giuliomagnificoMeta removes ads for social media addiction litigation
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/09/meta-social-media-addiction-ads
> "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."
Wow.. That is quite a statement. Am I right in saying that in order to claim for the class action lawsuit, which facebook has been 'found negligent', that the victims need to take an action collectively in order to claim ? IE They need to be reached somehow to inform them of the possibility ?
Seems the most obvious place to advertise would be Meta.
I understand Meta can basically do whatever they like with their ToS but the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.
They wouldn't profit if the cases didn't have merit.
Would be really entertaining if all the lawyers affected banded together and made a class action lawsuit full of lawyers as the plaintiffs.
The judge should have ordered Meta to place a banner on FB so that everyone can see it and join if they're a victim.
Wow this is a really good idea. I wonder if the various state trials happening as well should use this for remediation too.
It's not a hard thing to implement on their end and should be mandated by a judge as you said.
Filing this away for later use.
Europe (Poland) loves this kind of stuff.
It often comes up in (anti) free-speech trials, where the government compels the perpetrator to issue a public apology to the victim. Forcing them to buy an ad in a newspaper for example is not unheard of.
As far as I understand, Americans consider this to be "compelled speech" and hence prohibited, but I might be wrong on this.
The same thing happens here. Courts are allowed to compel speech as a method of remedy, but my recollection is that this is sometimes successfully challenged.
An interesting variant I’ve seen on anti-smoking banners at convenience stores is “A federal court has ordered a Philip Morris USA to say: …”
Not likely to survive 1st Amendment challenge - it is possible to compel somebody to certain speech as a result of losing a case, but doing this as a prerequisite when the case has just started is not likely to fly. Otherwise I could force Facebook (or any other platform) to publish anything just by suing them - and anybody could sue anybody else on virtually any grounds.
Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"
Literally every ceo
It would be a better analogy if tobacco companies sold ad space on their packs and chose not to do business with a private for-profit anti-smoking solicitation group.
No it would not. Meta is an advertising company that sells ad space. More specifically, Meta is the dominant firm in the social advertising market which is an oligopoly.
It is "the business", not an imagined side revenue stream.
I understand the impulse, but there are not only significant differences, i.e., the requirement to add labeling to cigarettes was mostly a judicial or legislative action, but there is also that rather perverse fact that this kind of legislation that people are championing is often funded by profit and greed just like the harm being sued over.
The article even at least mentions that at least one of the suits is private equity funded; which generally will result in the partners and/or investors of the private equity firm and the attorneys suing, which are often all one and the same in what is just a financial and legal shell game, net tens of millions of dollars, while the supposed victims will end up with nothing but pennies on the dollar of harm and injury.
I get the impulse to also “cheer” for the lawsuits, but if you thought Meta, etc. are bad; you really don’t want to look into the vile pestilence that is the law firms that are basically organized crime too by the core definition of crime being an offense and harm upon society.
I don’t really know a solution for this problem because it is so rooted in the core foundation of this rotten system we still call America for some reason, but for the time being I guess, the only moderately effective remedy for harm and injury is to combat it with more harm and injury.
> the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.
All corporate CYA ideas sound that way, but ultimately end up benefiting the company in the end. Meta is right to do this. That's not to say it's right to do, but it's right for the company.