Adidas owns the design rights for both existing and future colors and versions of the Yeezy line, but not the Yeezy name.The company said it will continue to sell the sneaker and apparel line, but stripped of the name and Evden eVE nakLiYaT branding, reported. If you beloved this short article and you would like to acquire much more data concerning eVDEn eVE NAKLiyAt kindly stop by the webpage.
‘Going forward, we will leverage the existing inventory with the exact plans being developed as we speak,’ Adidas finance chief Harm Ohlmeyer said Wednesday.
The German shoe and sportswear maker cut its sales and profit outlook part of its third-quarter earnings statement, even as the company’s chief financial officer said the profitability of the Yeezy shoe collaboration with Ye had been ‘overstated.’
The company slashed its expectations in half for net profit from continuing operations to $252 million this year from about $500 million. That matched its earlier statement that ending the partnership with Ye would cost it $252 million in profits.
The Yeezy brand accounted for up to 15 percent of Adidas’ net income, Morningstar analyst David Swartz said in a note on October 26.
Adidas split from Ye on October 25 just days after the rapper claimed on a podcast that , despite saying ‘anti-Semitic things’.
Adidas on Wednesday lowered its earnings forecast for the year to account for losses from ending its partnership with Kanye West over his anti-Semitic remarks
German sporting goods behemoth Adidas ended its partnership with Kanye West in October amid controversial behavior from the American rapper and designer
Adidas has lowered its revenue forecast for the year to a low single-digit increase from a mid-single-digit increase.
The split with Ye, with production of all Yeezy products halted and royalty payments ended, will leave Adidas searching for another star to help it compete with ever-larger rival Nike.
The company would largely offset the impact of the breakup next year by no longer having to pay royalties and marketing fees for evdEn eVE nAkLiYAt the brand, CFO Harm Ohlmeyer said.
Adidas also is facing internal upheaval, with its Friday.
He was previously expected to hand over next year, but the company announced the quicker change on Tuesday as it named Puma CEO Bjørn Gulden as his replacement.
Adidas faced pressure to split with Ye as other brands did earlier over the rapper´s anti-Semitic comments in interviews and social media, including a Twitter post earlier this month that he would soon go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,’ an apparent reference to the U.S.defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
He was suspended from both Twitter and Instagram.
Ohlmeyer also said that the profitability of the Yeezy business had been overstated because its costs only included expenses directly related to the products and not central overhead costs borne by the company.
‘In other words, it does not include any further central cost allocation for eVDEn EVe nAKLiyat sourcing, digital, retail, or any other services that this part of our business has been benefitting from and that were essential for its success,’ Ohlmeyer said.
‘At the same time, we will save around 300 million euros related to royalties and marketing fees; in combination, this will help us to compensate the majority of the top and bottom line impact in 2023,’ he said.
Shares of the company slid in October after breaking off its relationship with Kanye
The Yeezy brand accounted for up to 15 percent of Adidas’ net income, Morningstar analyst David Swartz said in a note on October 26
A statement posted in the media section of the Adidas website called Kanye West’s comments ‘unacceptable, hateful and dangerous’
The split with Ye, with production of all Yeezy products halted and royalty payments ended, will leave Adidas searching for another star to help it compete with ever-larger rival Nike
A travel agent faked while defrauding more than 1,400 customers has been jailed at Durham Crown Court for nine years.
Lyne Barlow, 39, was ‘riding the monster of deceit’ as she used her fake illness to deflect the avalanche of complaints from devastated families whose holidays failed to materialise.
She was so determined to continue her charade that she even convinced her husband, Paul, and son and daughter she was battling cancer.
Family members took her to hospital appointments, unaware that she was simply waiting inside before re-emerging claiming to have seen her consultant.
To make her story more convincing, she cut off strands of her hair and scattered them across her pillow to make it look as though she was losing it to chemotherapy.
Lyne Barlow, 39, claimed to her customers that she was covered by insurance and was a member of the trusted travel brand Association of British Travel Agents
Barlow also claimed to be suffering from a terminal illness while she was selling the holidays, Durham Crown Court heard in October last year
When Barlow was arrested in 2020 she hobbled into the police station with her head swathed in a scarfe and walking with a stick.
Custody photographs show a vast difference when she was re-arrested a year later and was forced to admit her ‘stage 3/4’ cancer had been a fabrication.
Barlow stooped so low as to defraud her own mother, Susan Coleman, 64, out of £500,000 – part of which came from an insurance payout following the untimely death of her father, Barry.
