> He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.
I gotta admit, I find this really trivial and silly that this is how court cases go, but I understand that juries are filled of all sorts of people and lawyers I guess feel the need to really dumb things down? Or maybe it's the inner theater kid coming out?
The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.
The same will happen with expert witnesses; both bring in people willing to say virtually anything, for the right pay.
Whereas for jury members, the only people who could do that are other jury members, who would be just as clueless.
(I get that you don't want a jury with wildly different levels of domain knowledge. e.g. if you had one "expert" and the remainder being laymen, the expert could quickly dominate the entire jury - and there would be no one there to call out any bias from them)
This is absolutely not the case.
> and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Sure, and now the jury - with zero domain knowledge - sees two very confident sounding experts who disagree on a critical point... and you wind up with it coming down to which one was more likeable.
How can you tell if you're not also an expert?
> the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Yes, and when the science is beyond the experience of the jury, experts giving opposite opinions will be as hard to distinguish as conflicting non-expert witness testimony (or even the testimony of the defendant compared to the accuser or litigant).
In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.
My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.
It’s also not a great sign that they’re relying on such tricks and props to hook the jury. In stronger cases they’ll rely on actual facts and key evidence, not grand but abstract claims using props like this.
I don’t know how the rest of the opening remarks went, but from the article it looks like Meta’s lawyers are already leaning into the actual evidence (or lack thereof) that their products were central to the problems:
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
> "If you took Instagram away and everything else was the same in Kaley's life, would her life be completely different, or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?" Schmidt asked, pointing out an Instagram addiction is never mentioned in medical records included in the evidence.
Obviously this is HN and we’re supposed to assume social media is to blame for everything, but I would ask people to try not to be so susceptible to evidence-free narrative persuasion like the ABC trick. Similar tricks were used years ago when it was video games, not social media, in the crosshairs of lawyers looking to extract money and limit industries. Many of the arguments were the same, such as addicting children’s brains and being engineered to capture their attention.
There’s a lot of anger in the thread about Discord starting to require ID checks for some features, but large parts of HN aren’t making the connection to these lawsuits and cases as the driving factor behind these regulations. This is how it happens, but many are cheering it on without making the connection. Or they are welcoming regulations but they have a wishful thinking idea that they’re only going to apply to sites they don’t use and don’t like, without spilling over into their communication apps and other internet use.
I feel like this must be an indication of an inherent flaw with a society designed around the idea that litigation originates in an individual's singular harm received from a company, outside of I guess class action lawsuits, which to be fair, I don't know much about. But I'm reminded of the McDonald's coffee case, when McDonald's was able to leverage their incredible capital power to make that woman look like such a crazy litigious hysterical lady that people to this day use it as an example of how Americans are just inherently trivially litigious, when in reality, that coffee was just way too hot.
Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
Which is why Americans need to curb the lobbying power and communications power of trillion dollar corporations, and limit the rights corporations have versus the rights of human citizens.
Or if a company is too big to be held accountable, it needs to be broken up aggressively.
Social media technology, according to former employees, is intentionally engineered to capitalize on dependency, unbeknownst to the user, came with no rating system or warnings, and hosts real interactions not simulated ones.
I think they have a much better case here.
Fact is defined by whatever the jury believes.
I thought it was Always Be Closing.
> I guess feel the need to really dumb things down?
Or making things simple, emotional and memorable?