Three-front war for online safety

Algorithm was once a term exclusive to mathematics and computer science. Fast forward to now, and the word is a common part of the social media world’s native dialect.
“When I started doing this work, people really didn’t know what an algorithm was,” Attorney Michael P. Bergman told The Stand. “Today, they do. And it’s having a real effect.”
Bergman is the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), representing families who claim their children have been harmed through social media and artificial intelligence-integrated platforms.
According to Bergman, some of the greatest risks posed to online users, particularly children, are not necessarily in the form of individual messages; instead, they are algorithms and other features that are built into a platform’s core functionality and are intended to keep users engaged as long as possible.

Malicious design
Bergman founded SMVLC (socialmediavictims.org) in 2021 following the release of internal documents from the social media platform Facebook. Commonly known as the Facebook Files, the documents revealed the dark truth behind social media addiction, according to Bergman.
“[The Facebook Files] demonstrated that these platforms were prioritizing engagement and advertising revenue over safety,” he asserted. “It demonstrated that the mental health crisis that we were in the midst of – which the surgeon general reported on contemporaneously with the Facebook papers – was not an accident, not a coincidence, but a direct result of the advent of social media and its defective design on kids.”
He added, that in ensuing years, his worst concerns have been more than confirmed by evidence uncovered through formal legal discovery.
Bergman described the current landscape of social media in one word: carnage.
“These platforms continue to inflict carnage on children,” he explained. “They undermine the authority of parents. They make it difficult, if not impossible, for parents to exercise their authority and to monitor their kids’ online activity.”
Unfortunately, the danger does not end with social media.
“The advent of chatbots has made things worse,” he continued, “in that children are now not only being placed in proximity to online pedophiles, but the chatbots themselves, in many cases, engage in grooming behavior that would put a person in jail if it weren’t being performed by an AI chatbot.” (An AI chatbot is a software application that uses human-like conversation, called natural language processing, to communicate with users through text or voice.)
Legally, who is responsible when AI, whether by design or not, crosses a line and pushes a user toward harm? After all, software cannot be prosecuted for breaking the law.
Bergman suggested that, in some circumstances, the people or companies responsible for developing and maintaining these AI systems may deserve criminal scrutiny.
“Take, for instance, these chatbots actively encouraging individuals to take their lives,” he explained. “In most states, it is a crime to encourage a person to commit suicide.”
He pointed to the lawsuit his organization filed with the Tech Justice Law Project on behalf of the parents of Zane Shamblin. The 23-year-old man, who had recently graduated with a master’s degree from Texas A&M University, committed suicide after a “conversation” with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship AI service. The chatbot appeared to encourage Shamblin to take his own life. The suit alleged wrongful death, involuntary manslaughter, and other claims against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman.
Bergman explained that in the world of social media, companies study how to hold a user’s attention through features, such as likes, streaks, notifications, and unpredictable rewards.
“They know that the way they keep you online is not by showing you what you want to see, but by showing you what you can’t look away from,” he explained.
He offered the example of a 12-year-old girl searching for exercises to help her get into shape to play lacrosse. Over time, the child may be shown increasingly extreme content involving punishing exercise routines, severe calorie restrictions, body-shaming images, or instructions for hiding an eating disorder from parents and doctors, Bergman said.
“[Users] will be given more and more extreme content, such as [images of]emaciated bodies or instructions – not on how to eat healthy, but how to survive on 500 calories a day.”

Holding companies accountable
Tech companies will do whatever they want unless they are held accountable. If they are not, Bergman warned, the list of victims will continue to grow.
“What we have learned with all of these companies is that the only way they are going to change their behavior is by facing liability in court,” he emphasized.
Looking at internal corporate documents regarding product design, Bergman said he noted that working within those companies were many “people of high conscience” who attempted to notify executives of the dangers clearly present in their platforms and the potential harm that could come – particularly to young users. He said those inside the company signaling the warning often suggested reasonable, common-sense solutions that would have mitigated those risks.
However, Bergman found that executives, by and large, rejected such warnings when their efforts to protect users would have reduced their time spent on the platform.
“The only thing [these companies] care about is money,” he said. “And so, until they must bear the economic costs of their deliberate design decisions, their behavior is not going to change. I have never in 30 years encountered clients less concerned about money and more concerned about justice and accountability than the parents who have lost kids to suicide. They want these companies to be held accountable. That’s what we’re here to do.”

Expanding danger
Bergman does not believe court cases alone can solve the problem. He described the effort to protect children as a three-front war.
The first front is the courtroom. When a tech company executive can be brought before a judge, families can bring the law to bear on otherwise- untouchable entities to secure justice and restitution through financial settlements. This hits tech companies where it hurts the worst: profits.
The second front is legislation. Although Congress remains as divided as ever on most matters, online safety is one issue that attracts support from both sides of the aisle, especially when it comes to children’s safety, Bergman said.
The third front is public opinion. Just as the term algorithm has become widely known, so has the awareness of the importance of online safety.
Increasingly, people are rejecting the notion that corporations have their best interests at heart, according to Bergman.
“When I was a teenager in the 70s,” he recalled, “drunk driving was a significant issue, with high death rates. Society responded with stricter laws, treating it as a crime, and by shifting cultural attitudes, it became acceptable to ask for rides home and for friends to designate sober drivers without fear of judgment. As a result, drunk-driving deaths have significantly decreased over the past 40 years.”
Bergman said the critical lesson to be learned is that a widespread crisis can be dealt with when legal accountability and cultural change reinforce one another.