Snapchat-Affiliated App Can Be Sued for Enabling Bullying
By Movieguide® Contributor
Third-party app Yolo can be sued for not protecting users from bullying.
The app, which was used in conjunction with Snapchat to allow users to message anonymously, “promised to unmask and ban users who engaged in bullying or harassment but allegedly failed to do so,” Justia reported.
The Verge reported, “In a ruling issued Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shouldn’t block a claim that Yolo misrepresented its terms of service, overruling a lower court decision. But it determined the app can’t be held liable for alleged design defects that allowed harassment, letting a different part of that earlier ruling stand.”
The app had previously been sued and removed from the app store when a 16-year-old boy named Carson Bride took his life after being bullied on the app.
“This is a really horrible, tragic case, and judges who are reading these cases are not completely blind to that,” Jeff Kosseff, a law professor, said about the case at the time. “No matter how much case law there is, they’re clearly going to be influenced by the fact these are some really terrible allegations in this complaint.”
“Bride’s family and a collection of other aggrieved parents argued that Yolo broke a legally binding promise to its users,” The Verge said. “They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent ‘harassing messages’ to others.”
The plaintiff said, “With a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did.”
“Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to,” wrote Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. “While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty…is the promise itself.”
Bullying is one of many issues that can arise when children use social media. Movieguide® previously reported:
NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes the damage social media wreaks on children’s mental health is undeniable; he is now pushing to hold companies accountable for the damage they have done.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Haidt told PEOPLE. “There’s massive evidence of harm. It happened in many countries at the same time, at a specific point in time: the moment when teens traded their flip phones for smartphones. It’s as if you had a murder, and all eyewitnesses point to this suspect. There is no other explanation.”
According to Haidt, rates of anxiety and depression skyrocketed among youth worldwide around 2012, five years after the iPhone was released and two years after Instagram debuted. He believes the link between these occurrences is not incidental, and lawmakers have allowed social media companies to get away with something inexcusable.
“Imagine there was suddenly a toy introduced which would cause children to get less sleep, less exercise, spend less time with other children. It would make them incredibly self-conscious, and it would lower their self-esteem and cause depression and anxiety. That would be horrible, right?” he said. “We’ve seen the loss of the play-based childhood, which kids have always had, in favor of a phone-based childhood.”
