The Confidential Payments Meta and TikTok Made to Addicted Teens

toomuchtodo

https://archive.today/ec9ji Gift link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-12/meta-tikt...

peter_d_sherman

>"The sprawling social media addiction litigation began in 2022, with personal injury lawsuits that alleged the companies’ products led to anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and even suicide. The cases were filed under a novel legal strategy that sought to hold the companies accountable for designing dangerous products, rather than for the content posted by their users. This strategy sidestepped a federal law, called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which had provided the companies with an immunity shield from liability suits over user content for decades. Then, schools and states filed similar suits under the same legal theory: that the platforms designed addictive products that prioritized profit over safety. Judges agreed to combine the cases, which at that point numbered in the hundreds, into two mass torts — one in state court, another in federal — to streamline the evidence-gathering and pretrial process for the four defendants." An interesting change in the apparent direction of the U.S. Legal System / U.S. Law in 2022! Is it right or wrong? That I don't know (every case is different, what constitutes true justice in one specific set of situations/circumstances may not necessarily constitute true justice in another set of specific situations/circumstances -- so I don't presume to decide one way or the other globally, on this set of issues)... but it does seem like something that should make the books for future historians, especially future legal historians, and this legal phenomena, which apparently originates on or around 2022, definitely seems worthy of additional research...