- A lawsuit in San Francisco accused an online gaming company Roblox Corp RBLX to facilitate the sexual and financial exploitation of a Californian girl by adult men.
- The lawsuit was also directed against an online chat company Discord Inc, Snapchat parent snap inc SNAPand Instagram parent Metaplatforms Inc META, Reuters reports.
- Snap and Meta have faced dozens of similar lawsuits.
- The girl, SU, was born in 2009 and started using Roblox when she was nine or ten years old.
- Beginning in early 2020, SU encountered adult males through Roblox, who encouraged her to log on to Discord, Snapchat, and Instagram to communicate with them. Neither company required parental consent.
- The men took advantage of them by encouraging them to drink and abuse prescription drugs and by sending sexually explicit photos of themselves. A man is said to have persuaded her to send him money.
- SU suffered from severe mental health issues that led to suicide attempts and hospitalizations.
- SU and her mother, CU, said the companies had taken no steps to ensure the safety of minors using their platforms, and that Snap and Instagram had encouraged addiction in children. They are demanding damages in an unspecified amount.
- Content on social media sites, including Instagram and Pinterest, Inc. PINSShe is said to have “probably” contributed to the death of British teenager Molly Russell, according to the Financial Times reports.
- After reading thousands of posts about suicide, depression and self-harm, Russell took her own life, a medical examiner ruled on September 30, five years after Russell’s death in November 2017, at the age of 14.
- In September, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen launched the nonprofit organization Beyond The Screen, marking a new open-source effort to hold social networking platforms accountable for harmful practices.
- This “due diligence” initiative brings together the expertise of nonprofit executives, academics, litigators, and technologists studying the harms caused and exacerbated by social media.
- Haugen had leaked internal documents suggesting that Facebook…
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