Will Social Media Change After YouTube and Meta's Court Defeat? (theverge.com) 31
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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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:2)
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 mos
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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)
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
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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:1)
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?
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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.
Collateral damage? (Score:3)
Will it cause collateral damage, or will it end (at least some of) it?
Does social media do anything but collateral damage?
Age verfication could mean one thing. (Score:3)
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:1)
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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:4, 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:3)
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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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
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:2)
Facts Only
YouTube and Meta were found negligent in a court case regarding social media addiction.
The case could result in multimillion-dollar penalties if decisions survive appeal.
Additional "bellwether" cases in Los Angeles may lead to larger group settlements.
Activists argue for changes to features like infinite scrolling and algorithms promoting shocking content.
Critics warn the rulings could harm smaller social networks and restrict free speech.
Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram following legal pressure.
Legal experts predict companies will make minimal changes to avoid liability.
Some advocate for stricter age verification and tiered access for minors.
Concerns exist about isolating LGBTQ+ youth and other vulnerable groups from online communities.
The New Mexico case partially hinged on arguments about end-to-end encryption harming children.
Eric Goldman predicts stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media.
Blake Reid, a law professor, notes uncertainty in forecasting long-term outcomes.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative acknowledges legitimate concerns about social media's addictive design and its impact on mental health, particularly for young users. The legal rulings represent a rare instance of holding tech giants accountable, which could incentivize meaningful reforms. However, the narrative also reveals tensions between accountability and overreach, as critics highlight potential collateral damage—such as stifling smaller platforms or cutting off lifelines for marginalized youth. The case’s reliance on vague standards of harm, particularly in targeting end-to-end encryption, raises questions about whether the legal approach risks undermining privacy protections under the guise of child safety.
Patterns detected: ARC-0024 Ambiguity (vague standards of harm), ARC-0043 Motte-and-Bailey (balancing accountability with potential overreach)
The root cause appears to be a clash between profit-driven design choices and societal expectations of corporate responsibility. The assumption that legal pressure alone can force ethical behavior ignores the adaptability of tech companies, which may opt for superficial compliance rather than systemic change. Historically, this echoes past regulatory battles—like tobacco litigation—where industries resisted meaningful reform until financial penalties became unsustainable.
For human agency, the implications are mixed. While some users may benefit from reduced addictive features, others—especially vulnerable groups—could lose critical support networks. The second-order consequences include a potential chilling effect on innovation, as smaller platforms face existential legal risks. Who benefits? Trial lawyers and large corporations capable of absorbing fines or lobbying for favorable laws. Who bears costs? Marginalized youth, independent creators, and platforms lacking legal resources.
Bridge questions: How can accountability be structured to avoid unintended harm to vulnerable users? What metrics would prove that reforms are working beyond legal compliance? What alternatives exist for youth who rely on online communities for identity support?
Counterstrike scan: If this were a coordinated campaign, the playbook might involve amplifying moral panic about child safety to justify broad censorship, while downplaying the risks to free expression and privacy. The actual content aligns partially with this pattern—particularly in the focus on encryption—but also includes legitimate critiques of corporate behavior, suggesting a more nuanced discourse than a pure influence operation.
Sentinel — Human
The article and comments exhibit strong human signals, including stylistic idiosyncrasies, passionate arguments, and diverse viewpoints, with no clear signs of AI generation or coordination.