Tech
Social Media Faces Lawsuits From Schools Over Mental Health Effects
SEATTLE, Wash. – The big U.S. social media firms, like the cigarette, oil, gun, opioid, and vape businesses before them, are now facing lawsuits launched by public agencies seeking to hold them accountable for a massive societal problem – in this case, the mental health crisis among youngsters.
However, the new cases — one filed by a public school district in Seattle last week, another by a suburban district on Monday, and almost definitely more to follow — face an uncertain legal path.
Next month, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on how federal law protects the computer industry from such claims when social media algorithms push potentially dangerous information.
Even if the Supreme Court grants permission for lawsuits like Seattle’s, the district faces difficulty showing the industry’s liability.
And the tech industry says there are many ways in which the effects of social media on teens’ mental health are different from, say, how big pharma promotes opioid addiction.
There Are Many Ways Social Media Effects Teens
“The fundamental premise is that the tech business is to blame for teens’ emotional state because they recommended content that has caused emotional injury,” vice president of tech industry trade organization NetChoice, said. “It would be ludicrous to sue Barnes & Noble because a staff member recommended a book that caused emotional harm or upset a youngster.” But that is precisely what this lawsuit does.”
Seattle Public Schools sued the digital titans behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat on Friday, arguing they had created a public nuisance by marketing to youngsters. The Kent School District in the Seattle suburbs followed suit on Monday.
The districts blame the companies for mental health and behavioral disorders such as anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and cyberbullying, making it making difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring more mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional teacher training.
Unprecidented Life Challenges
“Young people everywhere — face unprecedented learning and life challenges that are exacerbated by the negative effects of increased screen time, potentially addictive social media properties,” Seattle Superintendent Brent Jones said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “We hope this action will help reverse this trend for our students.”
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects online businesses from being held responsible for what other people post on their platforms. But the complaints say that the rule, which was made before there were any social media platforms, doesn’t protect the tech giants in this case because their algorithms favor harmful information.
This is also the issue in Gonzalez v. Google, YouTube’s parent firm, which the Supreme Court will hear on February 21. In another instance, the family of an American lady slain in an Islamic State group attack in Paris in 2015 claims that YouTube’s algorithms helped the terror group recruit.
If the Supreme Court rules that digital corporations can be held accountable in such cases, school districts will still have to prove that social media was to blame. Seattle’s lawsuit says that between 2009 and 2019, the number of students who said they felt “so unhappy or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row” that they stopped doing some of their usual activities rose by 30%.
However, Szabo noted that Seattle’s graduation rates have been rising since 2019 when many youngsters relied on social media to stay in touch with their pals during the pandemic. He said that the number of people who graduate from high school would be going up if social media were so bad for the district’s educational efforts.
“The complaint focuses solely on how social media damages children, and there may be evidence of that,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. “However, there is a lot of evidence that social media improves teenagers and other children. We don’t know what the distress rate would be like if social media didn’t exist. The distress rate might probably be higher rather than lower.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/teenage-students-in-classroom--141090063-5a653ed40c1a8200366bdd66.jpg "Social Media Faces Lawsuits From Schools Over Mental Health Effects")
Company’s Care About The Safety Of Its Users
The companies have said that they care about the safety of their users, especially children. They have tools that make it easier for parents to know who their children are talking to. They have also made it easier for people to find mental health resources on social media, like the new 988 crisis hotline. They have also made it easier to check a user’s age and set limits on how much time they can spend on their devices.
“When teens join Instagram, we immediately switch their profiles to private, and we send reminders encouraging them to take regular breaks,” Meta’s global head of safety, said “We do not allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders, and we identify over 99% of the content we remove or take action on before it is reported to us.”
Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, released internal studies in 2021 that showed the company knew Instagram was bad for kids because it hurt their body image and made eating disorders and suicidal thoughts worse. She claimed the platform put profits ahead of safety and concealed its research from investors and the general public.
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, an organization that protects children from commercialization and marketing, says that even if social media helps some students, it doesn’t make up for the huge harm it does to many others.
“The mental health expenses to students are astronomical, as is the amount of time schools have to spend monitoring and responding to social media drama,” Golin added. “It is ludicrous that schools are liable for the devastation created by these social media sites to young people. Nobody is witnessing the kinds of cumulative effects that social media is having on school districts.”
Both claims were filed in the United States District Court, but they are based on state public nuisance law – a wide, ill-defined legal notion with origins dating back to 13th century England. In Washington, a public nuisance is “any illegal act and every failure to do a duty” that “annoys, hurts, or threatens the safety, health, comfort, or rest of a large number of people.”
Tabacco Industries Under Constant Fire
Most notably, public nuisance allegations aided the tobacco industry in reaching a $246 billion, 25-year settlement with the states in 1998. However, state, city, county, and tribal governments have used public nuisance legislation to hold oil firms accountable for climate change, the gun business for gun violence, the pharmaceutical sector for the opioid crisis, and vaping companies like Juul accountable for teen vaping.
