https://gizmodo.com/meta-settles-lawsuit-that-claimed-social...

> Meta Settles Lawsuit That Claimed Social Media Addiction Screwed Up Schools

> On Thursday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district that claimed the tech giant’s social media platforms have created a mental health crisis at its schools.

> The case was considered the first of its kind and a bellwether (a case that is representative of a large pool of lawsuits and will be a test for future litigation). The plaintiffs argue that social media platforms have had a major negative impact on the mental health of school-age children, which in turn has caused a burden on the education system, as American schools were forced to redirect resources to counter this problem.

> The settlement comes shortly after Meta lost a key bellwether social media addiction trial. Back in March, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Meta was liable for the adverse mental health effects a now 20-year-old suffered after getting addicted to Instagram from an early age. The representatives of the young woman argued successfully that it was Meta’s deliberate design choices, like the infinite scroll and face-altering filters on stories, that had exacerbated her addiction and subsequent mental health issues like self-harm and depression.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People#Myanmar_genoci...

> The military junta in Myanmar was facilitated by Facebook to post hate speech that sought to foment sexual violence and promote genocide against the Rohingya. "Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived" Wynn-Williams writes.

> Wynn-Williams argued that Facebook failed to moderate hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar, including the use of the racial slur kalar. She noted that the company only had two Burmese language moderators, both based in Dublin, for the entire country, and claimed that one of the two moderators gave a pass to hate speech while removing pro-human rights content. She further claimed that she raised concerns that the moderator was "in cahoots with the" junta, only to have her concerns dismissed by the content team. Additionally, she claimed that her efforts to have Facebook's Community Standards rules translated into the Burmese language were resisted by the company communications team, who told her that "Myanmar isn’t a priority country" in the region.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.

> The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

> Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012.

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https://www.the-indepe...