The rest was NHS ward sister Mrs Coleman’s retirement payout and savings, which Barlow told her she’d invested in a business venture which would make her mother rich.
Barlow took over her grieving mother’s financial affairs as she struggled to come to terms with losing her husband in 2015.
As she systematically emptied her mother’s accounts she intercepted her post to stop her getting bank statements.
A redacted email exchange Lyne Barlow had with a customer about her pretend cancer
Travel agent Lyne Barlow (left) arrives at Durham Crown Court to be sentenced for defrauding friends, family and hundreds of customers who bought holidays from her in a £2. If you have any thoughts with regards to the place and how to use evdEn EvE NaKliyat, you can contact us at our own web page. 6 million con
Lyne Barlow claimed to her customers that she was covered by insurance and was a member of the trusted travel brand Association of British Travel Agents.(Pictured left: Lyne Barlow)
She also mocked up bank statement from Barclays which appeared to show that her mother’s money was in fact growing rather than disappearing.
Barlow also took her mum away on lavish holidays along with her children, a boy and a girl.
However it emerged the reason for this was, on some occasions, that Barlow knew through the intercepted post, that bailiffs were due to turn up at her mum’s house and EvDen eve nAkliyaT she didn’t want her to find out.
Mrs Coleman was left penniless by a daughter who used part of her money to set up Lyne Barlow Independent Travel in Stanley, County Durham.
Barlow offered holidays at astonishing prices to drum up trade.
Customers were able to snap up all inclusive trips to Dubai for just
£500 and word quickly spread of her extraordinary bargains.
The bubble quickly burst as families saw their hard earned money vanish on holidays that they never got to take.
Some paid up to £5,500 to arrive at their destination and discover no funds had been received by the hotel so there were no rooms booked.
Others arrived to discover they had no place on the return flight and were stranded abroad until they could find their own way back.
Eventually a Facebook group was set up by furious victims of Barlow’s scam and an agreement reached to go to Durham Police en masse.
There were so many calls to the force’s HQ that they had to be directed to an email address because emergency callers would have been unable to get through.
In total Barlow could be proven to have defrauded family, friends and customers out of £1.2m, but investigators believe the total sum she gained over a period of five years from 2015 to 2020 was £2.6m.
Barlow admitted theft, 10 counts of fraud and possessing criminal property at Durham Crown Court and was jailed for nine years.
Judge Joanne Kidd told her: ‘You have presented yourself to those who knew you as a charming an engaging woman.
‘You are clearly a woman with significant intellectual ability but you also have an extraordinary talent for dishonesty.
Her first victims were family and friends and she used their savings before setting up an independent travel agency, in which she fraudulently sold holidays, reporting them to be ATOL and ABTA protected, the force said.(Pictured: stock image of a beach)
‘You mercilessly abused the trust of your nearest and dearest in their darkest hours and set about targeting other vulnerable people of your acquaintance who trusted you in order to satisfy your relatively lavish lifestyle.
‘This involved lavish holidays, an expensive car and designer goods.
‘The extent of the betrayal of your own mother is truly breathtaking.
‘As you gallivanted around your mother’s utility bills went unpaid and county court judgements rained down upon her.
‘Bailiffs visited her home, unbeknown to her because you deviously arranged to take her away on visits on the days they were to arrive.
‘I take the view that you are a thoroughly callous individual.’
Tony Davis, mitigating, said: EvDen Eve NaKLiYAt ‘Once she began riding the monster of deceit it was inevitable it would come crashing down and it did.’
Barlow squandered the cash handed to her on designer clothes, prestige cars and holidays for her and her immediate family, with exclusive breaks in Dubai being her chosen retreat.
The charges stated that Barlow made false representations by purporting to be an ABTA and ATOL registered travel agent when in fact she was using criminal cash to finance further frauds.
Money handed over by customers was being used to pay for holidays that subsequent clients booked through her, in a Ponzi-type scheme.
But her jugging over other people’s cash came crashing down in 2020 when police were called in.
Furious customers were arriving at her home even as officers moved in to arrest her.
She used her ‘cancer’ as a shield to fend off angry people she had conned.
In an email she told one customer who was chasing a refund for a
holiday: ‘Unfortunately I’ve just found out my cancer has spread and it’s gone to stage 3/4 in my bones and eVDen EvE NAKLiYAt need to have chemo out into my spine to stop it from getting into my brain. It’s going to be pretty intense.’
Detective Sergeant Alan Meehan from Durham Police Complex Fraud Team led the investigation.