The majority of the litigation is still continuing. Juul Labs agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits, including 1,400 from school districts, towns, and counties, for an estimated $1.2 billion last month.
The Seattle lawsuit could lead to many changes, raising questions about whether it is right to solve big social problems in court instead of through laws. However, the school system faces little risk because the complaint was brought on a contingency basis, which means the company is only paid if the action is successful.
Jolina Cuaresma, senior counsel for privacy and technology policy at Common Sense Media, which works to make media safer for children, said she was pleased to see a school district file a public nuisance lawsuit against internet corporations.
“People have grown impatient of waiting for Congress to act,” she remarked.
SOURCE – (AP)
(VOR News) – The most recent version of Meta AI, which was created by Mark Zuckerberg and is accessible on social media platforms that are under the authority of the business, is now capable of accomplishing a great deal more than you might have thought it was able to accomplish in the past.
You might have assumed that it was capable of accomplishing anything, but this is a considerable advance over that perception. It is possible that you did not believe that it would be able to complete this particular duty.
What are your thoughts on this?
TechCrunch reports that Meta’s AI-powered assistant has recently been upgraded with a plethora of improvements, one of which being the introduction of the new “Imagine Yourself” generative AI model.
Meta recently updated its assistant, so we made this update.
All members of the general public have access to this most recent update. This upgrade for the assistant was just recently implemented with the purpose of enhancing the functioning of the helper.
On the other hand, what precisely is the new AI model capable of doing, and how does it operate when it makes use of its capabilities?
“The new generative AI model in Meta AI is the driving force behind a new feature that enables the option to make attractive selfies,” TechCrunch reports.
“This new feature enables users to create selfies that are captivating.” In response to the introduction of the new functionality, this feature was developed. The function was developed, as indicated by the information that is presented here.
It is possible for the Imagine Yourself model to make use of an image of a specific person in order to accomplish the goal of delivering visuals of that person.
The phrase “Imagine me” followed by anything that is not regarded to be “not safe for work” (NSFW) is an example of a prompt that can be used to prompt the model. In addition to that, this prompt can be utilised to prompt the respective model.
Imagine Yourself is currently accessible in beta form; however, Meta has not revealed the data that was used to train this artificial intelligence model.
This is despite the fact that the beta version is currently available. This is in spite of the fact that the model was informed by the data throughout its training.
According to TechCrunch, the terms of service for the company make it abundantly clear that any public posts or images that are affiliated with its platforms are open to scrutiny by the general public. This has been stated in the company’s terms of service.
This Meta information was obtained from this source.
Furthermore, Meta AI is providing new editing tools that simplify the process of adding, removing, amending, or adjusting things by applying easy prompts.
These tools are included in the company’s offerings. The availability of these instruments will not be difficult. Within a short period of time, these tools will be made available for offline download.
Within the following month, a completely new button that will be referred to as “Edit with AI” will be introduced. More options for fine-tuning the editing process will be made available to you when you click this button. Users will have the ability to access this button within the system.
Additionally, Meta has announced that within the next few days, users will have access to new shortcuts that will enable them to contribute images generated by Meta AI to feeds, articles, and comments across all Meta applications.
This initiative is expected to take place within the next few days. By virtue of the fact that Meta AI will be able to produce these photographs, this will be feasible. The abbreviated form of these shortcuts will be available to users for their convenience.
SOURCE: GN
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(VOR News) – During the second quarter of the fiscal year 2024, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) recorded sales of $20.82 billion, which was higher than the estimates provided by analysts.
This is a forty percent improvement over the same time period the previous year. Over the same period of time in the previous year, the Taiwanese chipmaker posted earnings of NT$247.85 billion, which is equivalent to $7.6 billion.
This is a 36% increase. According to FactSet, analysts had expected that the company would take in a net income of NT$236.4 billion, which is equivalent to $7.3 billion, during the second quarter of 2024. This figure exceeded that forecast.
This represents a thirty percent increase when compared to the previous year, when the company declared a profit of eight hundred and eighteen billion NTD. This year, the share price of TSMC has climbed by almost 70 percent.
Apple relies on TSMC as a semiconductor manufacturer, and the company has an exclusive partnership with NVIDIA, a company that manufactures chips for artificial intelligence research and development.
Every consumer wants their electronic devices to be equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities, as stated by C.C. Wei, chief executive officer of TSMC.
The artificial intelligence market is currently dominated by TSMC.
I made this statement while I was having a discussion with analysts. He continued by stating that he anticipated that production will reach capacity by the year 2025 or 2026, but that supply would continue to be difficult to come by beyond then.
“I also attempted to achieve a balance between supply and demand, but I am unable to do so at this time,” he explained to reporters. As a result of the extremely high demand, I had to put in a lot of effort in order to fulfill the requirements of my clients.
