Outside Mehta’s offices in New York, USA, members of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) call for the protection of youth to be a priority. Mary Rohde, on the left, holds a photo of her son Riley, who committed suicide after being bullied on Facebook. 2024.03.22/ ⓒ AFP=News1 ⓒ News1 Reporter Kwon Jin-young
(Seoul = News 1) Reporter Ji-wan Kim = A ruling was made that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, cannot avoid lawsuits from 34 U.S. states filed on the grounds that it misled users about addictive properties.
According to Reuters and Bloomberg, on the 15th, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the federal court in Oakland, California, rejected Meta’s request to dismiss two lawsuits filed last year. One of the two lawsuits was filed last year by 33 states, including California and New York, and the other was filed by the state of Florida.
Judge Rogers dismissed some of the state’s claims under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which exempts Internet companies from liability for illegal or harmful content posted on the Internet by individual users. Nevertheless, this decision was made because each state believed that it had presented sufficient concrete grounds to continue the lawsuit.
Judge Rogers also denied requests by Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to dismiss personal injury lawsuits filed by individual plaintiffs. It also ruled that some lawsuits filed for violation of the Consumer Protection Act can continue to proceed.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys called the decision “an important victory for young people across the country who have been negatively impacted by addictive and harmful social media platforms.” On the other hand, Mehta disagreed with this decision and countered that the company had developed several features to protect parents and teenagers, such as Instagram’s ‘Teen Accounts’, which makes teenagers’ accounts private.
Hundreds of lawsuits surrounding the harmful and addictive nature of social media platforms are continuing across the United States. The plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit claim that the platform company developed a highly addictive algorithm that caused depression, anxiety, and body image issues in teenagers and failed to warn them of the risks.
The lawsuit that Judge Rogers ruled on this day to continue was filed in October of last year. The state attorneys general who filed the lawsuit argued that Meta failed to eliminate harmful features on Facebook and Instagram despite research linking them to depression and other mental health problems. They also accused Mehta of illegally collecting data on children under the age of 13.
Most recently, on the 8th, 13 states, including California and New York, filed a lawsuit against TikTok, claiming that it addicted young people and harmed their mental health. They raised issues with TikTok’s ability to constantly display content while scrolling, TikTok’s ‘challenge’ videos that encourage risky behavior, and push alarms that sound even late at night.
