"K.G.M.’s is the first lawsuit to be picked by the court as a so-called “bellwether” trial. Bellwether trials typically occur in situations where there are a large number of plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the same defendant (or defendants) for harm by the same products. A small number of cases are handpicked as test cases to be representative of all the large pool of plaintiffs. The goal of such trials is to help foresee what the future litigation of all cases might look like.

This case has gotten so far because it’s built on an argument that tries to sidestep Section 230. The plaintiffs’ focus is not the liability of the content but the alleged business decisions that shape these platforms. If the legal argument in this trial proves successful, experts believe it could force social media companies to prioritize safety in a way they have not to this point.

“This is going to be the first time a jury is going to hear arguments about what the social media companies knew about the risks of the design of their platforms and how they acted on the types of information they had,” says Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, an organization that works to protect kids from Big Tech. The jury will ultimately decide, she says, whether the companies were negligent, if they contributed to mental health harms, and if they should have warned young users about the risks."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-google-youtube-social-media-addiction-trial/

#SocialMedia #SocialMediaAddiction #SocialNetworks #Algorithms #RecommendationAlgorithms #TikTok #Meta #Google #BigTech #MentalHealth #YouTube

"There are many ways in which the new algorithm will be able to influence the platform’s content visibility and hence its overall “political climate”. We may indeed witness changes in moderation, meaning that certain contents and accounts are effectively restricted. Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from the app as of Wednesday this week. However, it is likely that the most consequential changes will be more in terms of the way the algorithms serve content to users.

The new algorithm will be retrained on US rather than global data. This opens opportunities to introduce biases, with the potential of reinforcing conservative views and sidelining minority ones, while at the same time cutting US debates off from those going on in the rest of the world. Further, weights attributed to different parameters can have important consequences for user experience. As seen with Facebook’s 2018 adoption of the meaningful social interaction framework which down-ranked public and news content, while attributing a high weight to angry reactions, changes to the feed algorithm can have major consequences.

As scholars Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter have pointed out, the way in which algorithms “interfere with free speech on the audience side” highlights the need to reconsider the way we think about public debate in the algorithmic era. It’s not what we can or cannot say that matters; rather, it’s whether what we say can get any visibility at all, and whether it is able to move against the political climate imposed by those controlling platform algorithms."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/30/tiktok-us-takeover-new-type-of-censorship

#USA #SocialMedia #TikTok #Algorithms #RecommendationAlgorithms #ContentModeration #Censorship