The Ohio State Attorney's Office has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, which was recently renamed Meta, because of its algorithms for working with children, TASS reports, citing The Wall Street Journal.
The lawsuit is filed on behalf of investors in the company and the state pension system, who are demanding $ 100 billion in damages from Meta.
Facebook management claimed to be caring for our children and eradicating online trolls, but in reality it was creating suffering for its own benefit dnd divided users], the newspaper quoted Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost's statement.
According to the statement of claim, the company's management violated federal law from April 29 to October 21 this year, for the sake of profit, misleading the public as to what negative effects its products may have on minors. The plaintiffs, in addition to compensation for damages, are demanding that Meta's management take measures so as not to mislead its own investors again.
In September, The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of articles on malicious practices in the company and its services. The source of material for the articles was internal documents that a former employee of the company, Frances Haugen, handed over to a newspaper journalist. They talked, in particular, that the company's social networks promoted content that is potentially dangerous to the health of users, but arouses their interest (for example, girls already suffering from anorexia were recommended to subscribe to groups where weight loss was discussed). To attract attention, radical and even extremist content was promoted or not filtered out.
On October 25, an entire consortium of American publications came out with exposing materials. Internal documents obtained by the journalists again became the source. As it turned out, the company did little to filter content outside of the United States, leading to its social media use to incite hatred and xenophobia in, for example, Ethiopia and India. Within the United States, monitoring has also been significantly weakened since the 2020 presidential elections.
The founder of the corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, claims that all accusations against her are libel. The company did have to make tough decisions about content at times, Zuckerberg admitted, but it has never prioritized benefits over user health.
