Child safety advocates in Calgary are expressing their pleasure, after Meta recently was found liable by a court in the U.S.\u00a0in a child exploitation case.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The court ordering Meta to pay $375 million after the case was brought by the state\u2019s attorney general.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201dWhen children are being exploited, it\u2019s horrible stuff and yeah there should be serious penalties for that sort of thing,\u201d one Calgary man said. <\/p>\n
Sara Austin, founder and CEO of Children First Canada says this is a positive development. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m elated to hear this news,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to get ahead of that, we can\u2019t simply wait for harm to occur, we need to work upstream, to prevent harm from happening in the first place,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Now, the child exploitation case isn\u2019t 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\u00a0liable in a case that centred around allegations of Instagram and YouTube being designed to be addictive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI find they are way to addictive, they are exploiting the youth completely and there needs to be further restrictions for it,\u201d one Calgarian said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s your choice at the end of that day if you\u2019re on your phone or if you\u2019re not,\u201d another added. \u201cBut it\u2019s not always your choice what you\u2019re being pushed either.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement to CityNews, Meta says it plans to appeal both verdicts, saying they remain confident in their record of protecting teens online\u00a0and that \u201cteen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google says that they also plan to appeal with the case misunderstanding YouTube, \u201cwhich is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Child safety advocates in Calgary are expressing their pleasure, after Meta recently was found liable by a court…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194293],"tags":[49,2798,48],"class_list":["post-562269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-ca","tag-calgary","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}