Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme

from the social-media-chasing-lawyers dept

There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich?

Because we just found out that at least one of the key cases, involving a teenager who claimed he was addicted to social media ended with that kid dropping the case, right after he had to reveal during discovery that he had asked ChatGPT what his father meant when he said the kid needed to keep pursuing the case because it was going to make him a million dollars.

It increasingly looks like many of these cases brought against the companies are by money hungry lawyers and questionably competent parents exploiting children to try to get a big payday. There was some hint of this in the big California bellwether case regarding a teenager who sued Meta, claiming it made her addicted to social media, even though it came out that the teen suffered very real trauma from her own mother. Of course, at trial, pointing out that the child’s mother likely was the cause of some of her trauma doesn’t often play well in front of a jury.

But the story of another teenager’s lawsuit against all the big social media companies seems even more damning. Back in July there was some surprise that the teen, named only as “RKC” in the case, suddenly dropped the case just before it was set to go to trial. In the media, the claims were that it was just too stressful for RKC, but that seemed… odd. The real story appears to be what Meta turned up in discovery: evidence that the suit was part of the family’s get rich quick scheme, egged on by lawyers happy to keep it going.

Last week the Washington Post wrote about how everything you type into ChatGPT can get swept into discovery in a lawsuit. That’s a big deal on its own for anyone treating a chatbot as a diary. But buried in that story was something specifically revealing about the RKC case:

When a teenage boy identified in court filings as R.K.C. didn’t understand his father, he turned to ChatGPT for help.

“My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar,” R.K.C. said to the chatbot in October 2024, according to court filings. “He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does. What does he mean.”

Unlike the California case, where the trauma came from the teen’s own mother, here Meta got something much closer to a smoking gun: a kid so confused about why a million dollar settlement was supposed to make him happy that he had to ask a chatbot what his father meant. I imagine that would not play particularly well in front of a jury.

But, once again, it should raise some serious questions about these cases, and the motivations of those bringing them. Even if you believe that the companies could do a better job, the whole reason why Section 230 is supposed to stop these cases cold at the beginning is to stop grifting lawyers and grifting plaintiffs from filing these sorts of lawsuits as a shakedown. This is why we’ve warned people that, even if you hate Meta, the results of the California case are bad news.

The point of Section 230, again, was supposed to be that it prevented “death by a thousand duck bites,” but increasingly the courts are saying “eh, we can allow the ducks to bite away and sort it out later.” And that’s an open invitation for more suits like this one, where the lawyers get a contingency fee, the parents get a settlement, and the troubled kid gets deposed about their worst year.

Hell, in the RKC case, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube all paid off the family (and its lawyers) before the trial even started. So the plan appears to have worked, even if Meta escaped, thanks to the ChatGPT transcript that was revealed during discovery.

I understand that big tech companies are unsympathetic here, and Mark Zuckerberg has made a ton of terrible choices over the years. I honestly hope that the company collapses and users find other, more user-empowering places to connect with family and friends. But these lawsuits all seem incredibly sketchy. And, again, Meta can afford to fight these cases for years. With something like 2,500 of them already pending in this one mass tort, the sites that can’t afford that fight — including the smaller ones that actually take kid safety seriously — will settle or shut down, which is precisely the outcome Section 230 was written to prevent.

Filed Under: addiction, get rich quick, social media

Companies: meta