He said: ‘At the time of her arrest we were aware that she was telling people she had cancer and at that time we kept an open mind on whether that was correct or not not.
‘As part of the investigation we asked to access her medical records and it was only then that the truth emerged that she had been making the whole thing up.
‘It was a determined and calculated attempt to distract attention from her crimes and deflect blame away from her because she hoped people would feel sorry for her.
‘The lengths she went to were very unusual.It came as a massive shock to her husband that she did not in fact have cancer.
‘She wore a scarf over her head and appeared to be losing her hair, although we believe she was cutting off strands and scattering it across her pillow at night to keep up that deception.
‘Members of her family were even taking her to hospital appointments that never existed.
When she was first arrested in September 2020 she presented as a very frail and sick woman, walking with a stick and with her head in a black scarf to cover the apparent hair loss.
‘Once confronted by the medical information she had no option but to admit she’d been lying.
‘The second custody photograph from when she was re-arrested in 2021 show the true picture, with no sign or suggestion of illness.
‘In our opinion it’s a serious aggravating factor in the largest case of fraud this force has ever dealt with.
‘Lyne Barlow was trying to attain a lifestyle she could not afford and rather than stop as she got out of her depth she continued to take money from more and more victims.
‘The number of calls we received on this case was unprecedented and once they started coming in they were so many that we had to set up a dedicated email as the control room was in danger of being overrun.’
James Lewis, of the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘Barlow acted with greed, using false promises and deceptive lies, EVDeN EvE NaKliyaT to convince family and friends, as well as hundreds of customers, who all trusted her, to part with their money so that she could sustain her own lavish lifestyle.
‘Fraud is an insidious crime and the cost to the many victims in this case has not just been financial; it has also caused huge emotional distress and extreme disappointment to devastated customers who had to find out their holiday did not actually exist at a time when the country was in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘Thanks to the thorough investigation by Durham Police and to all the victims who came forward to report her, we were able to bring Barlow to justice.
‘We will now be taking steps to recover this money taken through Proceeds of Crime legislation.’
]]>A hail of mega corporate updates distracted stock markets from a confusing macro picture – but offers little more clarity with scattergun fortunes and ambiguous readouts for the wider economy.
Shares in Walt Disney surged 6% ahead of Thursday’s open after the firm announced a sweeping restructuring under reinstated CEO Bob Iger and cut 7,000 jobs – 3.6% of its workforce – in an effort to save $5.5 billion and make its streaming business profitable.
Disney’s job shedding is yet another sign that January’s red-hot U.S.employment reading may not be the full picture as company apes many big tech and digital firms in downsizing its staff this year.
The share price reaction, however, was in contrast to the bizarre Alphabet swoon on Wednesday.
Alphabet lost 9% – or over $100 billion in market value – after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video at an underwhelming company event.The flub fed worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft in the renewed craze around artificial intelligence.
Fears over ailing Swiss bank Credit Suisse dominated in Europe. Its shares dropped 5% after it reported its worst annual loss since the 2008 global financial crisis and warned of a further “substantial” loss this year.The mood didn’t improve even as it marked out another step towards creating a standalone investment bank by buying Michael Klein’s advisory boutique for $175 million.
For inflation worriers, consumer goods firms bear close watching.Unilever said on Thursday it would continue to raise prices for its detergents, soaps and packaged food to offset rising input costs but the pace of price rises was slowing and would ease up more in the second half of 2023.
Price increases would continue in the second half “but it will be a lower rates of increases…we are probably past peak inflation, but not yet past peak pricing,” finance chief Graeme Pitkethly said.
That disinflation drum continued to beat in Germany, eVDen EVe nAKliyat where consumer prices inflation fell more than anticipated last month, easing back below the 10% expected to 9.2% on the year.
Sweden’s central bank emphasised that rising global interest rates were still some way from their peaks as it raised its key rate by half a percentage point to 3.0%, forecasting more to come.
Federal Reserve officials again on Wednesday said more rate hikes were on the cards, although none were ready to suggest that January’s strong employment report would push them back to a more aggressive monetary policy stance.
Moving to a funds rate of between 5.00% and 5.25% “seems a very reasonable view,” said New York Fed chief John Williams.
More generally, eVDEn EvE NaKliYaT U.S.stock futures were higher on Thursday, with Treasury yields and the dollar falling back. European shares touched a fresh nine-month high on Thursday as Germany’s Siemens and UK’s AstraZeneca boosted earnings euphoria, while Britain’s bank, commodity and pharma heavy FTSE100 hit another record high.
