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Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme
from the social-media-chasing-lawyers dept
There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich?
Because we just found out that at least one of the key cases, involving a teenager who claimed he was addicted to social media ended with that kid dropping the case, right after he had to reveal during discovery that he had asked ChatGPT what his father meant when he said the kid needed to keep pursuing the case because it was going to make him a million dollars.
It increasingly looks like many of these cases brought against the companies are by money hungry lawyers and questionably competent parents exploiting children to try to get a big payday. There was some hint of this in the big California bellwether case regarding a teenager who sued Meta, claiming it made her addicted to social media, even though it came out that the teen suffered very real trauma from her own mother. Of course, at trial, pointing out that the child’s mother likely was the cause of some of her trauma doesn’t often play well in front of a jury.
But the story of another teenager’s lawsuit against all the big social media companies seems even more damning. Back in July there was some surprise that the teen, named only as “RKC” in the case, suddenly dropped the case just before it was set to go to trial. In the media, the claims were that it was just too stressful for RKC, but that seemed… odd. The real story appears to be what Meta turned up in discovery: evidence that the suit was part of the family’s get rich quick scheme, egged on by lawyers happy to keep it going.
Last week the Washington Post wrote about how everything you type into ChatGPT can get swept into discovery in a lawsuit. That’s a big deal on its own for anyone treating a chatbot as a diary. But buried in that story was something specifically revealing about the RKC case:
When a teenage boy identified in court filings as R.K.C. didn’t understand his father, he turned to ChatGPT for help.
“My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar,” R.K.C. said to the chatbot in October 2024, according to court filings. “He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does. What does he mean.”
Unlike the California case, where the trauma came from the teen’s own mother, here Meta got something much closer to a smoking gun: a kid so confused about why a million dollar settlement was supposed to make him happy that he had to ask a chatbot what his father meant. I imagine that would not play particularly well in front of a jury.
But, once again, it should raise some serious questions about these cases, and the motivations of those bringing them. Even if you believe that the companies could do a better job, the whole reason why Section 230 is supposed to stop these cases cold at the beginning is to stop grifting lawyers and grifting plaintiffs from filing these sorts of lawsuits as a shakedown. This is why we’ve warned people that, even if you hate Meta, the results of the California case are bad news.
The point of Section 230, again, was supposed to be that it prevented “death by a thousand duck bites,” but increasingly the courts are saying “eh, we can allow the ducks to bite away and sort it out later.” And that’s an open invitation for more suits like this one, where the lawyers get a contingency fee, the parents get a settlement, and the troubled kid gets deposed about their worst year.
Hell, in the RKC case, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube all paid off the family (and its lawyers) before the trial even started. So the plan appears to have worked, even if Meta escaped, thanks to the ChatGPT transcript that was revealed during discovery.
I understand that big tech companies are unsympathetic here, and Mark Zuckerberg has made a ton of terrible choices over the years. I honestly hope that the company collapses and users find other, more user-empowering places to connect with family and friends. But these lawsuits all seem incredibly sketchy. And, again, Meta can afford to fight these cases for years. With something like 2,500 of them already pending in this one mass tort, the sites that can’t afford that fight — including the smaller ones that actually take kid safety seriously — will settle or shut down, which is precisely the outcome Section 230 was written to prevent.
Filed Under: addiction, get rich quick, social media
Companies: meta
Comments on “Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme”
Wow. If this teenager’s a native English speaker who’s been in public school for years and has no documented mental disability, perhaps the parents ought to be suing the school board instead. Or Donald Trump, who tries to pass off similar word salad as “English”.
It's Trump's fault
With how badly Trump and the republicans are running things, how else can ordinary people afford to live in this country?
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JFC, Mike, a new low.
Re:
Used condom salesman
Even worse: *Scapegoating* of the self-help therapeutic Internet for the negative outcomes of parental abuse.
The article:
Speaking myself as a person who was seriously harmed by their mother, and who was helped by becoming a teen cypherpunk anarchist Web 1.0/e-mail/Usenet/IRC “addict” E2EE-high on PGP (which sounds like PCP), I found this quote from the first above link very interesting:
Fuckitty-fuck. Why didn’t I think of this scam three decades ago? I could’ve kissed mommy’s ass, and had her help me sue the Internet to GET RICH QUICK!! What a nice way that would’ve been to thank the Internet for being not only my solace and my freedom, but also my source of self-education on topics ranging from technology to mathematics to history, to the political theories underpinning freedom of speech.
