Corporate Crime/Legal Action

Facebookand Instagram recommend sexual content to underage users and promote minors’ accounts to apparent child predators, the state of New Mexico alleges in a lawsuit against parent company Meta Platforms and its CEO.The civil lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New Mexico state court, alleges that “Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey.” It also claims that Meta has failed to implement protections against usage by children below the age of 13 and has…

Updated Dec. 5, 2023 3:49 pm ETA group of activist nuns filed an unusual shareholder lawsuit to pressure gun maker Smith & Wessonto drastically change the way it markets, makes and sells its popular version of the AR-15 rifle.The so-called shareholder derivative action, which the nuns filed in Nevada state court Tuesday against publicly traded Smith & Wesson, alleges that company leaders are putting shareholders at risk. They argue the leaders are exposing the company to liability by the way they have made and…

TikTok won a reprieve in Montana after a judge ruled a state law banning the app can’t go into effect in January. A federal judge on Thursday granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which was passed by the Montana legislature earlier this year, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the social-media company. The legality of the ban itself will be decided later in a bench trial that has yet to be scheduled.Copyright ©2023Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8…

Updated Nov. 18, 2023 7:43 pm ETBayer faces a payout of $1.56 billion after a Missouri jury found in favor of the plaintiffs who blamed its Roundup weedkiller for causing their cancers.The decision is the fourth in a row to go against Bayer during a roller-coaster five-year legal battle over Roundup, the world’s most popular weedkiller, which included nine straight victories for the company, as well as earlier losses. The cases represent tens of thousands of claims from farmers and gardeners.Copyright ©2023Dow Jones…

An online nude-photo scam is ensnaring thousands of teen boys and causing emotional trauma.Scammers posing as teen girls befriend boys online, share nude photos of a girl and then ask for nude photos in return. Once the boy reciprocates, the schemer demands money be sent by a peer-to-peer payment app and threatens to share the boy’s photos with his social-media followers if he doesn’t pay.Copyright ©2023Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 An online nude-photo scam is…

A federal judge denied X Corp.’s request to modify or terminate a consent order between the social-media company acquired by Elon Musk last year and the Federal Trade Commission over how the platform handled users’ information.In a decision Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson in the Northern District of California said his court lacked the power to grant X relief from another tribunal’s orders. The judge also denied X’s request to stop a deposition of Musk by the FTC. Copyright ©2023Dow Jones & Company,…

Scammers are capitalizing on the rush of consumer interest in artificial-intelligence tools to steal U.S. small businesses’ social-media-account passwords, Google alleges in a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed Monday, targets unnamed individuals in India and Vietnam. Google said the hackers have been tricking small-business owners into clicking on Facebookads that offer to download Google’s Bard artificial-intelligence chatbot. When they do, the ads hit them with malware that steals their social-media credentials. …

Updated Nov. 6, 2023 3:44 pm ETSAN FRANCISCO — Google’s power in the digital economy is facing another major legal test starting Monday in a case targeting its role as a gatekeeper on billions of mobile devices.A group of jurors heard opening arguments from Fortnite-maker Epic Games that Google used its dominant position to squeeze excess profits from app developers, as well as the search giant’s response to those allegations. The case forms the second part of Epic’s attack on the two largest mobile software providers…

Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts.According to the suit, as early as 2019, Meta’s head of responsible innovation was telling Zuckerberg that mounting evidence showed the net effect of their platforms on user well-being was negative. Around that time, multiple executives, including Instagram head Adam Mosseri, were…

Satya Nadella wanted to make nice with longtime rival Google when he became chief executive of Microsoftalmost a decade ago. Those days now feel like a distant memory.Google’s antitrust trial in Washington, D.C., has provided a stage for Microsoft to air long-simmering grievances about the search giant’s market dominance. It also has opened a window into the events that led to a straining of relations between the two companies, a dynamic that has grown increasingly tense during the boom in artificial…