Buffalo, NY (WBEN) Juries in two states have rendered verdicts against two social media giants, ruling their algorithms have caused harm in children. One local attorney hopes to use that as a springboard in his lawsuit against social media for their role in the Tops mass shooting on 5/14.
Attorney John Elmore helped file the first in the nation lawsuit to hold social media accountable for a mass shooting. He says these rulings could shift things in his favor. He says the Communication Decency Act protects social media platforms from lawsuits based upon it gives them a lot of protections, but his suit was based on New York State's consumer protection laws,. "In New Mexico, the lawyers there tried to get around theact by filing their lawsuit based upon New Mexico consumer protection laws. So there's some parallel levels there. In New Mexico, what the attorney general did was they said that there was something called social media addiction, and when somebody gets on social media, the algorithms in New Mexico, they were designed in a way to connect teenage girls with pedophiles," says Elmore. He cites a violation of New York's Consumer Protection Act in his lawsuit. "What happened to Gendron because of the algorithms he was connected and indoctrinated to the white supremacy connections and friends and websites and everything.," he adds. A jury in California also ruled social media algorithms harmed young children who used them.
Elmore says the state Court of Appeals will hear the case. Elmore says two things are clear. "It's pretty clear that the social media is addictive, and it's pretty clear that they don't warn parents that juveniles, their brains aren't fully functioned and developed at 1617, 18 and 19 years old," says Elmore. "There's studies that say that the human brain is not fully developed until somebody is 25 years old. And so when, any time a corporation puts public safety above, I mean, I mean profits above public safety, then our products liability is sued, is what's filed, and that's what we've done in this case. And hopefully sometime down the road, we will have these social media platforms held responsible for, you know the damage and danger that they've exposed the public to already."
Juries in NM and CA ruled against Meta and YouTube
