LAWYER REACTS TO HOW TO COOK THAT: Exploding Egg Lawsuit??
Ann Reardon from the channel How To Cook That recently posed a question to lawyers: in the case of videos that tell people how to microwave an egg (which can AND HAS lead to explosions and horrible burns), could YouTube get sued for hosting the dangerous hacks?? Let's talk about it!
HOW TO COOK THAT VIDEO: NEW Debunking "Organic Food" Viral Videos | How To Cook That Ann Reardon, https://youtu.be/YfQO_aQo9VU
The 26 Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kossoff, https://amzn.to/3ya9GNv
RELATED VIDEOS: THIS LAW AFFECTS YOU EVERY DAY BUT YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF IT, https://youtu.be/adDGE9ylpiI
TRANSCRIPT:
I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here but like there's something about the Zuck. Hi there my name is Leeja I'm a real life lawyer on a mission to demystify the law and how it affects your everyday life. Ann Reardon on the channel How to Cook That recently posed a question for lawyers and a lot of you tagged me in it, and I'm a lawyer with a particular interest in internet law I figured ah hell why not let me take a whack at it. So the question was spurred by these poached egg microwave hacks that are all over YouTube and tiktok, claiming that you can poach an egg in the microwave so apparently recently another girl got burned by trying to poach an egg in the microwave so Ann posed the following question:
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I'd love to know if there is a lawyer watching, if someone could sue a platform like YouTube or Facebook or that some stuff, if they're watching a how to video on their platform that's already had marketable news stories about it about people getting injured. If someone then followed that and it was still on the platform with no warnings nothing minor, could they sue the platform on,
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Can they sue YouTube? Let's talk about it. First let me say that I'm a lawyer but I'm not your lawyer nothing that I say should be construed as legal advice and you should always seek the advice of a licensed attorney before making any legal decisions, but the short answer is likely now, they probably can't sue you too, so there are a number of different issues here that we can kind of delve into first question is Where would they sue you to what jurisdiction, YouTube is located in the United States, they have a lot of servers in the United States. However, they also have servers in other countries and that's important because the server's host the content the videos. So where the video is hosted might come into play when questioning where this lawsuit would happen a lot of these burning incidents happened in the UK I don't know why y'all keep putting eggs in microwaves, but like I was trying to find an incident that happened in the United States but it's all UK based I think maybe someone else really maybe like stopped putting ideas in microwaves over there in the UK like we got a bad here in the US but you guys with the microwave in the egg I don't get it. Okay, because YouTube is a US based company you would likely have to bring the case in the United States I think YouTube would have some viable arguments as to the forum being inconvenient, they're located in the United States, a lot of their content is hosted in the United States because of that it's not convenient for them to have to litigate something that happened in Australia or the UK or wherever else Google owns YouTube Google is also located in the United States so they would have some arguments to say like we're you shouldn't have to be forced to litigate this outside of the US, Google and YouTube have both been successfully sued outside of the US for things like antitrust violations and violating children's privacy on the internet. However, those lawsuits have been brought by governments and have often resulted in fines and things like that, terms of a private citizen trying to sue, YouTube, that wouldn't be something that would probably have to happen on US soil based on my limited knowledge of international law I took the class I've read some cases companies are very good at avoiding international litigation, a lot of courts in other countries, and in the US say like look, it didn't happen here so like we're not going to deal with it or look the company's not located here it's not our problem, there could be viable arguments to bring a suit, in a different country. However, likely the suit would have to be brought in the United States.
