Landmark losses for Meta and YouTube as big tech misses point

Zuckerberg company sought to insist social media addiction is not real – jurors found it liable regardless

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor for the Guardian. I’m hoping futilely for warm spring weather in New York City, but while it’s still cold, I’m sitting inside and reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Published in 2010 and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, the book is a fascinating record of our anxieties about technology at a time when the iPhone was just three years old and Facebook was just six. Google Chrome had debuted two years prior, and I think I was using Mozilla Firefox as my main browser. Stay tuned for a fuller analysis once I finish, but my early impression is that Carr’s observations have stood the test of time.

This week in tech, we’re discussing one major topic: two landmark cases against Meta and YouTube over social media addiction. Whether social media is clinically addictive or not, the liability for it has been determined.

‘Accountability has arrived’: dual US court losses show shifting tide against Meta and co

The Guardian view on social media in the dock: tech bros move fast – society is trying to catch up

How Meta’s victim-blaming failed to sway jurors in landmark social media addiction trial | Technology

I was paid to write fake Google reviews – then my ‘bosses’ tried to scam me

Keep under-fives’ screen time to no more than an hour a day, UK advice says

Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia

Federal judge sides with Anthropic in first round of standoff with Pentagon

Bernie Sanders and AOC introduce bill to pause building of new datacenters