The IT Nerd

From the “Meta might be in trouble here” department comes a lawsuit that has been filed by 41 states and DC which has a very interesting claim:

A federal lawsuit and parallel state lawsuits allege that Meta knowingly designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that purposefully addict children and teens.

The states also allege Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without informing parents or obtaining parental consent.

“Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms,” the lawsuit said. “It has concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children. And it has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth. In doing so, Meta engaged in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal law.”

According to this story, the lawsuits are intended to force Meta who owns Facebook and Instagram to change their products to stop this from happening. Seeing as Meta is known to have products that collect all sorts of data about you to monetize it in any way they can, these lawsuits are a direct threat to their business model. Thus you can be sure that Mark Zuckerberg is freaking right now while tying to figure out how not to be taken to the woodshed if these lawsuits go to trial.

This will be a fun one to watch.

This entry was posted on October 24, 2023 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.