The share in troubled Indian giant Adani took another negative twist.Financial index provider MSCI said some Adani securities should no longer be designated as free float, after market participants raised concerns about the eligibility of the Indian conglomerate’s companies for some of its indexes.
Norway’s $1.35 trillion sovereign wealth fund said it had recently divested virtually all its remaining shares in the Adani group.
Key developments that may provide direction to U.S. markets later on Thursday: * U.S. weekly jobless claims * Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, European Central Bank board member Luis de Guindos speak * European Union summit * U.S. Treasury auctions 30-year bond * U.S.
corp earnings: AbbVie, PepsiCo, S&P Global, PayPal, Apollo, Hilton, Expedia, News Corp, Ralph Lauren, Lyft, Kellogg, Motorola Solutions, Mohawk Industries, Philip Morris, Huntington Ingalls, Duke Energy, Wills Towers Watson
(By Mike Dolan; mike.dolan@thomsonreuters.com.Twitter: @reutersMikeD)
]]>Evelyn ‘Ebere’ Agbasonu allegedly asked for payment of £1,500 to help secure the £80,000 private kidney transplant for the alleged recipient Sonia Ekweremadu, 25, at the Royal Free Hospital in north London in February 2022.
Jurors at the Old Bailey heard of Ms Agbasonu’s role during the trial of Ike Ekweremadu, 60, who is alleged to have conspired with family members and others to exploit the 21-year-old street trader from Lagos in harvesting his kidney.
The then-deputy president of the Nigerian is on trial alongside his wife Beatrice Ekweremadu, 56, their daughter Sonia and medical ‘middleman’ Dr Obinna Obeta.They all deny conspiracy to arrange the travel of another person with a view to exploitation.
Sonia had a ‘significant and deteriorating’ kidney condition which could be managed through dialysis but cured with a transplant.
Ike Ekweremadu, 60, is on trial alongside his wife Beatrice Ekweremadu, 56, their daughter Sonia, 25.All three deny conspiracy to arrange the travel of another person with a view to exploitation
The prosecution claims the procedure was not legal as the potential organ donor was a street trader from Lagos who had no altruistic motive or family connection with the recipient.
The Old Bailey has been told it was a ‘transactional’ deal, with the man to be paid up to 3.5m Naira, the equivalent of £7,000,for the harvesting of his body part and the promise of opportunities in the UK.
He was tested in Nigeria and found to be a match for Sonia before being brought to the UK.
The jury heard that Ms Agbasonu, who worked as a medical secretary at the clinic and spoke Igbo, stepped in to interpret during an initial meeting on February 24 between Dr Peter Dupont and eVDeN EvE nakliyaT the donor from Nigeria.
The consultant had concluded the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was not an appropriate candidate and appeared relived that the transplant would not take place.
However, according to messages from others, Ms Agbasonu appeared to agree to manipulate a second meeting to the advantage of the Ekweremadu family.
Mr Ekweremadu’s brother Diwe, who had medical training, allegedly sent Sonia Ekweremadu advice from the interpreter to show a clear family connection with the donor.
Ike, a former barrister, is a member of the centre-right Peoples Democratic Party and was the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate for three consecutive terms
Beatrice (pictured) said the donor had been found via a third party. She stated that she was ‘devastated’ when further tests after his arrival in the UK found he was not a match
He allegedly said: ‘Ebere said it would be easier to establish that his mum and your mum are sisters.If we stretch it to the grandmum and grandmum the relationship will be too distant. If you adored this short article and you would certainly such as to receive more details regarding Evden evE NaKLiYat kindly browse through our own web-site. ‘
Ms Ekweremadu allegedly replied with: ‘Ok, that’s fine.’
Diwe then allegedly laid out a financial agreement with her father, saying: ‘I’ve met the Igbo interpreter.She agreed to work with us. She will be involved in coaching the boy, and during his consultation and interviews she will be providing the relevant interpretation.
‘She insisted that I give her £1,500. I think the just position themselves to exploit people.’
It is claimed the potential donor was told to pretend to be Sonia’s cousin.
Diwe is also alleged to have said: ‘We had a meeting today with her so I’ve introduced her to Chinoso (Sonia) and (the donor).She advised that (the donor) comes to the hospital on Tuesday and Thursday while Chinoso (Sonia) is having her dialysis.
