California bill would let parents sue social media companies for addicting kids

Re:California bill would let parents sue social media compan... by onion2k on Thursday March 17, 2022 @02:34AM (#30708276)

Social media companies say you have to be over 13 to use the service, and then they fail to enforce their own rules a lot of the time. It's a disclaimer to avoid legal action by shifting responsibility to the user more than a real feature to stop children accessing their applications.

Laws like the one proposed in the article are a way to push social media companies to start enforcing those rules better.

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Re:California bill would let parents sue social media compan... by tyrfing on Thursday March 17, 2022 @03:52AM (#30708634)

"Child" is defined as under 18 here, not 13.

It's a way to retroactively punish social media companies with 100s of billions in civil liability. Really nothing else, there's an absurdly easy way given to avoid future liability.

"Social media company" is also defined so broadly that SMS has to be specifically exempted, iMessage and Roblox probably fall under the law.

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Re:California bill would let parents sue social media compan... by eterevsky on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:33AM (#30719508)

I don't see any specific age given in the article. If they actually want to make things like YouTube inaccessible to teenagers, they are freaking nuts.

And yes, if they make YouTube liable for some vaguely defined harm towards teenagers, the only reasonable course of action for Google would be to completely ban teenagers from the platform.

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Re:California bill would let parents sue social media compan... by johnnyanmac on Sunday March 20, 2022 @07:12AM (#30741694)

I grepped through the PDF of the bill and found this:

>“Child user” means a person who uses a social media platform and is not older than 17 years of age.

I was already wary of the bill in general, but thinking about parents suing Snapchat or Instagram over some high school drama (that would happen anyway, social media or not) seems to be almost dystopic from a technical point of view. Literally shooting the messenger.

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Not sure if HN allows links to PDF's, but the first link of [this news article](https://dot.la/social-media-addiction-california-bill-265698...) will get you to the bill I found.

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Re:California bill would let parents sue social media compan... by eterevsky on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:28AM (#30719483)

If they want to enforce age checks, they can just enforce age checks directly, like UK does with porn, not go around making social websites liable for some hard-to-prove harm.

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