00:00 Speaker A
Meta and Google, here we go. found liable in this social media addiction case. There are, by the way, I was reading reportedly thousands of other suits like this and basically claiming Instagram and YouTube, they intentionally designed their products to to addict young users. Meta must pay at least 2 million in damages. Google at least 900,000. Clearly, that is nothing for these tech giants, but what you do have now is precedent and that’s important.
00:31 Speaker B
The the companies have to now uh deal with the punitive phase and so we’ll see what happens there.
00:35 Speaker B
The important thing about this is that it was seen as this bell weather for all these other cases. There’s other states uh that are suing, there’s school districts, there’s other families. This was seen as basically the test to see can uh you convince a jury that these companies designed their products to be intentionally addict uh addictive. The jury found uh both companies negligent. They knew the design of their platforms were dangerous, uh that users wouldn’t realize the danger and that the companies failed to warn of the danger when a reasonable platform would have. And so, what makes this unique is that for years, you know, the the discussion around social media has been the content, right? The whistleblower a few years ago who discussed how meta had known about uh how Instagram posts could be uh damaging to young girls. But this was not about content, which is unique in that it circumvents one of the protections that social media companies have leaned on, which is section 230 of the communications decency Act. and there’s been all this discussion for years, should we get rid of 230, should we not? The internet as we know it wouldn’t exist uh if it wasn’t for 230s. That would be an incredibly difficult thing uh for legislators to do. Talking about the design though, allows you to not even contend with that. The Meta uh responded, uh spokesperson said we respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options. We had a Google spokesperson also uh say that they disagree with the verdict and the and plan to appeal. They said, this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a reasonably built streaming platform, not responsibly built, sorry, streaming platform, not a social media site. So they’re contending that they’re not uh part of the
/Alibaba%20by%20Photo%20Agency%20via%20Shutterstock.jpg?ssl=1 "As Alibaba Launches a New Chip for Agentic AI, Should You Buy, Sell, or Hold BABA Stock?")
