From Patrick Hardyman

Blanchardville

To the Editor:

On Tuesday, March 24, a jury in New Mexico found that “Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.” Meta was fined $375 million.

The very next day on March 25, a jury in Los Angeles, California, found “Meta (owner of Instagram and Facebook) and Google (owner of You Tube) liable for creating products that led to harmful and addictive behavior by young users.” The lead plaintiff “KGM” was awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages. Both verdicts will be appealed.

I mentioned the New Mexico and California trials in a “Letter to the Editor” published nearly six weeks ago, when discussing the book, “The Anxious Generation” and author Jonathan Haidt’s claim of the “negative impact that social media has inflicted on the mental health of children”. The two historic jury decisions confirm many of his findings.

Mr. Haidt offered four “foundational” reforms that parents should implement: “No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.” Purchase the book to delve deeper into this subject and stay tuned for further developments!

On a personal note, television can be just as bad, if not worse, with the extremely violent and sexual images portrayed on our various devices. The majority of programming has deteriorated over the last six decades and we wonder why we see the negative impacts on human behavior, both in the young and older humans. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another “thorny issue”!