A jury in Los Angeles has awarded a landmark victory to a young woman who sued Meta and YouTube for her childhood addiction to social media. After the woman won the $3 million lawsuit, Meta and Google officials stated that they do not believe Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have an influence on young children. You can find more details about the news at this link.
This decision is a first worldwide and will likely set a precedent. As an adult who occasionally uses Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, I can say that it sometimes created an excessive addiction in me. There are so many unnecessary things in the world: short clips from movies, people exposing their bodies, people in their 70s dancing and showing off, all desperate to make money. Young people, like their elders, are only concerned with making money through social media. While young people use social media to showcase themselves and earn more money quickly with less work, we can say that there are sometimes good things happening.
But one thing is certain: social media is definitely addictive. It’s difficult to distance yourself from it, even if you want to. You try not to go online to protect yourself, but that’s only for a limited time. As long as you have a phone in your hand, you have to use it. The fact that phones were only for talking is gone. People talk on the phone 3-5 times a day, on buses, ships, planes, trains – social media is everywhere. You can practically see the disaster unfolding when you’re on a bus. I’m one of those helpless people. Although I sometimes get angry at myself, the allure of social media is leading me astray. If I can’t even protect myself, it’s foolish to expect children and young people to protect themselves.
Social media has changed 70% of people’s lives; our habits have changed. Look at the people who go to and leave a theater; almost all of them are 60 years and older. There are still young people who go to the cinema, but the young person who used to buy a newspaper from a newsstand is now a thing of the past. You can easily see young people on trains who are incapable of even reading free newspapers, because seeing other people’s butts is much more appealing than reading a newspaper.
What’s the result? This: humanity has become corrupted after social media because we all now have a genetic makeup: we buy into bad things much more easily. That’s why evil is constantly increasing while good things are decreasing.
Recep Re – London