Child safety advocates in Calgary are expressing their pleasure, after Meta recently was found liable by a court in the U.S. in a child exploitation case.
A jury in New Mexico finding that Meta broke state laws by enabling child exploitation and misleading users about the safety of its platforms like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
The court ordering Meta to pay $375 million after the case was brought by the state’s attorney general.
”When children are being exploited, it’s horrible stuff and yeah there should be serious penalties for that sort of thing,” one Calgary man said.
Sara Austin, founder and CEO of Children First Canada says this is a positive development.
“I’m elated to hear this news,” she said.
As court cases against social media companies get litigated, including here in Canada, advocates like Austin are calling on the government to enact an Online Safety Act.
“We need to get ahead of that, we can’t simply wait for harm to occur, we need to work upstream, to prevent harm from happening in the first place,” she said.
Now, the child exploitation case isn’t the only one before the courts. Google losing a case, this time in a California courtroom, Wednesday where a jury found the company and Meta liable in a case that centred around allegations of Instagram and YouTube being designed to be addictive.
“I find they are way to addictive, they are exploiting the youth completely and there needs to be further restrictions for it,” one Calgarian said.
“It’s your choice at the end of that day if you’re on your phone or if you’re not,” another added. “But it’s not always your choice what you’re being pushed either.”
In a statement to CityNews, Meta says it plans to appeal both verdicts, saying they remain confident in their record of protecting teens online and that “teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
Google says that they also plan to appeal with the case misunderstanding YouTube, “which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”