SAN FRANCISCO: Several social media companies agreed to pay about $27 million to a Kentucky school district as part of a settlement for a lawsuit blaming them for a student mental health crisis, according to court documents reviewed Monday by AFP. The sum included $9 million by Facebook parent company Meta; $8 million each from Snapchat parent Snap and ByteDance, which owns TikTok; and Google, whose portfolio includes YouTube, will pay around $2 million cash and offer training and software licenses valued at $900,000. The case was brought by the Breathitt County school district, a rural district in eastern Kentucky whose lawsuit had been chosen as a test case for more than 1,200 similar suits filed by school districts across the country. The district was seeking more than $60 million to fund a 15-year mental health program, as well as covering costs of remediating the effects of social media on its students, including sleep problems, emotional distress and conflicts. The case was set to go to trial later this month in Oakland, California when the four companies decided to settle. Google&#39;s offerings include an on-site professional development and training coach, a three-year license for its Google AI for Education software, a four-year &quot;Social Emotional Learning&quot; program and technical support of its Google Workspace tools. None of the settlements include any admission of wrongdoing. They are likely to increase pressure on the companies to settle the remaining cases, all of which are being overseen by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who recently presided over the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman. The settlements come after a series of legal rulings against social media companies. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for the addictive nature of their Instagram and YouTube platforms, setting a potential precedent that could impact future social media addiction lawsuits. That same month a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for exposing minors to inappropriate content and sexual predators. More than 30 states are also suing Meta over similar social media claims in a separate case that could go to trial in August in Oakland.

Artificial Intelligence

Several social media companies agree to pay about $27 million to a Kentucky school district as part of a settlement for a lawsuit blaming them for a student mental health crisis

Social media giants pay $27 mn in US school lawsuit settlement

LOS ANGELES: A Los Angeles jury on Wednesday found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young woman because of an addictive design of their social media platforms, ordering the companies to pay $6 million in damages, including $3 million in punitive damages. The verdict hands plaintiffs in more than a thousand similar pending cases significant leverage &mdash; and signals to the broader tech industry that juries are prepared to hold social media companies accountable for the mental health toll of their design choices. The jury answered yes to all seven questions on verdict forms for both companies, finding that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design and operation of their platforms and that their negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff. Jurors also found that both companies knew or should have known their services posed a danger to minors, that they failed to adequately warn users of that danger, and that a reasonable platform operator would have done so. The panel awarded $3 million in compensatory damages, assigning Meta 70 percent of the responsibility for the plaintiff&#39;s harm &mdash; a $2.1 million share &mdash; and YouTube the remaining 30%, or $900,000. In a second phase, jurors added a further $3 million in total punitive damages after finding both companies had acted with malice, oppression, or fraud. Both companies said they would appeal the verdict. &quot;This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,&quot; Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said. A spokesperson for Meta said they &quot;respectfully disagree with the verdict,&quot; adding that &quot;teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.&quot; Nine of the 12 jurors further found that both companies had acted with malice, oppression or fraud, a finding that set the stage for the separate punitive damages. The plaintiff, known in court documents by her initials K.G.M. and called Kaley at trial, began using YouTube when she was six, downloading the app on her iPod Touch to watch videos about lip gloss and an online kids&rsquo; game. She joined Instagram at nine, getting around a block her mother had put in place to keep her off the platform. She told jurors that her near-constant social media use &quot;really affected my self-worth,&quot; saying the apps led her to abandon hobbies, struggle to make friends, and constantly measure herself against others. In closing arguments, plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier cast the case as a story of corporate greed, saying that features like infinite scrolling, autoplay videos, notifications, and like counts were engineered to drive compulsive use among young people. &#39;Existential&#39; threat? Meta and YouTube had maintained throughout the trial that Kaley&#39;s mental health struggles had nothing to do with their platforms. Meta&#39;s lawyer pointed to her life at home and a turbulent relationship with her parents, while YouTube disputed how much time Kaley actually spent on its platform. The jury rejected both defenses across all seven questions on each verdict form. TikTok and Snap were originally named as defendants but settled on undisclosed terms before the trial got underway. Two further bellwether trials are expected to follow in the same Los Angeles courthouse, with their outcomes likely to determine whether social media companies fight on or move toward a broader settlement, potentially including redesigning how their platforms work. The penalty amounts are &quot;a slap on the wrist for companies like Meta and YouTube, which are two of the biggest ad sellers in the world,&quot; said Jasmine Enberg of Scalable, who tracks the social media industry. &quot;But if these companies are forced to redesign their products, that poses an existential threat to their business models.&quot; A separate New Mexico jury on Tuesday found Meta liable for endangering children by making them vulnerable to predators on its platforms and other dangers. The state had sought the maximum $2.2 billion in damages, but the jury awarded a lesser amount of $375 million.