But for the Internet, I literally would have committed
<rot13>fhvpvqr</rot13>to escape from the harms of the maternal tyrant. On the Internet, I made friends with a stranger 21 years older than myself on another continent. They talked me out of a serious, rationally premeditated, eminently practical, absolutely coldblooded plan to<rot13>xvyy zlfrys</rot13>—which I confided only in them, because I didn’t want anyone to stop me. Not a “cry for help”. Thanks so much, mommy! But hey, once I hit age 20 like KGM, I should’ve called it water under the bridge, and ganged up with mommy dearest to sue the Internet for 2^256-1 dollars. It would’ve been the “older, wiser” thing to do.A gathering of various snippets from the second link:
It’s THE INTERNET’s fault!!!
Holy hell, KGM excusing her mom sounds just like my mom excusing herself.
KGM, honey, you’ll understand when you’re younger and wiser.
Are you really trying to handwave away the harms that social media companies have admitted to doing to people on purpose because some people may not have a genuine case? Using the same logic people taking a machete to programs designed to feed and educate the poor and defend the innocent… ‘Look, this one edge case may not be genuine, guess they all need to be regarded with skepticism!’
As others have said, a new low.
Re: The Elephant in the Room.
Look, I’m willing to call Mike Masnick out when he’s full of shit. And I hate social media so much that I’ve been avoiding it like plague ever since it was invented. I don’t use any of these platforms! Do you? I don’t even use Bluesky.
That being said, there are two problems lurking beneath the surface of your argument:
As to that last, why don’t people complain more about the harms of social media to adults? In my opinion, these platforms are harmful to everyone of all ages. Not that the problem should be solved with this type of lawsuit: Try for starters, don’t fucking use that shit. (Do you use any of these platforms?)
Are you really trying to defend the lawsuits of plaintiffs who “may not have a genuine case”, as you so charitably put it, on the basis that social media are bad, so someone’s gotta get ’em somehow?
At this time, I see one AC with an unsubstantive one-liner saying that. Contrast the comments sections when Masnick does his “AI” cult evangelist apologetics, and gets a barrage of scathing criticism.
Re: Re:
I mean, this is pretty commonly complained about. Kids are an easier bar, because they’re more vulnerable and have more legal protections, but it does come up with adults fairly often.
Re: Re: Re: Helping kids vs. Saving The Children™.
Do adults whine passively about how social media hurts them? Or do they undertake global crusades against social media on their own behalves?
As for the “easier bar”, I admit that some sincere concern about kids may be a minor factor (so to speak) in some people’s misguided types of attacks. However, I think that by far the dominant factors are: (a) Saving The Children™ plays to a cliché political weapon so infamous, it has its own Wikipedia article; and, (b) adults want to evade the nature of their own irresponsible, self-harmful behavior. Grown-ups who cling to their own crackpipes while preaching that crack is bad, will surely prefer to preach that crack is bad for kids.
I can tell when someone is sincerely concerned and thoughtful about kids, because they place exceedingly high priorities on teaching kids media literacy and critical thinking skills, freeing the Net to break down the social media corporate walled gardens (which have multibillion-dollar perverse incentives to abuse everyone with algorithmic psychological manipulation and corporate mass-surveillance), and other important, very urgent actions that do not involve censoring the Internet.
This is just a distraction
Whenever there’s a lot of litigation around any issue, there’s always a small amount of bogus litigation brought by people who are trying to ride the wave for profit, fame, or something else.
The key word, of course, is “small”. Which it is here because it always is. These few isolated cases are just a distraction from the vastly larger corpus of cases that are sincere attempts to seek redress for harm.
But just as we’ve seen elsewhere, these isolated cases will be seized on to buttress the claim that ALL cases are bogus and ALL plaintiffs are just in it for money/fame/etc., and one of the outcomes of this is that all those other plaintiffs will be harmed again — by having their character and sincerity brought into question, not just in public, but in court by defendants’ attorneys who will do so in order to persuade juries to find in their favor and/or to reduce awards.
Given the massive damage and severe harm that social media has done — and in particular, Facebook/Meta and Twitter/X, both of which are run by sociopathic monsters, I’m not going to concern myself with a few outliers. I’m going to concern myself with overwhelming majority of plaintiffs who’ve truly been harmed and deserve to be compensated.
As soon as you swap to ‘all’ is where people have a problem. Is it some of them, or is it all of them? Because I think even people who think there is a real issue, will not be surprised there are some grifters trying to cash in on it. That doesn’t really say anything about the underlying issue one way or the other, though.
I don’t think anyone, even the biggest haters/misunderstanders, minds preventing frivolous suits. Their issues are with how it does so, especially since frivolous suits are not unique to 230 cases. People trying to score a settlement payday is common in every part of law. (Nevermind that many of these suits are also not necessarily UGC focused)
Yeah, giving someone immunity stops frivolous suits. But it also forecloses potential non-frivolous suits as a cost, and the consequences of that are immediately obvious to people. It’s a hammer of a solution, not a surgical tool, which is why it’s rarely used.
