> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
From a Rolling Stone article:
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
My siblings are better informed, I just wanted to say, settlements don’t get paid unless there’s a risk the plaintiff could win.
I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.
That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.
Not always. Sometimes it’s as simple as: settling is cheaper than proving you’re “clear” at trial.
Not sure about that, don't defendants sometimes settle because they don't want the publicity of a trial or don't want their dirty laundry being aired in discovery?
She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and suicidality she experienced.
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.