Americas

Verdict signals to the broader tech industry that juries are prepared to hold social media companies accountable for the mental health toll of their design choices; separate New Mexico jury finds Meta liable for endangering children by making them vulnerable to predators on its platforms and other dangers.

US jury finds Meta, YouTube liable in social media addiction trial

LOS ANGELES: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday he regretted Meta&#39;s slow progress in identifying underage users on Instagram, as he faced stinging criticism at a landmark social media trial over accusations that his company deliberately hooked under-13s. Asked to comment on complaints from inside the company that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform, the 41-year-old head of Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, said improvements had been made. But &quot;I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner,&quot; he added. Zuckerberg was the most hotly anticipated witness in the California trial, the first in a series of cases that could set legal precedent for thousands of lawsuits filed by American families against social media platforms. The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath. Zuckerberg was very reserved at first, an AFP journalist in the courtroom reported. But he grew animated, showing signs of annoyance, shaking his head and waving his hands as he turned toward the jury. The 12 jurors in Los Angeles heard the increasingly testy testimony as plaintiff lawyer Mark Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on age verification and the tycoon&#39;s guiding philosophy for making decisions at the vast social media company he controls. Zuckerberg faced a barrage of internal emails, including warnings from colleagues that age verification was not fit for purpose and others that seemed to plainly display that encouraging more time spent on Instagram was long a central goal of the company. The trial is set to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, as well as Google-owned YouTube, bear responsibility for the mental health problems suffered by Kaley GM, a 20-year-old California resident who has been a heavy social media user since childhood. Kaley GM started using YouTube at age six, Instagram at nine, then TikTok and Snapchat. Under-13s are not allowed on Instagram, and Lanier pressed Zuckerberg on the fact that Kaley had easily signed up for the platform despite rules that were buried deep in the user agreement, which he said a child could not be expected to read. &#39;Right place now&#39; Zuckerberg was confronted with an internal document that said Instagram had four million users under 13 in 2015, at the time of the plaintiff&#39;s adoption of the app, and that 30% of all children age 10 to 12, or &quot;tweens,&quot; in the United States were users. Zuckerberg said that &quot;we&#39;re in the right place now&quot; when it comes to age verification, and that new tools and methods would be added over time. The platform now uses identification tools that help it verify a person&#39;s age, particularly based on content choices and interactions. Lanier went on to argue that young people like Kaley were subject to Meta&#39;s efforts to increase time spent on its wildly popular apps, despite Zuckerberg having told the US Congress under oath that this was not the case. Faced with emails displaying internal targets for usage, Zuckerberg admitted that &quot;we used to have goals around time,&quot; but that the company&#39;s aim was always to &quot;build useful services&quot; that connected people. Zuckerberg was also read an old email from his former head of public policy, Nick Clegg, that said &quot;the fact that we say we don&#39;t allow under-13s on our platform, yet have no way of enforcing it, is just indefensible.&quot; The trial is set to determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process. The case, along with two similar trials scheduled in Los Angeles this summer, aims to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fueling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people. TikTok and Snapchat, also named in the complaint, reached settlements with the plaintiff before the trial began.

The trial is set to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, as well as Google-owned YouTube, bear responsibility for the mental health problems suffered by Kaley GM, a 20-year-old California resident who has been a heavy social media user since childhood.

