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Social media faces a legal crisis over defective design - Recent jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube indicate that platforms can be held liable for features like beauty filters and infinite scroll, bypassing traditional content protections.
“In LA, a jury found that Meta and YouTube had been negligent in the way that they designed features, that they said were harmful to this plaintiff.”
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Plaintiffs have found a legal side door around Section 230 - By framing platform mechanics—rather than user-generated content—as defective products, lawyers are successfully challenging the decades-old legal immunity enjoyed by tech companies.
“This is not about, oh, I got harmed by this particular piece of content. This is about the design of the whole platform. The design feels defective.”
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Wuhan’s robo-taxi outage highlights autonomous vehicle risks - A glitch in Baidu's self-driving fleet trapped passengers on highways for over an hour, underscoring the physical safety concerns and reliability gaps in current robo-taxi deployments
“technical glitch that caused a number of robo taxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze, trapping some passengers in their vehicles for more than an hour.”