Zuckerberg avoids personal liability in 2 dozen Meta addiction lawsuits

A federal judge again rejected a bid to hold Mark Zuckerberg individually liable in two dozen lawsuits accusing Meta Platforms Inc. and other social media companies of addicting children to their products.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is overseeing the cases, sided with the Meta chief executive officer Thursday, finding that a revised complaint still wasn’t legally sufficient to proceed. The decision dismisses Zuckerberg as an individual defendant without affecting claims against Meta as a company.

Lawsuits filed on behalf of young people have alleged that Zuckerberg was repeatedly warned by Meta employees that Instagram and Facebook weren’t safe for children but ignored the findings and chose not to share them publicly.

Holding CEOs of large companies personally responsible for wrongdoing is generally difficult because of a corporate law tradition of shielding executives from liability.

The cases naming Zuckerberg are a small subset of a collection of more than 1,000 suits in state and federal courts in California by families and public school districts against Meta, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, and Snap Inc., owner of the Snapchat platform.

Tesla told to temper robotaxi fervor months before probe

Tesla was admonished by a U.S. agency over how the automaker was promoting its driver-assistance technology on social media months before the regulator opened a defect investigation of the system.

In a May 15 email sent to Tesla representatives, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official flagged seven social media posts the company had shared that gave the agency pause. Each post on X, the service that Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk owns, showcased disengaged drivers using the system Tesla has marketed as Full Self-Driving, or FSD.

“We believe that Tesla’s postings conflict with its stated messaging that the driver is to maintain continued control over the dynamic driving task,” Gregory Magno, a division chief within NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation, wrote in the letter posted on the agency’s website Friday. “These postings may encourage viewers to see FSD-Supervised as a Chauffer or ‘Robotaxi’ rather than a partial automation / driver-assist system that requires persistent attention and intermittent intervention by the driver.”

The email offers a sense of how closely NHTSA was monitoring Tesla and FSD in the months before the regulator decided to investigate the system. Magno notes that the agency had asked the company to brief NHTSA’s technical staff about how the company had begun offering free trials of FSD. He wrote that Tesla had obliged and emphasized ways it had communicated to drivers that their vehicle wasn’t autonomous.

Man who voiced famous ‘You’ve got mail’ soundbite dies at age 74

Elwood Edwards, who voiced America Online’s “You’ve got mail” greeting, has died. He was 74.

He died Tuesday at his home in New Bern, North Carolina, said his daughter Heather Edwards. The cause was complications from a stroke late last year, she said.

Edwards taped his AOL greeting in 1989 into a recorder while sitting in the living room of his home. “You’ve got mail” became a pop culture catchphrase in the late 1990s and served as the title of the 1998 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan film.

He was also the voice of AOL’s “Welcome,” “Goodbye” and “File’s done” messages. He made $200 from the recordings.

Compiled from Bloomberg and Associated Press reports.