Not just another money-grubbing lawsuitNot just another money-grubbing lawsuit

This stuff really freaks me out. Apparently, people are suing Meta and YouTube and all the other social media platforms for not preventing them from using social media.

Mark Zuckerberg spent more than five hours on the stand in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, testifying before a jury for the first time about claims that Meta deliberately designed Instagram to addict children.

The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiff identified as KGM, now 20 years old, who claims she began using Instagram at age 9 and that the platform’s design addicted her to it, worsening her mental health, contributing to anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts.

TikTok and Snapchat settled before trial. Meta and Google’s YouTube remain defendants. Over 1,600 related cases are pending nationally. This is a big business. A verdict here could set the template for all of them.

The case rests on a contested scientific premise: that social media is clinically addictive and that this addiction causes measurable harm. That premise drives the legal strategy, the media coverage, and the resulting policy agenda. It deserves scrutiny that most coverage is not giving it.

This routes around section 230This routes around section 230

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act has long shielded platforms from liability for what users post. Plaintiff’s lawyers here found a route around it: they argue that the platform itself is a defective product. The claim is not about user content but about design choices. Infinite scroll, auto-play, algorithmically amplified notifications, beauty filters linked to body dysmorphia. The lawsuit treats them like a car without brakes.

And if we're all driving cars with poorly designed brakes, don't we need big daddy government to come in and make sure we are being safe?

“Addiction” is how you get a public health emergency. A public health emergency is how you get emergency powers and make it easier for people to overlook constitutional protections. Emergency powers applied to the internet mean mandatory access controls. And mandatory access controls on the internet mean the end of anonymous and pseudonymous speech.

I was thinking that it was gonna take a number of years before the internet got fully gated. I'm not feeling so good about that anymore. This is moving fast.

Zuckerberg is not proposing that Instagram verify the ages of Instagram users. He is proposing that Apple and Google verify the identity of every smartphone user, for every app, at the OS level.

The regulations are coming:

California’s SB 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, mandates age verification systems for social media platforms in the state. The California Attorney General must finalize implementation rules by January 2027.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), pending at the federal level, would direct agencies to develop age verification at the device or operating system level, the same framework Zuckerberg promoted from the stand.

KOSA also carries broad definitions of “harmful” content that leave moderation decisions subject to government influence, with no independent review. Age verification and content restriction in a single bill, with the government writing the definition of harm.

New York’s SAFE For Kids Act restricts algorithmic feeds for users who don’t complete age verification. Acceptable alternatives to submitting a government ID include facial analysis that estimates age. Biometric data, collected to scroll a social media feed.

The whole article is worth a read.