do more? They have not done anything. These trials have shown they have long had extremely detailed understanding of what is going on with their product, and instead of trying to mitigate the problems, they have intentionally made the problems worse in order to profit more.

What evidence was presented in this trial to show that?

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#217

Post by aprilthird2021 »

bitwank wrote: post #67
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #23

I can't help but feel these are "revenge" verdicts. Public perception of these companies is dirt low, and there are so few levers the average person has to change what they feel is an increase in atomization, loneliness, breakdown of civic discourse, Cambridge Analytica level political targeting, misinformation, etc. Maybe the social media companies could do more to combat all these. They certainly have a level of pr…

>But does anyone believe for a second that YouTube is responsible for a person's internet / video watching addiction? Yes? Is there an algorithm or not?

By this logic your Grocery store can be sued for you gaining weight because they use an algorithm to time notifications to advertise to you on your phone if you install the app

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#218

Post by andai »

pixl97 wrote: post #185
andai wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other? I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.

I mean do you remember what p2p turned into for things like downloads? "Some_popular_thing.mov.exe" They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.

I'm not sure how that applies here? The argument is that a p2p network will be flooded with bots?

There's a p2p network I use today which doesn't have that problem, probably due to its small size. Meanwhile all the big platforms do — including this one!

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#219

Post by parsimo2010 »

lokar wrote: post #184
parsimo2010 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure the plaintiff’s mental harm was caused by Meta and YouTube. You can be just as depressed without social media and online videos. And even if they were, other cases that are kind of similar to this have not found the corporation responsible. The parents of Sandy Hook didn’t get any money out of Remington, and their product is much more directly linked to harming people than an app. McDonald’s was not held…

I was just pointing out that the basic framework of the case is not some novel new idea, and a jury just decided to stick it to a big company out of the blue. There is a long history of this sort of case, and a jury did hear a lot of evidence from witnesses and instructions on the law from a judge. Some of your examples are not very compelling. In the case of Remington, there was another party that (presumably) the j…

> Apple does not make you install instagram on your phone.

Meta did not make her install Instagram on her phone.

> I'm not sure there a requirement that a product be paid for in order to be subject to product liability law.

You’re the one who originally used the word sell when pointing out this case was brought as a product liability case, not me. And selling something is the first step in establishing product liability. But even if the court allowed a liability case to go where there was no commercial sale, Meta and YouTube could have argued that their product would not be considered defective/harmful by a reasonable person- almost by definition the number of users of Instagram and YouTube make that argument- and thus they should not be liable for one person claiming a defect.

Like I said before, this should be a class action. One person doing it is a money grab and the jury just wanted to stick it to “big bad tech companies.” I probably wouldn’t care so much if they had found Instagram liable but excluded YouTube, but the fact that YouTube has to pay some of the damages means the jury was not thinking that hard.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Products_liability

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#220

Post by 2postsperday »

dymk wrote: post #204
gzread wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? And only the ones that were included in the war on drugs (not nicotine, alcohol, caffeine)? So it was a success.

> People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? No

[dead]
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