The Ultimate Breakdown of NYC’s Tech Lawsuit

Video Transcript

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

Hi, this is Ray Hrdlicka with Attorneys.Media, your host for Legal Commentary Interviews.

Today we have Steve Giacovino, a personal injury attorney in New York City, Long Island, and we’re going to talk about social media youth harm because that’s a big, big newsworthy item, and recently there have been some really good actions taken within the legal realm to stop the harm to our nation’s youth.

Specifically, I’m talking about New York City itself suing the major social media companies. Let me read them. Meta, of course, you know, Facebook, Google, Snap, ByteDance, which is TikTok, and they’re suing them. Let me get this out here.

They’re suing them because they claim the platforms, I happen to agree with them, and I’m sure Steve also does, but the claim is that the platforms constitute a public nuisance, and the companies are guilty of gross negligence by intentionally, intentionally designing their products to be addictive to young people for profit.

All right. And the end result of that is addictive features. They’re targeting vulnerable users. They are classifying it in this lawsuit as a public health hazard, and of course, they use the term real world harm, which is, of course, what is happening.

There’s situations all over the news about harm to our nation’s youth because of the overuse of their social media accounts. So let’s get Steve into it here. Steve, welcome very much to our show.

Steven Gacovino – Personal Injury Attorney – Suffolk County (Long Island), NY

I appreciate that. And let’s talk a little bit about New York. Give me your opinion on this lawsuit because you have filed a bunch of them. So tell us about it.

Well, thank you for having me on. And of course, you know that I like to talk about this topic because I think it’s extremely important. And it is affecting families, not just locally, but, of course, all over the country.

But when we’re talking about a public nuisance, and I don’t want to get into the legal weed so much, but it is causing public entities such as school districts, in this instance, the New York City Department of Education, and even public hospitals, an awful lot of time and cost.

To combat the prevalent use of social media in schools, it’s not only because it detracts from the educational mission, but also because there is a huge amount of measurable increase in teen mental harm, mental illness, anxiety, depression, suicide, attempted suicide, harming themselves, cutting themselves, disputes between people, people getting cyberbullied, instances where people are doing harm to themselves, whether it’s reactive to a trend on social media or something of that nature.

You know, the good news is that New York State has taken some pretty affirmative steps to keep cell phones out of schools. There is a law now banning cell phones from being in schools, which I think is terrific.

But in the meantime, this has been ongoing for years, and it’s been building up, I would estimate, about 15 years, where it’s become more and more invasive into the everyday life of young people.

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

Well, if I may ask a question, you tied a bunch of actual physical harm situations. You just described them. How do you tie those into social media, though?

Steven Gacovino – Personal Injury Attorney – Suffolk County (Long Island), NY

Well, this is where a lot of the trends come from. This is where a lot of these viral stunts and things like that come from. Look, you know, in New York, for instance, you have people that are doing something called subway surfing.

I don’t know if you’ve seen that, train surfing, where they actually jump on the top of trains and they try to ride them out.

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

Oh my gosh, I must have missed that.

Steven Gacovino – Personal Injury Attorney – Suffolk County (Long Island), NY

It’s resulted in a number of deaths. But that is just one aspect of what we’re talking about.

I think that what we see more frequently is that there’s this very steady increase of mental harm that people are going through. And how does that really tie into social media?

Well, it ties into social media because social media knows what anybody, everybody creates their own individual reality, and they know what every individual is going to consume. A lot of times that information is deleterious, particularly to the young and formative brain.

That area right around puberty, 11, really up to the point of 25, 26 years old is where they’re most vulnerable to whatever it is that social media is feeding them and most vulnerable to addiction, and these products, in our view, are addictive, and we have therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists that back this up.

So that’s the trend, that’s the problem. People spend more and more time on this stuff that’s negative and stuff that’s harmful to them and stuff that gives them a very negative point of view.

Stuff that, you know, I think that we’ve talked about this in the past, but you know, the prime example of this are people, young people. You picture young women in particular. It’s always important as to how they portray themselves, how they look.

There’s the inevitable comparison to looking at other people online, and immediately, be it Instagram, TikTok, Snap, wherever it’s coming from, they know that if this person is going to look at images of thin girls, for instance, in bikinis, and it’s going to make them feel worse and worse about themselves, but they’re going to want to maybe try to figure out how to get thinner.

Where it eventually evolves, its logical end game, which is learning how to starve themselves, becoming anorexic, sometimes learning how to make themselves actually vomit and become bulimics, which is one of the scariest things that an adult, a parent, can witness one of their children going through.

It is frightening, it’s a grave injury, it’s a serious illness, and it’s happening more and more. And we believe a lot of that can be tied back to the exposure to social media.

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

You know, it’s very interesting because they use the word product in this lawsuit. And when you use that word, what comes to mind is something tangible, you know, that is, you can touch, you can feel.

And here, it’s an interaction, and it’s different, yet it pulls out those addictive tendencies. And not just tendencies, it probably creates addiction where that person may not have ever been addictive to anything because just the volume, yes, the volume of consumption, yes, that’s the word I was looking for, the phrase.

Steven Gacovino – Personal Injury Attorney – Suffolk County (Long Island), NY

Consumption of information or misinformation that’s creating just an individualized reality in that person’s brain, but it isn’t reality. It’s not what’s going on outside their doors. It’s…

But this is where young people live. Unfortunately, it’s also where their parents live. So we all have our own individualized realities and a failure to have good and healthy human interaction.

This is the reason behind this lawsuit, because it’s costing school districts, it’s costing the New York Department of Education, it’s costing the time and the efforts of our healthcare providers to address what really is there should be big alarms going off, because we do have a mental health crisis in this country, particularly for young people.

And it’s, and part of the reason, and I believe the most substantial reason, is because of this extreme exposure to this insidious brain worm that is social media.

And if you talk to kids, it’s funny. Like a lot of them say, well, it’s not that I love it. They don’t love it. They just feel like if I’m not there, then I might be missing out on something.