Two tragedies

Two disasters have riveted the Filipino consciousness lately.

The first was at Ateneo de Zamboanga University on Aug. 18. A student shooter shot and killed a Grade 10 student, wounded another, then turned the gun on himself. The shooting is blamed on the harmful effects of social media.

The second tragedy is the Nepal floods on Aug. 26. A chunk of glacier half a km wide and about 100 meters deep separated from the Lantan National Park in Nepal, near the border in China, fell 1.2 kms deep into the valley floor and at a furious pace of 150 kph traveled nearly 100 kms, destroying nearly everything in its path in populated areas downstream along the Lende Khola and Trishuli Khola rivers, including the Rasuwagadhi border post between China and Nepal. Entire villages and towns vanished or were destroyed, including a vital highway connecting China and Nepal.

Latest reports say at least 903 people died and 4,247 are missing (including 933 hydroelectric project workers and 592 foreign tourists), after devastating flooding swept through the Bhote Koshi region. About 40 bridges and 14 dams or power plants were damaged or gone forever.

In a report, the US Geological Survey says, “The slope failure involving a glacier generated energy equivalent to an M5.2 earthquake. The debris flow and flood traveled approximately 100 kilometers (approximately 62 miles). A second seismic event was recorded approximately three hours later, generating energy equivalent to an M4.2 earthquake.

“At this time, it is unclear if the initial slope failure was a landslide incorporating part of a glacier or a glacial collapse. A glacial collapse is when a portion of a glacier breaks off, and the debris rapidly moves downslope. The glacial debris contained water and ice that rapidly melted, picking up more material and water as it flowed downslope in the existing stream and river channels, creating a fast-moving, far-traveled landslide and flood laden with boulders and other rubble.

“This mountain was previously the source of another large debris avalanche in 2015 caused by an M7.8 earthquake. There, several million cubic meters of ice and debris collapsed, starting at 5,000-meter elevation, and fell nearly 1,900 meters, burying a village and killing more than 200.”

Climate change is blamed for the unprecedented Nepal floods.

Says scientist Jonathan Mingle, writing for The New York Times: “Worldwide, climate change is causing glaciers to disappear at an accelerating rate. Few places are as vulnerable as the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau, where the rate of glacier ice loss has doubled since 2000. As those frozen water towers dwindle, the two billion people downstream who depend on the Brahmaputra, Indus and other great rivers of Asia will have less water for drinking, farming and hydroelectricity in decades to come.”

On the tragedy caused by harmful social media, the cure, it seems, is to sue the technology companies.

In California and other states, the government sued Meta and won a partial if crucial victory. Meta agreed to pay $18 billion in fines. The issue in the Meta case is not freedom of speech or expression (Section 230 of the US Communications Act). It is product liability. The product is defective. A coalition of US states had alleged that the tech giant had misled the public about the harms its platforms posed to younger users.

“As part of the deal, the company agreed to more safety measures,” reports The New York Times, including stopping teenage users from endless scrolling and imposing a two-hour daily limit on use of Instagram and Facebook. Meta would also limit teen use between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications during school hours from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Meta would tighten age verification measures and night mode.

Meta will also pay more and increase limits on how much young users can use its platforms if other social media companies, like TikTok and YouTube, agree to similar controls for their apps – something that Meta said would keep it from being singled out.

Meta’s $18-billion settlement puts TikTok, YouTube and Snap on notice.

Meta would only pay 70 percent of the settlement, or around $12.7 billion, to the states over a period of 10 years. The remaining $5.3 billion is conditional on Meta’s rivals TikTok and Alphabet’s YouTube making similar changes to their apps for younger users.

The NYT quotes California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, a co-lead in this case alongside New Jersey, Colorado and Kentucky, saying Meta’s settlement “gives notice to others in the industry that we’re not done, and we expect similar outcomes from them as well.”

“No company wants what Meta faced in Oakland,” Rob Lalka, a professor of practice in management at Tulane University and author of “The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power,” told CNBC.

“I’d expect TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat to make changes before they ever face that scene. These platforms depend entirely on being trusted, by parents, by users, by advertisers and the settlement reflects a business decision about reputational risk, which now the boards of these other companies must also make,” Lalka added.

Around the world, there has been a crescendo of alarums over the harmful effects of social media on children. In 2025, Australia became the first country to bar children under 16 from social media. Other countries carried out or are considering similar rules. In the Philippine Congress, bills have been filed to offer similar bans.

Since 2022, in the US, a flood of online child safety lawsuits have been filed. Complainants claimed that social media sites designed their products in a harmful way that violates consumer protection and other laws.

The suits accused the companies of knowingly creating sites that were as addictive as cigarettes, taking a page from a strategy used against Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Suddenly, relying on Section 230 didn’t look so safe.

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