‘Psychologically everyone in the team will have to accept that he’s really committed to his cousin’s health and it usually makes it easier to accept the person for the procedure.’
Prosecutor Hugh Davies KC suggested to the court the messages demonstrated the opposite of an altruistic organ donation.
Ike has denied all the allegations and said he had not arranged the travel of anyone to the UK
Beatrice Ekweremadu (fron) and Sonia Ekweremadu (behind) at the Old Bailey
The court heard that the potential donor and interpreter attended a meeting with a surgeon at the hospital on March 11.
After the meeting, Diwe allegedly messaged Ms Ekweremadu’s father, saying: ‘I have spoken with (the interpreter).She said the boy did better today but he’s still showing so much timidity.
‘She covered up for him and added the words as much as possible. The surgeon will discuss with Dr Dupont and they will communicate us. They will continue to work on the boy’s confidence.Ebere and Obinna.’
But, the surgeon agreed with the initial assessment made by Dr Dupont that the donor was unsuitable. Ms Ekweremadu was informed of the decision on March 29.
Mr Davies told the court the interpreter was also involved in Dr Obeta’s own transplant.
The jury heard that Dr Obeta, also on trial with the family, Evden EVE NakliyaT had secured a kidney transplant at the Royal Free Hospital in 2021, with a donor EvdeN evE NakLiYAT purporting to be his cousin.
Mr Davies told jurors an affidavit was the only evidence of a relation between the two men.
‘Whatever the truth of any of that, the basis of his transplant process provided a clear model for what Sonia needed in her moment of crisis,’ he told the court.
Jurors heard that Dr Obeta had trained at medical school with Diwe, who remains in Nigeria and is not on trial.
Medical ‘middleman’ Dr Obinna Obeta (pictured) is also on trial with the family at the Old Bailey
Ike Ekweremadu (left) and wife Beatrice Ekweremadu (right) are on trial at the Old Bailey
*
Surge in mental health problems worst among girls
*
Lawyers zone in on algorithm designs, whistleblower leaks
*
Others see platforms as scapegoat for society’s woes
By Avi Asher-Schapiro
LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At about the time her daughter reached the age of 12, American health executive Laurie saw her once confident, happy child turning into someone she barely recognized.At first, she thought a bad case of adolescent angst was to blame.
Initially, her daughter had trouble sleeping and grappled with episodes of self-loathing and anxiety, but by the time she was 14, she had started cutting herself and was having suicidal thoughts.
Without Laurie knowing, she had been sneaking away her confiscated smartphone and spending hours online at night, trawling through posts about self-harm and eating disorders on social media platforms.
“One day she said to me: ‘Mom, I’m going to hurt myself badly if I don’t get help,'” Laurie said as she described the mental health crises that have plagued her daughter for the last two years, disrupting her education and devastating the family’s finances.
She asked to use only her first name in order to protect the identity of her daughter.
Paying for her daughter’s care – therapists, a psychiatrist, and multiple residential treatment facilities across the country – has nearly bankrupted Laurie, who recently sold her house in California and moved to a cheaper home in another state.
In August, she filed a lawsuit on behalf of her daughter against the social media platforms she blames for the ordeal: Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
The case is one of dozens of similar U.S.lawsuits which argue that, when it comes to children, social media is a dangerous product – like a car with a faulty seat-belt – and that tech companies should be held to account and pay for the resulting harms.
“Before (she used) social media, there was no eating disorder, there was no mental illness, there was no isolation, there was no cutting, none of that,” Laurie told the Thomson Reuters Foundation about her daughter, who is identified as C.W.in the suit.
Don Grant, a psychologist who specializes in treating children with mental health issues linked to digital devices, said Laurie’s predicament is increasingly common.
“It’s like every night, kids all over the country sneak out of their houses and go to play in the sewers under the city with no supervision. That’s what being online can be like,” he said.
“You think just because your kids are sitting in your living room they’re safe – but they’re not.”
Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc, Snap Inc, which owns Snapchat, and TikTok declined to comment on individual lawsuits, but said they prioritized children’s safety online.
Meta executives, under criticism over internal data showing its Instagram app damaged the mental health of teenagers, have highlighted the positive impacts of social media, and their efforts to better protect young users.
ASBESTOS, TOBACCO, EvdeN EVe NaKLiyAt SOCIAL MEDIA?
Laurie is represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a firm co-founded by veteran trial lawyer Matt Bergman, who won hundreds of millions of dollars suing makers of the building material asbestos for concealing its linkage with cancer in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Bergman decided to turn his attention to social media after former Facebook executive Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal company documents in 2021 that showed the company had some knowledge of the potential harm its products could cause.
