Video – Attorney Steven Gacovino Explains Social Media Youth Harm Litigation

Ray Hrdlicka - Presentador - Attorneys.Media

All right, so now let’s take a change in our discussion here to social media youth harm. It’s obviously a phrase that implies what is happening with today’s youth and the harm that is created by the social media sites. There’s been a number of articles, and for many years, about the level of addiction created with the social media sites, how it changes brain functions, how it changes moods. There’s a plethora of issues that have been raised and it’s very interesting that you’re focusing on this as part of your practice.

So, give us an overview of what that… what that practice is and what it entails.

Steven Gacovino – Social Media Youth Harm Mass Tort Attorney – Suffolk County, NY

All right, so well for the most part we’re representing people that are, I’m going to say, generally under the age of 29 years old. But what we see is that there was a great rise of social media in, let’s say the early 2010s, where it became part and parcel of many people’s lives. Children, adults, everything in between. We know that companies like Facebook, Instagram became really, really, I think, where people, in a way, virtually lived.

Now, with respect to young people, when, you know, the brain is is forming from those ages of 11 to 26, there is such a vulnerability to the things that are addictive, right. And what we what we’ve learned over time is that these companies, the big the big social media outlets, know that they’re interested in engagement and when I say engagement they want to keep that person on there as much as they can, okay?

And it doesn’t matter if the information that they’re providing is positive, it doesn’t matter if it’s negative, but what they do know is that they want that individual to stay there. They want to stimulate that person to stay in that place and use their product as much as they can use it.

With respect to young people, their brain is still forming and they are vulnerable and they are yet more vulnerable to, really quite frankly, negativity or things that are making them sad or things that are upsetting them. There’s just something in the human brain that’s drawn to that and even if it’s sad, even if it’s miserable, they tend to have more of it if more of it is presented to them.

Now these companies know it, their artificial intelligence knows it, their programming knows it, and the best example that I like to use is usually young girls are very concerned with their physical appearance. And of course, young boys too, but using the example of a young girl, she’s 13 years old, she’s self-conscious about her body, and they know on the other side of this that she’s lingered on an image or looked at some information where it might be a girl that looks perfect and beautiful in, let’s say, in a bathing suit.

Now they’ve recognized instantly that she’s looking at that person. Now she’s going to get suggestions for whether it could be friends or people to follow that are similarly beautiful in not very much clothing. It could be inside how to get thinner. Sometimes it could start off with fitness. It could start off with health, but it could also turn into something that I’ve heard frequently called how to get a thigh gap, which means I really want to get very, very skinny legs, right?

So, then it’s how to starve yourself. And then it’s how to hide the fact that you’re making yourself throw up from your parents and your doctors.

So, this type of suggestion winds up putting this person down a very, very dark hole. And there’s been a lot of correlation between young people looking at this kind of material and getting very ill, suffering from very significant eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other associated mental illness such as high anxiety, depression, harming themselves, suicides, attempted suicides. The list goes on.

I see cases like this every single day. I don’t know that these companies are necessarily malevolent out-of-the-box, but it’s having a lot of what I believe to be dangerous results and terrible results. I think it needs to be taken seriously. I think that these cases are important. And I think that these cases… can bring these things really to the top, to the forefront, and really help raise public awareness as well.