A U.S. appeals court on Monday allowed thousands of lawsuits to move forward against Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, and other social media companies over claims they designed their products to be addictive to young users.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the companies’ bid to reverse a lower court’s ruling forcing them to face more than 3,000 lawsuits over the claims filed in federal court, concluding that the appeal came too early in the litigation.
I just can’t get behind suits like this.
There’s never been any rules on limits of how much fun or entertainment is too much fun or entertainment in the digital world. Getting sued for someone wanting to do something too much? How many people have to cross the threshold of doing something to an unhealthy degree before it’s too many and turns illegal? Or turns to be able to sue. “Your app\game\tech made me want to be on it all the time, so I’m suing you because I want to use it too much”
Where’s the limit for this? Should blizzard get sued for world of warcraft? Clash of Clans? All of at least the US was addicted to TV for decades. Do we sue Sony for making the TV, or do we sue Fox because the new episode of the X Files had to be watched so I couldn’t go out Friday night at 9pm?
Where is the limit supposed to be? I despise Meta, but it doesn’t mean I want some bullshit precedent to be set to put some gray area upper limit on how good something is allowed to be before it causes legal issues.