“These companies make the asbestos industry look like a bunch of Boy Scouts,” Bergman said.
Facebook has said the Haugen papers have been mischaracterized and taken out of context, and that Wall Street Journal articles based on them “conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees”.
Bergman’s firm has signed up more than 1,200 clients including Laurie over the past year, taking out television ads asking families who worry about their children’s social media use to get in touch on a toll-free hotline.
In addition to more than 70 cases involving child suicide, the firm has collected over 600 cases linked to eating disorders.Dozens more accuse social media firms of failing to prevent sex trafficking on their platforms, or stem from accidental deaths after children attempted viral stunts allowed to spread online.
In late 2022, 80 similar federal suits from 35 different jurisdictions were consolidated together and are now being considered by the U.S.District Court for the Northern District of California.
Laurie’s suit is part of a similar bundle of suits filed in California state courts.
HIDING BEHIND SECTION 230
None of these cases – or any of those filed by Bergman – have yet to be heard by a jury, and it is not clear if they ever will.
First, he has to get past Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that provides technology companies some legal immunity for content published on their platform by third parties.
Courts routinely cite the provision when they dismiss lawsuits against social media firms, which prevents the cases from moving on to trial.
In October, for example, a court in Pennsylvania blocked a lawsuit against TikTok brought on behalf of a child who died after suffocating themselves doing a so-called blackout challenge that was widely shared on the video-sharing site.
When it was enacted in the 1990s, Section 230 was intended to shield the nascent tech industry from being crushed under waves of lawsuits, providing space for companies to experiment with platforms that encouraged user-generated content.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, a lawyer with the Social Media Victims Law Center who is taking the lead on Laurie’s case, said she believed her cases could be won if a court agreed to hear them.
“The moment we get to litigate … and move forward, it’s game over,” she said.
Bergman and Marquez-Garrett are part of growing cohort of lawyers who think Section 230 is no longer tenable, as political pressure builds on the issue.
President Joe Biden has voiced support for “revoking” Section 230, and politicians in both parties have proposed legislation that would scrap or tweak the provision. But so far, no reform packages have gained traction, shifting the focus of reform efforts to litigation.
“We aren’t talking about small companies experimenting with new technology; we’re talking about huge companies who have built harmful products,” Bergman said.
Bergman and his team say the harm to their clients is not primarily about harmful speech that just so happened to be posted online, but that it can directly be attributed to design decisions made by the tech companies.
His lawsuits focus on the building of algorithms that maximize the amount of time children spend online and push them towards harmful content; the way friend recommendation features can introduce children to predatory adults – as well as the lax controls for parents who want to restrict access.
“These lawsuits are about specific design decisions social media platforms have made to maximize profit over safety,” Bergman said.
Asked by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to comment on the company’s product designs, Meta sent an emailed statement from its global head of safety, Antigone Davis, who said the company takes children’s safety seriously.
“We want teens to be safe online. We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences,” the statement read.
A Snap spokesperson did not comment directly on the pending litigation, adding in a statement that “nothing is more important to us than the wellbeing of our community.”
“We curate content from known creators and publishers and use human moderation to review user generated content before it can reach a large audience, which greatly reduces the spread and discovery of harmful content,” the statement added.
‘FOR PARENTS EVERYWHERE’
Laurie’s lawsuit – which was filed in late August in the Superior Court of Los Angeles – alleges that TikTok, Meta and Snap, are “contributing to the burgeoning mental health crisis perpetrated upon the children and teenagers of the United States.”
“I’m doing this for parents everywhere,” she said.
A sharp increase in depression and suicide among U.S.teenagers coincided with a surge in social media use about a decade ago, though a slew of research has reached mixed conclusions about a possible link.
Bergman is not the first lawyer to try to bring a tech firm to court for building an allegedly harmful product.
Carrie Goldberg, a New York-based lawyer, helped to popularize the notion that social media software is essentially like any other consumer product – and that harms it causes in the real world should open up manufacturers to lawsuits.
In 2017, she sued the dating app Grindr on behalf of Matthew Herrick, a man who was stalked and threatened online by an ex-boyfriend, but could not get Grindr to block his harasser.
Goldberg argued that Grindr’s decision to make it difficult to kick harassers off the app should open the company up to some liability as designers of the product, but the court disagreed – ruling that Grindr merely facilitated communications, and was therefore protected under Section 230.