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So in this hypothetical situation, let's say that a lawsuit is brought in the United States. The next issue you would have to overcome is standing, standing refers to whether or not you have a right to sue a company or a person to bring a lawsuit in the first place, in order to bring a lawsuit you have to have been personally harmed, meaning that you can't just sue on behalf of someone else because you're mad but it happened to them, there are organizations that Sue on behalf of other people, for example, there are a lot of like environmental activism orgs that sue for like pipeline construction that is going to hurt a group of people, on behalf of them because they represent their interests, but as an individual person if like, am wanted to bring a lawsuit because she's seeing this happen and she thinks it's an injustice, I wouldn't be able to do this you have to have been personally hurt or has like a real danger of being hurt by the actions of the defendant of the per year suing in order to bring a lawsuit to begin with, so okay, you're in the United States, you've been actually hurt by one of these videos that claims that you can microwave and egg you bring a lawsuit, would you be successful in it, Still no, not in the US at least, there's a lot of theories of liability when it comes to products, so if you were selling a product or a service that YouTube created and then hurt you, you might be able to sue them under like a product liability claims and like this product was made by YouTube and YouTube did not create these videos though YouTube is merely a website that hosts them, and in the United States we have this pesky little law called CDA 230, also known as the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 Luckily for all of us I already made an extensive video on CDA 230 I will link it here but let's just talk about the basics CDA 230 says in relevant part no provider or user of an interactive computer service, shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider, this language has been interpreted by courts to mean that no host of third party content, so like social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, websites that host content that is posted by its users, not by the host itself. They cannot be held liable for the content that their users post, for better or for worse, so if your Facebook and someone posts defamatory language on your website in a comment or something, that person that's been defamed can't then sue Facebook for hosting that content, or for example if you're Pornhub and someone posts revenge porn, have you on the Pornhub database Pornhub can't get sued. And you might wonder why we would give such blanket immunity to websites like this and the reason is because this law was passed in 1996 Back when the internet was oriented was just becoming a consumer product, people were really excited about its potential, and people wanted to see it grow, unfettered by pesky regulations and CDA 230 really did shape the Internet as we know today there's this great book if you're really interested in delving really deep into the background of this law of CDA 230 It's called the 26 words, that created the internet, I'll link it below. So again this model allowed these websites to be formed, and to not have to worry about
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facing any sort of liability
for the things that are posted on it which is why we now have social media, like we know it today. However, this is also allowed for abuses to proliferate on these websites, including child abuse, relationship abuse Doxxing which is where someone takes your information and publishes it publicly, trying to encourage people to harass you revenge porn harassment, you name it, this is happening on these platforms and the websites that are hosting this content, cannot be held liable, across the board for pretty much any of it, there was an act called foster acesta that was passed back in 2017 that protects specifically against child abuse so where a website is hosting content that promotes sex trafficking, especially of children, they can be held liable, that was carved out of that law, and I talked more about that in the video that I mentioned before on CDA 230 how it didn't really do what it was meant to do and it's actually hurt a lot of people including specifically sex workers whose websites where they were finding work safely were taken down because we allow websites to grow without the burden of regulation. Now there's a ton of websites that exist that if new regulations are made, they would have to close down because they don't have the resources to hire the people necessary to do the type of monitoring that would be necessary to monitor the content that other people are posting on the site, all of that to say that websites like YouTube, cannot be held liable for the things that people are posting on it, so if someone posts defamation and video or posts, bad advice in a video, even if it's like flagrantly negligent adopt them to have posted it and to have recommended someone doing it, YouTube cannot be held liable for it. Of course you could sue the person who posted the content. Oftentimes this is impossible because in cases of like revenge porn or Daxing, it's really easy to hide your identity when you post something on the internet. So proving that someone posted something, even if you know like okay the only person I gave that photo to was this person, so the only person who could have posted with them, that doesn't prove that they actually posted it you have to be able to show, like the IP address and the specific technical things that indicate who actually did the post. A lot of times that are obscured with various technology you can use to obscure your identity and your location. Because of this, bringing lawsuits against abusers who use websites to post the content is really difficult. On top of this, those people who are posting this content might not have any money. Anyway, if you bring a lawsuit against someone that doesn't have any money even if you win against them, like you're not going to get damages, out of them because they wouldn't have the money to pay you in a criminal case again it's gonna be really hard to prove. However, in the case of the exploding egg situation.
These are YouTube
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channels that have a name associated with it, which would be a lot easier to then say if this person or this company was negligent in saying that I should microwave an egg to poach it, so I'm going to sue them under a theory of negligence. Negligence just means that you owed me a duty to not intervene or encouraged me to injure myself you acted unreasonably in encouraging me to microwave that poached egg. You should have told me the risks and the dangers involved. The fact that you didn't was negligent and as a direct result of your negligent recommendation that I put an egg in the microwave. I was hurt as a result so I'm suing him, I think this would be a difficult case to bring it just because they would probably have a pretty viable argument to say like, I didn't owe you anything, I didn't owe you this protection I'm just posting this on the internet, you should have known better than the, than to put an egg in the microwave. That's your negligence not mine, and there have been so many other incidents where people have put eggs in microwaves, and then injured but you should have known better, they might have a pretty strong argument there to at least negate any sort of damages and again, even if you won the case against them looking at a lot of these channels I mean, they don't have a ton of views they don't have a ton of subscribers so potentially a lot