State attorneys general are addicted to lawsuits, and that should scare us. In the late 1990s attorneys working for states drafted the landmark tobacco settlement to mitigate the damage from decades harmful effects of cigarettes. Two decades after the tobacco litigation, state attorneys general sued drug companies for the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin, was accused of using aggressive marketing to boost demand for narcotic drugs, fueling addiction. Purdue Pharma wasn’t the only target, large pharmacy chains, including CVS, Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens and others were drawn in.
It should come as no surprise that state attorneys general are on the lookout for other targets for lawsuits. It appears social media is the new one. More than two-thirds of states are suing Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. There are also suits against TikTok. Supposedly, social media is addictive (like cigarettes and opioids) and bad for youngsters’ mental health:
The complaint against Meta follows a string of suits targeting social media companies over claims their platforms harm children, including a suit against both Meta and rival TikTok filed in March by Arkansas’ Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin, who claimed the companies deceived users about content on their apps. In that suit, Griffin argued the companies violated Arkansas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act by “knowingly” designing apps to foster addiction for young users.
Social media, like Facebook, likely embodies and perpetuates some of the same childhood and teen angst common in American grade schools and high schools. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine calling a website addictive because people enjoy using it. The number of states suing Meta is now 41.
Arkansas just added Google’s parent company Alphabet and YouTube to the list of companies it is suing, claiming they are fueling a mental health crisis.
The lawsuit claims the site is addictive and has resulted in the state spending millions on expanded mental health and other services for young people.“YouTube amplifies harmful material, doses users with dopamine hits, and drives youth engagement and advertising revenue,” the lawsuit said. “As a result, youth mental health problems have advanced in lockstep with the growth of social media, and in particular, YouTube.”
I confess that I love YouTube. YouTube is the most widely used streaming service, more than Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+. YouTube went from humble beginnings as a repository of short, grainy videos to a streaming service with 14 billion videos, many of which are professional quality. Monthly users number about 2.5 billion. The average number of hours of video watched daily is 1 billion, while the average time spent is 19 minutes.
YouTube democratized the television entertainment industry. Anyone can become a content creating partner and upload videos. Those who attract at least 10,000 subscribers share in the advertising revenue and can even make their own deals for sponsorships. Want to watch both amateur and professional chefs teach you to cook? There are tons of such videos. Want to watch a retired British couple refurbish an old farmhouse in Portugal? There are videos like that too.
YouTube is teaming with medical content as well. There are physicians who produce videos on a wide range of medical topics. There are also videos to improve your mental health available to those who seek them out. I even believe YouTube could be the next big advancement in physician care and mass-customized medicine.
Telemedicine historically required talking to a doctor, one-on-one, on the phone or through a video feed. That is only a slight improvement over queuing in an office waiting room. The next leap was websites that allow patients to fill out forms and a doctor approves prescriptions after the fact. Think Viagra, birth control, hormones and many more conditions. Perhaps in the future YouTube could facilitate a form of interactive group therapy, where would-be patients watch a video or perhaps participate in a live event where they can ask questions and get follow up care and prescriptions from a physician. Such an arrangement could be with doctors you will never meet. Or they could be in partnership with your personal physician. Interactive group therapy could substantially increase access to care while reducing the cost. However, state attorneys general are afraid that may be too addictive.
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