“I couldn’t get in front of a jury,” Goldberg recalled, saying that if such cases were allowed to proceed to trial, they would likely succeed.
A lot has changed in the last five years, she said: the public has become less trusting of social media companies and courts have started to entertain the notion that lawyers should be able to sue tech platforms in the same way as providers of other consumer products or services.
In 2021, the 9th Circuit Court in California ruled that Snap could potentially be held liable for the deaths of two boys who died in a high-speed car accident that took place while they were using a Snapchat filter that their families say encouraged reckless driving.
In October, the U.S.Supreme Court decided to hear a case against Google that accuses its YouTube video platform of materially supporting terrorism due to the algorithmic recommendation of videos by the Islamic State militant group.
Legal experts said that case could set an important precedent for how Section 230 applies to the content recommendations that platforms’ algorithms make to users – including those made to children such as Laurie’s daughter.
“The pendulum has really swung,” Goldberg said.”People no longer trust these products are operating in the public good, and the courts are waking up.”
Outside the United States, the balance has shifted still further, and is beginning to be reflected both in consumer lawsuits and regulation.
In September, a British government inquest faulted social media exposure for the suicide of a 14-year-old girl, and lawmakers are poised to implement stringent rules for age verification for social media firms.
But aside from a recent bill in California that mandates “age appropriate design” decisions, efforts in the United States to pass new laws governing digital platforms have largely faltered.
Trial lawyers like Bergman say that leaves the issue in their hands.
CONSENT AND CONTROL
Laurie’s daughter got her first cellphone in the sixth grade, when she started taking the bus to school alone.When her mental health began to deteriorate soon after, her mother did not initially make a connection.
“In many ways I was a helicopter parent,” Laurie said. “I did everything right – I put the phone in the cupboard at night, we spoke about the appropriate use of technology around the dinner table.”
Now, Laurie knows her daughter had secretly opened multiple social media accounts in an attempt to evade her mother’s vigilance, spending hours connected at night in her bedroom.
Laurie soon realized her daughter was wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover up cutting scars on her arms.
“When I asked her about it, she said, “Mom, there are videos showing you how to do it on TikTok, and Snapchat – they show you what tools to use.”
TikTok and Snap said harmful content is not allowed on their platforms, and they take steps to remove it.
With her self-esteem plummeting, Laurie’s daughter was introduced to older users on Snapchat and Instagram who sought to groom and sexually exploit her – including requesting sexually explicit images from her, according to her lawyers.
Although Laurie wanted to keep her daughter offline, social media platforms designed their products “to evade parental consent and control,” her lawsuit alleges.
A Meta spokesperson pointed to a number of recent initiatives to give parents control over their children’s online activity, including a “Family Center,” introduced in 2022, which allows parents to monitor and limit time spent on Instagram.
Laurie’s daughter surreptitiously opened five Instagram, six Snapchat and three TikTok accounts, according to her lawsuit, many before she turned 13 – the age when social media firms can allow minors to open accounts.
“There was no way for me to contact all these companies and say, eVDEn eVE NakLiYaT ‘don’t let my daughter log in,'” Laurie said.
Though Laurie wanted to further restrict her daughter’s social media access, she was concerned that – since all her classmates were communicating on the apps – her daughter would feel socially excluded without them.
ENDLESS SCROLLING
Laurie’s daughter is just one data point in a trend that psychologists have been trying to make sense of over the last decade.
Between the years of 2012 and 2015, U.S. teenagers reporting symptoms of depression increased by 21% – the number was double for girls, said Jean Twenge, an American psychologist and researcher studying mental health trends.
Three times as many 12- to 14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, Twenge said.
Until about 10 years ago, cases involving depression, self-harm and anxiety had been stable for decades, said Grant, the psychologist.
“Then we see this big spike around 2012 – what happened in 2011?The advent of Snapchat and Instagram,” he said.
One driver of this trend, researchers say, is social comparison – the way that products including Instagram and TikTok are engineered to push users to constantly compare themselves to their peers in a way that can torpedo self-esteem.
“She’d say “Mom, I’m ugly, I’m fat”,” Laurie recalled of her daughter. “Keep in mind: she’s 98 pounds (44 kg), and 5 foot 5 (165 cm).”
“So I’d ask her, ‘why do you think this?’ And she’d say, ‘because I posted a photo and only four people liked it’.”
Grant said he sees children hooked by very specific design choices that social media companies have made.
