EVDEN eVe nAKLiyaT<\/a> there are videos showing you how to do it on TikTok, and Snapchat – they show you what tools to use.”<\/p>\nTikTok and Snap said harmful content is not allowed on their platforms, and they take steps to remove it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Although Laurie wanted to keep her daughter offline, social media platforms designed their products “to evade parental consent and control,” her lawsuit alleges.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“There was no way for me to contact all these companies and say, ‘don’t let my daughter log in,'” Laurie said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
ENDLESS SCROLLING<\/p>\n
Laurie’s daughter is just one data point in a trend that psychologists have been trying to make sense of over the last decade.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Three times as many 12- to 14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, Twenge said.<\/p>\n
Until about 10 years ago, cases involving depression, self-harm and anxiety had been stable for decades, said Grant, the psychologist.<\/p>\n
“Then we see this big spike around 2012 – what happened in 2011?The advent of Snapchat and Instagram,” he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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).”<\/p>\n
“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’.”<\/p>\n
Grant said he sees children hooked by very specific design choices that social media companies have made.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
Still, mental health experts are divided on the interplay between children’s mental health and social media use.<\/p>\n
“Social media is often a scapegoat,” said Yalda Uhls, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“But the internal research – the Frances Haugen documents – are damning,” she said. “And of course, it was shark bait for trial lawyers.”<\/p>\n
INHERENTLY DANGEROUS?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
“I thought, wait, this is what happened to our daughter,” he recalled.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
TikTok and Snapchat also declined to comment on the case.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Another employee suggests in the same message board that the tool should be disabled for children.<\/p>\n
Meta did not directly respond to a request for comment on the document.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Bergman said facts like this illustrate social media litigation should become the next “Big Tobacco.”<\/p>\n
Some other lawyers are not convinced by the parallel, however.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“Courts are going to have to ask: is this really an inherently dangerous thing?”<\/p>\n
DESIGN DECISIONS<\/p>\n
King, for her part, agrees that design choices made by the platforms are problematic.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“It’s not unreasonable for platforms to build digital products that encourage more engagement,” he said.<\/p>\n
“And if someone is prone to addiction, and can’t stop using it – is that always the platform’s fault?”<\/p>\n
In late 2022, Laurie’s daughter returned home after spending a chunk of her high school years in residential treatment centers.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Today, she is doing much better, Laurie said.”I feel like I have my daughter back.”<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As concern grows over social media, U.S.Should you have almost any concerns relating to where by and also the way to utilize EVdEn EvE NAkLiYat, you’ll be able to e mail us in the website. lawsuits stack up * Surge in mental health problems worst among girls * Lawyers zone in on algorithm designs, whistleblower […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19927,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5113],"tags":[5078],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72843,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72842\/revisions\/72843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.announcement.news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}