In 70+ lawsuits against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Google, parents are making product liability claims, blaming algorithms for kids’ mental health issues, and more (Joel Rosenblatt/Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Roblox and Discord are accused of enabling adult men to sexually and financially exploit a California girl in a lawsuit filed by a social media watchdog group  —  Roblox Corp. and Discord Inc. were accused of enabling adult men to sexually and financially exploit a California girl in a lawsuit filed by a social-media watchdog group.

Lachlan Markay / Axios:
Snap’s ad archive shows some Democratic and progressive orgs were able to target ads using the data of a GOP data broker; Snap blames an internal mistake  —  A slip-up by social media giant Snap allowed leading Democratic campaigns and party committees to unwittingly tap into a vast repository …

TechCrunch:
BrandTotal and Unimania agreed to a permanent injunction banning them from using and scraping Facebook and Instagram, and will pay a “significant financial sum”  —  Facebook parent Meta has settled a lawsuit in the U.S. against two companies that had engaged in data scraping operations …

Bloomberg:
A look at online and smartphone gambling in the UK, legalized in 2005, as bettors lost £14B+ in four of the past five years and concerns about addiction rise  —  On an August morning in 2016, Stewart Kenny, the co-founder of Paddy Power, was struggling to keep his emotions in check …

TechCrunch:
A look at Snap’s decision to close Zenly, popular in Europe and Asia with a claimed ~35M MAUs earlier in 2022, to “focus on Snap Map”, which has 300M+ MAUs  —  Snapchat’s parent Snap became the latest tech company to announce a huge round of layoffs, confirming ongoing rumors yesterday …

Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
Indiana’s AG sues TikTok for deceiving users about China’s access to data and for exposing kids to mature content, in the first US state lawsuits against TikTok  —  The lawsuits are the first by an American state against TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, in a sign of mounting legal pressure.