“Young people are stuck in a perverse spiral”, so seven French families announce that they will sue TikTok after the suicide of two of their children, in an action led by the Algos Victima association for the first time in Europe. Accused of exploiting young people, it is now clear that social networks exploit weaknesses to fuel addiction and therefore profits. Sometimes with devastating consequences.
These French families now claim that the TikTok algorithm has shown children a flood of increasingly dangerous and increasingly harmful content for their mental stability.
According to the lawyer Laure Boutron-Marmion, who represents them, the perverse mechanism of the platform, aimed at personalizing the contents based on the user’s choices, only fuels the fragility and discomfort of adolescents, perhaps triggering or aggravating conditions of already fragile mental health.
The combination of the “engaging” design of the application with the lack of content moderation “It makes a product really problematic,” says Laure Boutron.
Hundreds of lawsuits accusing the app of having damaged the mental health of minors are already underway in the United States, just as last March the Antitrust fined three companies of the Bytedance Ltd group (l (Irish TikTok Technology Limited, the British TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and the Italian TikTok Italy Sr), because they are inadequate controls on the contents circulating on the platform, in particular those that may threaten the safety of minors and vulnerable subjects.
