The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said \u201cthe floodgates are open\u201d for more legal cases against tech giants after Google and Meta were found liable for a woman\u2019s social media addiction in a landmark lawsuit.<\/p>\n
A jury in Los Angels found Instagram, which is owned by Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Google, were responsible for harm caused to the 20-year-old \u2013 awarding her $6m in damages.<\/p>\n
Meta and Google both said they disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s been seen as a bellwether decision that will inform hundreds more cases against social media companies for creating addictive algorithms.<\/p>\n
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said \u201caccountability has finally arrived\u201d and declared: \u201cThe question is no longer whether social media must change \u2013 it\u2019s when, and how fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018The floodgates are now open\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n In a statement, Harry and Meghan hailed the \u201clandmark\u201d court verdict as a victory \u201cfor families, advocates, and young people everywhere \u2013 and a powerful message that justice has caught up to Big Tech\u201d.<\/p>\n They said the case had \u201cpulled back the curtain\u201d and \u201cconfirmed what parents and experts have said all along: the harm isn\u2019t in parenting, it\u2019s in product design\u201d.<\/p>\n They said that the outcome had \u201cchanged the conversation about tech accountability forever\u201d, adding: \u201cThe floodgates are now open. There will be more cases, more demands for reform, and more insistence on responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n How the case unfolded<\/strong><\/p>\n After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, California jurors decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms.<\/p>\n The jury also decided each company\u2019s negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the woman, who has remained anonymous.<\/p>\n The trial, which lasted around a month and ended on Wednesday when the verdict was delivered, centred around arguments that Instagram and YouTube (and TikTok and Snapchat, but they settled out of court) were built to be addictive and were therefore harmful.<\/p>\n It focused on the case of KGM, or Kaley, as she was called in court, a now 20-year-old Californian who says she developed a number of mental health issues after using social media from a young age.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you make a child never put down the phone? That\u2019s called the engineering of addiction,\u201d her lawyer, Mark Lanier, told the jury.<\/p>\n \u201cThey engineered it, they put these features on the phones. These are Trojan horses: They look wonderful and great\u2026but you invite them in and they take over.\u201d<\/p>\n Tech bosses take the stand<\/strong><\/p>\n The trial saw Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg take the stand in front of a jury for the first time.<\/p>\n During his testimony, the tech billionaire insisted that he built his platforms \u201cto have a positive impact in people\u2019s lives\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very important to me that what we do [\u2026] is a positive force in their lives,\u201d he told the jury.<\/p>\n Instagram boss Adam Mosseri was also called into court and told the jury there was no scientific evidence that social media was addictive.<\/p>\n He said it was important to differentiate between clinical addiction and what he, and others at Instagram, describe as \u201cproblematic use\u201d.<\/p>\n When asked about the plaintiff spending 16 hours in one day on Instagram, he told the court: \u201cThat sounds like problematic use.\u201d<\/p>\n YouTube largely contested any claims it should be in court in the first place, arguing it doesn\u2019t count as social media and there was almost no suggestion in the evidence presented to the court that the plaintiff was addicted to the platform.<\/p>\n YouTube\u2019s lawyer Luis Li noted that the plaintiff said she lost interest in YouTube as she grew older.<\/p>\n \u201cAsk whether anybody suffering from addiction could just say, \u2018Yeah, I kinda lost interest,’\u201d Mr Li said in his closing statement. \u201cWhat\u2019s your common sense tell you about that?\u201d<\/p>\n Meta argued that the plaintiff\u2019s mental health difficulties had come from a troubled childhood and that \u201cnot one of her therapists identified social media as the cause\u201d of her problems.<\/p>\n More cases to come<\/strong><\/p>\n The trial is the first in a series of landmark cases against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap that are set to follow in the US.<\/p>\n More than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and over 250 school districts, accuse the companies of designing addictive products that have harmed young users.<\/p>\n Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, is representing more than 1,000 plaintiffs in the proceedings and told reporters before the verdict that simply taking the case to trial was a win in itself, according to Sky\u2019s partner network NBC News.<\/p>\n \u201cWin or lose the outcome of this trial, victims in the United States have won because now we know that social media companies can and will be held accountable before a fair and impartial jury,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd in some cases, plaintiffs will prevail, and in some they may not, but we are just gratified for the opportunity to get this far, and there will be many more trials in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said \u201cthe floodgates are open\u201d for more legal cases against tech giants after Google and Meta were found liable for a woman\u2019s social media addiction in a landmark lawsuit. A jury in Los Angels found Instagram, which is owned by Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Google, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":20714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financetrendreport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}