The Taiwan-listed shares of the chipmaker experienced a decline of 2.43% by the time trading on Thursday came to a conclusion.
As a result of the demand from its customers, which include Apple and Nvidia, TSMC predicted in April that its revenues for the second quarter may increase by as much as thirty percent, which was a figure that exceeded the expectations.
In order to surpass the initial expectations, it increased its sales projections for the second quarter from $19.1 billion to between $19.6 billion and $20.4 billion between those two numbers.
In addition, TSMC made the announcement that it would continue to adhere to its plans to invest up to 32 billion dollars this year, the majority of which will be allocated to the development of innovative technology.
TSMC announced in June that their net revenue for the month of May increased to seven billion dollars, representing a thirty percent increase between the previous year and the current year.
The income of the company for the months of January through May climbed by 27% compared to the same period in the previous year.
This was despite a 2.7% decline from April for TSMC.
C.C. Wei, chairman and chief executive officer of TSMC, repeated past forecasts that the semiconductor industry, excluding the memory sector, will climb by 10% this year, with artificial intelligence being the primary driver of this growth.
Chip markets around the world, including those of TSMC, experienced a decline in the early hours of Wednesday as a result of comments made by former President Donald Trump that were critical of Taiwan and rumors that the administration of Vice President Joe Biden was purportedly considering imposing more stringent trade restrictions.
By the time the market closed, the shares of TSMC that are listed in Taiwan had experienced a decrease of 2.4%.
It has been claimed that the administration of Vice President Joe Biden is mulling over the idea of imposing an export embargo known as the foreign direct product rule on allies such as Japan and the Netherlands in the event that these countries continue to provide China advanced chipmaking technology.
SOURCE: QZ
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(VOR News) – On Thursday, shares of Nokia, a Finnish telecom business, dropped after the company disclosed a decline in its operational profit for the second quarter that was around 32 percent lower than the previous quarter.
We were able to attribute this reduction to the fact that there was a dearth of demand for the 5G equipment that Nokia was producing.
By the time the market opened at nine o’clock London time, the stock of the business that is listed in Helsinki had already experienced a decline of eight percent.
Today, Nokia reported a comparable operating profit of $462 million.
This value was reported by the company. When compared Nokia to the 619 million euros that were recorded for the same period of time in the previous year, this implies a loss of roughly a third more than what was stated.
Data provided by LSEG indicates that the firm reported a decline in its net sales of 18%, bringing the total to 4.47 billion euros.
This Nokia represents the lowest level of net sales attained since the fourth quarter of 2015. This decline was attributed to “ongoing market weakness” by the corporation at the time of the decline.
“The most significant impact was the challenging comparison period from the previous year, which saw the peak of India’s rapid 5G deployment, with India accounting for three quarters of the decline,” Mr. Pekka Lundmark, CEO of Nokia, remarked in the announcement of the results. “The most significant impact was the challenging comparison period.”
Continuing along the same lines, he emphasized that the landscape in the mobile networks business continues to be “challenging as operators continue to be cautious.”
In spite of this, Nokia forecasts that the business situation will become “stabilizing” and that there will be a “significant acceleration in net sales growth in the second half” of the year. The order intake that was seen in the most recent quarter served as the basis for these forecasts.
According to the company’s CEO, “though the dynamic is showing signs of improvement, the recovery of net sales is occurring somewhat later than we had anticipated, which will have an effect on our business group’s net sales assumptions for the year 2024.”
Despite the fact that this has taken place, we are still well on our approach to fulfilling our full-year target, which is further supported by the early action that we have taken addressing cost.
The business continues to strive for a result that is either near to or slightly below the midpoint of its comparable operating profit prediction for the entire year, which ranges from 2.3 billion to 2.9 billion euros.
Nokia’s founders set this goal for the company.
AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the United States, made the decision to select Ericsson as the provider for the construction of a telecom network that is completely based on a technology known as ORAN at the end of the previous year.
A severe blow was handed to Nokia by this decision, as the company had previously been awarded a significant contract in the North American market.
Both the Finnish company and its Swedish competitor, Ericsson, have initiated strong cost-cutting initiatives in the midst of an industry-wide fight against a slowing economy and infrastructure expenditure cuts from mobile carriers. Ericsson is a Swedish company that competes with the Finnish company.
The revelation that Nokia will be cutting off as many as 14,000 employees came in October, following the company’s realization that it had experienced a major decline in profitability during the third quarter.
By the year 2026, the company intends to achieve a reduction in its gross expenses of between 800 million and 1.2 billion euros within the time frame.
The business made the announcement on Thursday that it had made “significant progress” on its entire cost reduction program and that it had implemented actions with the goal of cutting expenses by a total of 400 million euros up to this time.
SOURCE: CNBC
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