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.
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.
Meanwhile, Roblox:
My buddy should sue. His kid got so addicted he went into his fathers business AMEX cards account and shut off text/email notifications. Used his card to rack almost $10k USD in a month. It was insane when that bill came in.
That’s…wild. Wow. And crazy sad too.
Especially when Roblox has almost no content of its own: Most of its profit basically comes from abstracted child labor, for games meant to appeal to and addict other children with MTXs.
I don’t know if it’ll do any good but I’m gonna try so hard to inoculate my kid against predatory gambling/exploitation mechanics, and be involved in what they’re playing.
Roblox is disgusting.
Imagine how many other kids are doing this or worse. That platform is already in the spotlight for bad things (Like Habbo)?
I will say I was in almost ever Habbo raid to close the pool.
I think my buddy got Roblox, thru AMEX to rescind some of the charges. He gets pissed when it gets brought up so I don’t bring it up. I think his wife might have mention it was to one us in the group they did refund some, but not nearly all.
Yet another reason to have 2 part authentication on your accounts. Well knowing that kid he would have got his dads phone, he’s pretty smart.
How did he not get a full refund? Someone stealing you’ll card info and turning off notifications is credit card theft. He should be able to have the charges reversed.
The kid may get in some legal trouble, but they probably should if they’re stealing 10k+. Better now than when they’re an adult and have more serious legal issues.
Its his son, to get the whole thing back he would have to press charges. The amount would be a massive felony here. He’s not going to flush his kids life to get the money back. And he would have to get the money back from the “criminal”, his tween son. No win here
Now AMEX could press charges if roblox and the father not played ball. But that would go no where as he has the money to repay (and he did) so its hard to arrest someone if there are no damages.
So this route he gets a little back, his kids not in a juvenile facility and has a record. Robox keeps the lion share and AMEX is whole. My take is my buddy has money, if they went the other route he would be in the press/lawyered as this was during the roblox media frenzy. So roblox payed him to go away, with his money.
I don’t understand how the fuck it’s still operational. There is nothing about that shit game that anyone cares about unless they’re 9, or an obvious pedophile. Not even like the Epstein ones, they go the classic trafficking route… Roblox is the To Catch a Predator ones.
All its “content” is basically built by children or adult devs trying to hook children. I don’t like that dynamic at all. It really is child labor.
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!
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
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.
