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Comment by duringmath | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that these lawsuits are based on junk and non existent science, so just because they're being sued it doesn't mean there's any merit to it. It only means that law firms, ambulance chasers, and grandstanding politicians are using some misplaced anger against Facebook et al to make a buck or raise their political profiles.

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These lawsuits are from the actual states by their Attorney Generals in federal court.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

AGs are elected politicians they campaign on this kind of stuff, so them being behind this particular suit doesn't legitimize it but probably the opposite.

They don't bring lawsuits that they can't win. I can't name one case they lost.

Are you serious? AGs lose cases all the time (often they get settled out of court though). It's a trivial google search away to find examples

Settling is losing for the company. Company has to pay millions or even tens of millions on fines and be subjected to strong injunctive actions. Since I suck at google, find me a company that won a court case against a state in federal court.

If people voted for them and they do this then that is the system working as it should be. Society isn't run by an elite group of the learned.

Let's assume that the lawsuits are poorly constructed. That does not necessarily mean that Facebook is harmless. It just means these lawsuits aren't sufficient to prove harm.

Consider this analogy: Just because the DA doesn't have enough evidence to convict in a murder trial, that doesn't mean that the defendant is innocent. I just means they haven't been proven guilty.

We tend to presume innocence until proven otherwise.

Presuming innocence doesn't make him actually, literally innocent. The reality of what happened is what it is, regardless of whether anybody can prove it to a legal standard.

Also, when you say "We tend to presume innocence", that's not really true. It's true (or is supposed to be true) for the government and people who want to be civically responsible, but a whole lot of the general population does not actually think this way. People think OJ did it, have various theories about who killed JFK, etc. People read the news about somebody accused of murder and think "yeah, that guy probably did it."

Sure. That’s why they’re suing. To prove it in court.

Not in the court of public opinion. People are allowed to judge guilt/innocence for themselves well in advance of being legally proven. Cynicism about modern day capitalism is thoroughly justified. The track record of ad-tech companies to "do the right thing" is really bad.

It's up to Meta to handle PR on such things. Unfortunately when your company is accused of, for instance, contributing to a genocide, your PR department probably doesn't have a lot of options.

Unfortunately we also agreed to have dmca.

In your original comment, you suggest "misplaced anger against Facebook". Many people hold the belief that Facebook's products are harmful to children.

Following from that, I can imagine a few viewpoints: 0) Parents are wrong, Facebook is awesome! 1) Facebook has violated existing laws (these lawsuits are exploring that space). 2) Parents should be frustrated with legislators for failing to regulate social media. 3) Parents should be angry with themselves for allowing their children to use Facebook's products.

I'm curious which (if any) of these viewpoints you hold.

Whether courts can pin that sentiment down against prior laws may determine if these "lawsuits have merit" as you say, but the concern and calls for action exist and are growing regardless of how the lawsuits happen to settle.

All these companies know they're a target for accountability now, and even many people inside of them acknowledge a need for reform and possibly restitution. Your comment seems focused on the practical matters of these lawsuits (many of which probably are frivolous or will otherwise be lost), but what really matters are the unsettled societal costs that transcend them.

You may feel that accountability is being "misplaced", but it's much bigger than ambulance chasers and grandstanders. People are genuinely concerned about real problems and are hungry for some kind of action on them.

The abdication of parenteral responsibility is another element here.

Social media is harmless, so it's the parents' fault for not restricting their child's use of social media? You can't have this one both ways. If there is a parental responsibility, it is incurred because social media can be harmful, which creates a cause for action.

There’s only so much a parent can do when schools hand out Chromebooks then don’t enforce any proper-use policy. My kid watched anime all day, every day, and there was nothing I could do about it. The school just took a Wonka-esque “No. Stop. Don’t.” approach.

In other conversational contexts on this forum, people laugh and gloat about how ineffectual parental control over internet consumption is. Kids find a way, any attempt to lock things down will be quickly circumvented as kids turn computer hacker to access the unfiltered internet. But as soon as the conversation turns to regulating tech businesses, we get people like you pretending that parents have all the responsibility and can easily ban their kids from social media if they simply bothered to try and that failure to do so is nothing more than the product of parental neglect.

The same plays out with "just talk to your kids". In conversations about regulating businesses, the narrative is that parents can simply talk to their kids and persuade them to not use social media. But in other conversations, the narrative is that kids are naturally rebellious and have a strong "always do the opposite of what my parents suggest" instinct.

> these lawsuits are based on junk and non existent science

Unfortunately the studies are reasonably solid. They aren't double-blind control group studies but they are correlative, so not the highest most pure studies. Social media use seems to be heavily correlated with depression and other markers of mental illness and struggle.

That isn't very surprising - social media networks are designed for "engagement" and that comes from strong negative emotions. If you constantly bombard someone with a drip feed of negative emotions.. that probably does them harm.

This doesn't mean the litigants will prevail because correlation and causation aren't 1:1 but it's probably a good idea to push your kid away from social media by explaining this to them.

Do you honestly believe social media has no impact on teen mental health, whether it be related to self esteem or inability to concentrate? It doesn't seem like a stretch to me at all.

I'm not saying it doesn't, but people argued the same thing w.r.t. violence and video games 20 years ago and that turned out to be a nothingburger. But yet on first glance how can shooting 1000s of people virtually not encourage you to do the same in real life? So we should be skeptical of claims made from "gut feelings".

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