When you can be held liable for surfacing the wrong (for unclear definitions of wrong) content to the wrong person, even Google could be held liable. Imagine if this child found a blackout video on the fifth page of their search results on "blackout". After all, YouTube hosted such videos as well.
That's one hell of a specific accusation - that they looked at her age alone and determined solely based on that to show her that specific video?
First off, at 10, she should have had an age-gated account that shows curated content specifically for children. There's nothing to indicate that her parents set up such an account for her.
Also, it's well understood that Tiktok takes a user's previously watched videos into account when recommending videos. It can identify traits about the people based off that (and by personal experience, I can assert that it will lock down your account if it thinks you're a child), but they have no hard data on someone's age. Something about her video history triggered displaying this video (alongside thousands of other videos).
Finally, no, the girl did not do a search (that we're aware of). But would the judge's opinion have changed? I don't believe so, based off of their logic. TikTok used an algorithm to recommend a video. TikTok uses that same algorithm with a filter to show search results.
In any case, a tragedy happened. But putting the blame on TikTok seems more like an attack on TikTok and not an attempt to reign in the industry at large.
Plus, at some point, we have to ask the question: where were the parents in all of this?
Anyways.
You can of course choose not to believe the judges saying it matters for them, but it becomes a very different discussion...
I suppose I did not phrase that very carefully. What I meant is that they chose to surface the video because a specific young girl visited the site -- one who had a specific history of watched videos.
> In any case, a tragedy happened. But putting the blame on TikTok seems more like an attack on TikTok and not an attempt to reign in the industry at large.
It's always going to start with one case. This could be protectionism but it very well could instead be the start of reining in the industry.
Chronological order, location based, posts-by-followed-accounts, etc. "Most liked", etc.
Essentially by only using 'simple' algorithms.
(And as an addendum, even if you think the answer to that is no, do you trust a judge who can probably barely work an iphone to come to the same conclusion, with your company in the crosshairs?)
And for the addendum, that's why we have hearings and experts. No judge can be expected to be knowledgable about everything in life.