A U.S. appeals court on Monday allowed thousands of lawsuits to move forward against Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, and other social media companies over claims they designed their products to be addictive to young users.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the companies’ bid to reverse a lower court’s ruling forcing them to face more than 3,000 lawsuits over the claims filed in federal court, concluding that the appeal came too early in the litigation.
Cool, maybe I’ll get a check for $5 in 10 years.
Hey, don’t shit on that. I got 35 bucks from a Facebook class action lawsuit I signed on to 12 years ago. I got some nice coffee and a pair of slippers.
It’s not nothing
They pop up in my email inbox every few months or so. I always sign on. If my bank account gets a surprise $5, $10, $50 deposit every once in a while courtesy of Meta or Google, what am I gonna complain? Some court somewhere says I’m entitled to that money. Tiny bit of surprise income ongoing for the last 20 years or so. Times are tough, so thank you very much.
Fuck ‘em
Edit: and it’s not just me. When I hear the kerpling! notification from my phone, and I see $27.15 deposited into my PayPal account from some obscure trust fund out of some town in California that I’ve never heard of, I also know that 3.2 million other people received exactly that same amount exactly the same time because 15 years ago Facebook used my ‘like’ on a post for some kind of ad tracking that wasn’t legal in New York at the time. I have no idea what it was, but thanks for the 27 bucks! I’m gonna buy some groceries!
Well look at mister monopoly over here, making double digits on his class action suits. /S
Something I found interesting is that my wife and I both signed up for a facebook privacy class action a couple years ago and recently got our payouts. I got $6.73, and my wife got I think $6.80.
Woohoo! Raking in the big bucks! You two could enjoy a couple of Slurpees, or maybe a few Gatorades? It’s hot this summer! Stay hydrated!
Now do AI.
Silly, they only “went after” social media because now their future is set on datacenters, ai, and government contracts.
The social media was probably just step 1 in the plan of mining our data to feed the newer AI to profile us.
I think they’re going after Social Media because they want to track people’s identity online more closely. Because the government are creeps who are afraid of the Internet.
“They”?
The Australian Labour Party
Britain too, and Chat Control in Europe.
Basically the intelligence agencies own the world. (5 eyes etc)
It seriously makes me wonder if new world order is I. The works… They just need USA to be the nation to make it happen first then all the corruption will come out of wood work and we’ll have some new fucked up life.
Don’t get too hyped yet. I see two problems:
- This was an appeals court, and could be overturned by a higher court
- The companies appealed prematurely on the basis of a 1996 law shielding them from liability; this ruling only says that the companies still have to go to court, not that they aren’t immune.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Hopefully these cases go to trial and these companies don’t settle out of court and silence all of the plaintiffs.
This was an appeals court, and could be overturned by a higher court
The only higher court than a US circuit court is the Supreme Court of the United States.
this ruling only says that the companies still have to go to court
I mean, that is the headline … “must face thousands of lawsuits” doesn’t mean they’re guilty.
It’s not just young people. Their heuristics work on all demographics.
Reuters should fire the guy who writes all the headlines.
Maybe I’m having a brainfart, but what’s wrong with the headline?
Nothing. That guy’s just an asshole.
I’m assuming they are unfamiliar with the convention that headlines often drop the “and” for a comma
I just can’t get behind suits like this.
There’s never been any rules on limits of how much fun or entertainment is too much fun or entertainment in the digital world. Getting sued for someone wanting to do something too much? How many people have to cross the threshold of doing something to an unhealthy degree before it’s too many and turns illegal? Or turns to be able to sue. “Your app\game\tech made me want to be on it all the time, so I’m suing you because I want to use it too much”
Where’s the limit for this? Should blizzard get sued for world of warcraft? Clash of Clans? All of at least the US was addicted to TV for decades. Do we sue Sony for making the TV, or do we sue Fox because the new episode of the X Files had to be watched so I couldn’t go out Friday night at 9pm?
Where is the limit supposed to be? I despise Meta, but it doesn’t mean I want some bullshit precedent to be set to put some gray area upper limit on how good something is allowed to be before it causes legal issues.