of these YouTube channels don't have a ton of assets for you to go after if you were to sue them in civil court to try to get damages, I mean you could try to press criminal charges but criminal negligence is a pretty high bar, and I don't think you're going to get it by claiming that you follow their video on YouTube, voluntarily and got hurt because of it, but and this is a really interesting question because it gets at some internet law developments that are very much in motion that are starting to happen, I delve into this more in my video on CDA 230 But there are a number of different actors that are very involved in the regulation of the Internet, Department of Justice has recently held a panel discussion, looking at what should be done to reform, CDA 230 The DOJ wants it to be reformed in their favor so that they can access data and information on people to try to help in criminal investigations, which can be good but can also lead to invasions of privacy and other issues of like government surveillance that might be problematic victims rights advocates want CDA 230 to be revised because a lot of people are experiencing abuse on the internet and have no recourse again because it's hard to tell who did it and even if you know who did it, they probably don't have the money to pay damages to try to rectify the harm that they caused you or cover like the therapy fee and pressing criminal charges is difficult because again it's hard to prove who did it, so being able to sue a large company that has a ton of money for allowing the content to proliferate would be a really powerful tool for survivors of online abuse and harassment, but then there are also people who are really really in favor of a completely free internet with no regulation like they're willing to just kind of sacrifice, the abuse and the other negative things that are happening on the internet in favor of free speech for a long time social media companies were really in this no regulation boat, of course, because why would they want to be regulated, they wanted to be able to do whatever they want to do and that's what they've been able to do for the past couple decades because of CDA 230 But I think the tides on that are turning, actually I know the tides on that are turning because recently I opened a new york times daily like headlines. Morning email that I got and I noticed this very interesting ad, let me show it to you. Let's zoom in. This is a Facebook ad. It's not like any other Facebook app I've ever seen. You click on it it goes to this website where Facebook is expounding on all of these regulations that they are in favor of they're talking about how they're in favor of regulating social media have fair and free elections and making sure that there isn't, you know, People interfering with elections via social media platforms, for example, in favor of trying to curb abuse online, etc. And at first I was like, Well that's weird like they've never wanted regulation and now it seems like they're trying to be the good guy. And then I realized it's a tactic, and like, Look, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here but like there's something about this. That face looks like the face of like what a lizard person would say like, this looks like a human face, right, like his hairline looks like it was drawn by a child who was like this is what a human hairline looks like right. There's something about them anyway, not relevant. The point is that I think it's a tactic because big internet companies know that regulations are coming there have been numerous government inquiries into their antitrust into their anti competitive behavior and all sorts of things that they're doing, they were violating federal law that had been in place for like 40 years that said that you cannot discriminate against people in housing based on their race and yet they were allowing housing advertisers to discriminate against people based on race, in their targeted ads, and they just were allowed to just get away
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with that
for years
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with no regulation, until the government finally stepped in, But the government is realizing the power that these websites have and the lack of oversight and the type of damage that that can cause especially after
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the 2016 election for example, so they know that these regulations are coming, so they're trying to get out ahead of it
by
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forming the narrative, the way that they want it to. So they're saying yes okay we're going to be regulated but if we put our money and our cloud into advertising on the New York Times which by the way, shame on you, New York Times, come on, and pushing our own privacy and other sort of regulatory agenda, we can form the conversation we can buy out politicians because we know our politicians can be bought out. That is a fact, at this point and we can then control the narrative, and they have
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the money to do
it. And this is an issue that's going to grow in importance
in the coming years.
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I just know it. If our planet survives the coming years because I don't know about you guys but all of these natural disasters that are happening all at once is making me really nihilistic, so I think even though the internet's been around for decades, we're at the very beginning of figuring out how to actually regulate it and I'm not sure that consumers are going to be the biggest beneficiaries, when those regulations are written something tells me there's going to be money that gets in the way, so thank you man for asking this question I think it's really interesting, it gave me an opportunity to expound on a topic that I find very interesting and get up on my soapbox, which I'd like to do. I hope this answers the question, I'm sorry that it's disappointing No, probably not, there might be situations where if they were sued in a different country and that country's laws allowed for websites to be held liable for
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things then
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maybe, like I said I don't know anything about European law but in the United States, it's a major no go. You can just do whatever they want, at this point, thanks for asking the question, thanks for watching. Also in case you missed it, I launched a Patreon, the link to join is down below if you want a behind the scenes footage, more information early access to videos, more access to me you want to get on our discord chat you want to do live streams with me, etc, etc. We're gonna do a lot of fun stuff over on that Patreon, and I owe some people some shout outs for being so kind and generous and supportive of me so far on that Patreon first major thank you to Brett Qian tech and to anonymous you know who you are, for being my multi platinum patrons. You guys are so generous and your support means so much to me a shout out and welcome to the following new patrons, lo Federman Daniel Taylor, and Nick Williams sit at the Royal patron level, and Sara Gray, David Corrado and Adrian at the VIP patron level, thank you so so much for your support it means the world and it allows this channel, to continue to grow and proliferate. If you're already a patron and I owe you a shout out don't worry it's coming. Thank you so much for your views and your support, let me know in the comments below if you have any ideas for future videos don't forget to like and subscribe and thank you so much for watching. Have a good day. Goodbye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