“Just think about endless scrolling – that’s based on the motion of slot machines – addictive gambling,” said Grant, who spent years treating adult addiction before turning his focus to children’s technology use.
Still, mental health experts are divided on the interplay between children’s mental health and social media use.
“Social media is often a scapegoat,” said Yalda Uhls, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
“It’s easier to blame (it) than the systematic issues in our society – there’s inequality, racism, climate change, and there’s parenting decisions too.”
While some children may attribute a mental health challenge to social media, others say the opposite. Polling by Pew in November showed that less than 10% of teens said social media was having a “mostly negative” impact on their lives.
There are still big gaps in research into concepts such as social media addiction and digital harm to children, said Jennifer King, a research fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
“But the internal research – the Frances Haugen documents – are damning,” she said. “And of course, it was shark bait for trial lawyers.”
INHERENTLY DANGEROUS?
Toney Roberts was watching CNN at 2 a.m. on a winter’s evening in early 2022, when he saw an advertisement he never expected to see.
A woman on screen invited parents to call a 1-800 number if they had a “child (who) suffered a mental health crisis, eating disorder, attempted or completed suicide or was sexually exploited through social media.”
“I thought, wait, this is what happened to our daughter,” he recalled.
It had been more than a year since he found his 14-year-old daughter Englyn hanging in her room. She eventually died from her injuries.
Roberts later discovered that his daughter had viewed a video depicting the specific suicide method on Instagram, and that in the months leading up to her death she had been sucked into an online world of self-harm content, and abuse.
He began to comb through his daughter’s phone, creating a dossier of her mental health spiral, which he attributed to her use of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
To his distress, he found the video that may have played a part in her death was still circulating on Instagram for months after she died.
Meta declined to comment on the Roberts case, but said in an emailed statement that the company does not “allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.”
After Roberts called the 1-800 number, Bergman and Marquez-Garrett flew to Louisiana to meet the family, and last July, he and his wife Brandy sued the three social media companies.
“I didn’t want my daughter to be a statistic,” Roberts said, adding that the user who created the video he thinks inspired his daughter’s suicide still has an active Instagram account.
TikTok and Snapchat also declined to comment on the case.
Bergman often compares his cases against social media platforms to the avalanche of lawsuits that targeted tobacco companies in the 1950s onwards: lawyers only began winning cases after leaked documents showed advance knowledge of cancer-causing chemicals.
In Laurie’s case, for example, the lawsuit cites documents made public by Haugen showing an internal Facebook conversation about how 70% of the reported “adult/minor exploitation” on the platform could be traced back to recommendations made through the “People You May Know” feature.
Another employee suggests in the same message board that the tool should be disabled for children.
Meta did not directly respond to a request for comment on the document.
Since the so-called Facebook Papers were first published in September 2021, Meta has made a number of changes, including restricting the ability of children to message adults who Instagram flags as “suspicious. In case you loved this article and you would like to receive much more information concerning evDeN EvE naKliyAT i implore you to visit the page. “
But at the time Laurie’s daughter was using social media, none of the platforms had meaningful restrictions on the ability of adults to message children, her lawyers say, a design choice they argue should open the companies up to legal liability.
Bergman said facts like this illustrate social media litigation should become the next “Big Tobacco.”
Some other lawyers are not convinced by the parallel, however.
“For every person that gets harmed or hurt in real ways, I suspect there are literally millions who have no problems at all, and are having a great time on the platform,” said Jason Schultz, director of New York University’s Tech Law and Policy Clinic.
“Courts are going to have to ask: is this really an inherently dangerous thing?”
DESIGN DECISIONS
King, for her part, agrees that design choices made by the platforms are problematic.
“There’s growing evidence that the companies made design decisions that were so skewed toward promoting engagement, that they can lead users to very harmful places,” she said.
John Villasenor, the co-director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy, said it could be hard to distinguish between a well-designed algorithm and one that might under some circumstances promote addictive behaviors.
“It’s not unreasonable for platforms to build digital products that encourage more engagement,” he said.
“And if someone is prone to addiction, and can’t stop using it – is that always the platform’s fault?”
In late 2022, Laurie’s daughter returned home after spending a chunk of her high school years in residential treatment centers.
Each week, she sits down with her mother so they can go through everything she has posted on Instagram – the only social media platform Laurie decided to let her keep using, so she could still connect with her friends.
Today, she is doing much better, Laurie said.”I feel like I have my daughter back.”
Originally published at: website (Reporting by Avi Asher-Schapiro @AASchapiro; Editing by Helen Popper. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. Visit website