Zuckerberg grilled over underage users at social media trial

WASHINGTON: U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday extended a delay on enforcing a ban against TikTok until December 16.&nbsp;This marks the fourth postponement of a law designed to force the app&#39;s sale from its Chinese owner.The announcement, made through an executive order, came despite Trump telling reporters Tuesday that the United States and China had reached a deal over a new ownership structure for the hugely popular video-sharing app.The extension builds on previous delays issued in January, April and June as the administration navigates the complex legal and national security implications surrounding TikTok&#39;s operations in the United States.The latest delay was set to expire on Wednesday.&lsquo;We have a deal&rsquo;&quot;We have a deal on TikTok, I&#39;ve reached a deal with China, I&#39;m going to speak to President Xi (Jinping) on Friday to confirm everything up,&quot; Trump told reporters on Monday as he left the White House for a state visit to Britain.&quot;We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,&quot; Trump said, adding that he would &quot;hate to see value like that thrown out the window.&quot;China also confirmed what both sides on Monday called the &quot;framework&quot; of a deal that would be finalized in the phone call between the two leaders on Friday.TikTok &mdash; which boasts almost two billion global users &mdash; is owned by China-based ByteDance.According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok&#39;s U.S. business would be controlled by an investor consortium including cloud giant Oracle and venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, with the Chinese owners keeping 20% of the U.S. business.Both companies have very close ties to the Trump White House and Oracle already plays a major role in TikTok&#39;s U.S. infrastructure.Fate of TikTok&rsquo;s algorithm&nbsp;One of the major questions is the fate of TikTok&#39;s powerful algorithm that saw the app become one of the world&#39;s most popular sources of online entertainment.The preliminary deal was negotiated over two days of talks that ended Monday in Madrid between U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.Under the order, the U.S. Justice Department is prohibited from taking enforcement action not only during the extended period, but also retroactively for any conduct that occurred since the ban was originally to come into force, on January 19, 2025 &mdash; the day before Trump&#39;s inauguration.The legislation was designed to address national security concerns.The app has faced scrutiny from U.S. officials.TikTok has repeatedly denied sharing user data with Chinese authorities and has challenged various restrictions in federal court.<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;" id="isPasted">China terms deal a &#39;win-win&#39;,<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;" id="isPasted">&nbsp;will review app&#39;s technology and IP transfers<span style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Later in the day, China called the framework deal reached in Madrid a &quot;win-win&quot;, adding it would review TikTok&#39;s technology exports and intellectual property licensing, in a state media editorial.<span style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&quot;China reached the relevant consensus with the United States on the TikTok issue because it is based on the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation,&quot; the official People&#39;s Daily said in a commentary.<span style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The article was signed &quot;Zhong Sheng&quot; or &quot;Voice of China&quot;, a term the paper of the governing Communist Party uses to express views on foreign policy.<span style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&quot;China will review matters related to TikTok&#39;s technology exports and intellectual property licensing in accordance with the law,&quot; the commentary added.

Viral

China terms deal a 'win-win', will review app's technology and IP transfers.



Trump extends delay on U.S. TikTok ban until mid-December

Romesa Umar

ISLAMABAD: At least 14 people were killed and dozens injured in Kathmandu on Monday after police opened fire on protesters storming Nepal&rsquo;s Federal Parliament in response to a controversial social media ban, Reuters reported.The unrest broke out outside the parliament building, where thousands of mostly young demonstrators had gathered. Witnesses said police fired live rounds, rubber bullets, and tear gas after some protesters breached barricades, set fire to an ambulance, and attempted to enter the compound.Others hurled stones at security forces and transported the wounded away on motorcycles.The protests were sparked by the government&rsquo;s decision to block major social media platforms that failed to meet new regulatory requirements. Under the new policy, platforms were ordered to register with Nepal&rsquo;s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, open local offices, and appoint official representatives by a September 3 deadline.Platforms that complied and those blockedOfficials said apps like TikTok, Viber, and WeTalk complied with the rules. However, Meta-owned Messenger and others were blocked.A government official told Reuters that the restrictions aim to curb fake accounts and rising cybercrime, which authorities claim threaten national unity.Popularity of Social Media ApplicationsThe ban has hit Nepal&rsquo;s diaspora community especially hard. Roughly 7.5% of Nepal&rsquo;s population lives abroad and relies on messaging apps to stay in touch with family.According to the Nepal Telecommunications Authority&rsquo;s 2021 report, over 90% of the country&rsquo;s 30 million people use the internet. Many have already shifted to platforms like Viber to maintain communication.&ldquo;The new generation in Nepal&rdquo;Protesters argue that the ban restricts free expression and blocks critical communication tools. Chants like &ldquo;Shut down corruption, not social media,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Youth against corruption,&rdquo; echoed through the crowd, reflecting wider dissatisfaction with government transparency and governance.The situation escalated rapidly, merging frustrations over corruption, censorship, and what many see as an authoritarian overreach into digital life.While the government has not declared a state of emergency, officials have warned of stricter crackdowns if the violence continues.The incident marks one of the deadliest outbreaks of civil unrest in Nepal in recent years and underscores a growing clash between the state&rsquo;s push for digital regulation and the demands of a young, connected population seeking free access to global platforms.

Asia

At least 14 killed in Kathmandu as protests against Nepal’s ban on 26 social media platforms escalate into violent clashes with police.

Articles tagged with "Social Media"

Social media giants pay $27 mn in US school lawsuit settlement

US jury finds Meta, YouTube liable in social media addiction trial

Zuckerberg grilled over underage users at social media trial

Trump extends delay on U.S. TikTok ban until mid-December

14 killed as Nepal protests erupt over social media ban