Tech Policy Press - Courts Find Platforms Addictive and Dangerous by Design
CMDG director Courtney Radsch explains that courts are beginning to hold Meta, TikTok, and other platforms accountable for harmful design choices that allegedly prioritized engagement over child safety, challenging their ability to hide behind Section 230.
In a landmark ruling last Thursday, a New Mexico judge not only ordered Meta to pay an additional fine of more than half a billion dollars in a case about teen mental health and child exploitation but also imposed a slew of safety measures aimed at mitigating harmful design features that could have repercussions for child safety everywhere. The fine—in what appears to be the first case in which a platform has been determined to be a “public nuisance”—will not go to the state's coffers, but to therapists, screening, and treatment for the teenagers New Mexico says Instagram already hurt. Courts tend to write remedies like that when they've decided the harm wasn't an accident but rather part of a company’s business plan.
While Meta says it will appeal, the ruling could set a precedent with consequences not only for the parent company of Instagram and Facebook but also for other social media companies. Especially since this is only one of many cases that 41 state attorney generals have filed against Meta for addiction and harm, and a California district court denied a preliminary injunction sought by Meta, Google, and TikTok on First Amendment grounds to prevent enforcement of the state’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act.
Meta is not the only tech corporation that knew the design of its platform caused harm and nonetheless failed to warn the public about the dangers, particularly to children. Last week, Bloomberg reported on an internal TikTok document marked "privileged and confidential" and under a court-ordered seal that provides a forensic reconstruction, built by TikTok's own safety and algorithm teams, of the watch history in the final weeks in the life of 16-year-old Chase Nasca, who died after he stepped in front of a train in February 2022. The document seems to answer a question his mother had been asking since the death of her son, who had no history of mental illness and left no note. She went through his account and found it feeding him videos about suicide, including by train. Why him? The company's own reviewers found the answer when members of TikTok’s safety and algorithm teams deep-dived into his feed: Chase's account had been swept into an internal experiment, and TikTok's safety filters were not applied to his account. They had not taken effect "by design."
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