And he should be responsible for those choices. The point of 230 is so that he can’t be liable for other people’s speech/choices.
'Now that we've paid the dane-geld the danes are sure to leave us alone!'
Hell, in the RKC case, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube all paid off the family (and its lawyers) before the trial even started. So the plan appears to have worked, even if Meta escaped, thanks to the ChatGPT transcript that was revealed during discovery.
I get that companies seem to be welded to the idea of only thinking about the current quarter’s profits but they really need to hire people capable of thinking long-term to bounce ideas off of. Sure, settling a case you expect you’d win but pay a bunch to prosecute may be cheaper in the short-term but what it also does is tell everyone watching that all they have to do is file suit against you and you’ll fold like wet cardboard.
I so freaking knew it. I didn’t want to say this part because I had no evidence that this was the case anywhere, but I guess I do now. These lawsuits have all the hallmarks of a money making machine. It’s so scummy, it makes Meta look good.
Re:
It’s a common pattern. In a large enough society, anyone seeing large settlements in an industry might potentially see a paycheck by faking, lying, or manufacturing victimhood. It doesn’t mean everyone who files a lawsuit is lying or greedy, but someone somewhere will try to take advantage of the opportunity.
See also insurance fraud, slip and fall accidents in stores, people jumping in front of cars, the Pepsi needle hoax, etc.
Re: Compare anti-vaxxer parental frauds to sue pharmaceutical companies and governments.
Topical relation to other recent Techdirt articles: The thirst to sue a big company is a major factor in the whole development of the anti-vaxxer movement. Indeed, it was originally the singular one-and-only driving motive that created the modern anti-vaxxer movement, which grew out of attacks on MMR.
The biggest scientific fraud in history, the MMR-autism link, was cooked up by a corrupt (now ex-)doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was secretly on the payroll of a corrupt lawyer, Richard Barr, and taking instructions for made-to-order “science” to create a lawsuit out of thin air.
Results: They brought back measles from the brink of extinction as vaccination rates fell, numerous children all over the world have been killed or maimed, we got Trump’s EO #14420 and RFK Jr., and… there have been many multi-million, and even multi-billion dollar lawsuits filed all over the world by parents against pharmaceutical companies and governments, on allegations that the MMR vaccine caused their children autism.
For my source of facts on this, please see this comment. As to the subset of anti-vaxxer parents who are proved to have intentionally lied to try to sue pharmaceutical companies, the author of that book remarked in Chapter 32, “Here was grim accountancy on the human condition.” (Some anti-vaxxer parents are sincerely misguided and cruelly manipulated into a cult.)
“I get that companies seem to be welded to the idea of only thinking about the current quarter’s profits but they really need to hire people capable of thinking long-term to bounce ideas off of.”
I’d really like to agree with you, because a large part of what I do is think long-term.
But, no, they don’t need to hire people like me/like that, because there are no penalties for short-term thinking. Instead there are considerable rewards: promotions, fame, profit. And when the roof caves in (if the roof caves in) those people are almost never held responsible. And even if, in one of those rare cases, they are held responsible, they can bail out with a golden parachute and fail upward into their next position.
That’s how the machine works now. You and I might agree that it’s a really stupid way for the machine to work, but that’s how things are. And absent a wholesale reset of American business culture, it’s going to keep working that way because the people profiting massively from it want it to.
Re:
Not only are there no punishments for short term thinking, their are massive punishments for long term thinking.
Not happy with simply being bad parents, they now want to demonstrate that they’re bad human beings as well.
A deeper problem: Fodder for conservative tort reform.
These bullshit lawsuits are fodder for conservative tort reform—and worse, they may predictably incentivize Big Tech oligarchs to lobby for tort reform.
Tort reform is bad. Conservative tort reforms are designed to let rich people dust your kids’ school playground with organic lead compounds, sell you a car with a known-defective exploding gas tank, and then toss your case out of court because you can’t afford the burdens of suing them. You have no recourse.
Myopic bleeding hearts who knee-jerk support the meritless plaintiffs here are shooting legit, meritorious plaintiffs in the foot.
Their logic: (a) Defendant is evil and rich; (b) plaintiff cries lotsa tears about being allegedly hurt by plaintiff when they were at least one nanosecond under age 18. Therefore, $$$ for plaintiff.
That makes a poster case for conservatives to advocate tort reform, while some naïve libertarians nod their heads.
(Disclosures: IANAL, I have no financial interest in the trial lawyers’ business, and I have no foreseeable reason to be affected by tort reform either way. Note the emphasized qualifier; anyone can be affected by it in some unforeseen future.)