The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller’s, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.

BOSTON – Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell has filed a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the social media giant deliberately exploited young people.

Do lawsuits against social media companies get results?

It’s the latest in a series of lawsuits brought against big social media companies. But is it the best way to fight back?

“Virtually every young person in this Commonwealth uses TikTok,” said Campbell. And for many kids, she added, it’s become an addiction that’s hazardous to their mental health. “Teens report using TikTok for hours a day, often late at night, and this is no accident. Rather, it’s a result of TikTok intentionally designing its platform to keep our young people glued to their screens, all in the name of profit.”

So Campbell has joined more than a dozen other states in suing TikTok to change its tactics. And if that sounds familiar, it’s no wonder. Campbell and other AGs filed a similar suit against Meta last fall. That case is dragging on, as this one likely will in the face of TikTok’s deep pockets.

“The lawsuit becomes a stick. It becomes an incentive to make that social media company do it,” said WBZ-TV legal analyst Jennifer Roman. “The downside of it, though, is to what cost?”

Why doesn’t Congress make laws regulating social media?   

Roman noted cases like this demand lots of time and money – taxpayer money. And in the meantime, the alleged mental health crisis rolls on.

“During that extended period of time, nothing is changing from TikTok,” Roman said. “They’re not gonna change until they have to.”

Congress could pass laws to bring the tech companies to heel, but they don’t, leaving the courts to play what seems like an endless game of whack-a-mole.

“Technology is just moving at such a rapid pace, and the wheels of justice do not move quickly,” noted Roman. “So we’re never gonna keep up with what’s on the horizon, what’s coming next and what those impacts may be.”

Some of these lawsuits have gotten results. A federal judge ruled this summer that Google and it’s ubiquitous search engine was an illegal monopoly.

But it took nearly four years of legal wrangling to get there, and the appeals process is expected to take at least another five years.

So it seems clear that with the kinds of profits these companies are making off the way they operate, other parties – like parents – are going to have to step up to deal with the mental health fallout. Because – to adapt an old cliche – changes in technology circle the globe while social responsibility is still putting its pants on. 

Two Massachusetts scientists have been recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their role in the discovery of microRNA — key to the understanding of gene regulation and potential treatments of heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and more.

Researchers Victor Ambros, a University of Massachusetts Medical School professor of natural science, and Gary Ruvkun, a Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School investigator and professor of genetics, received the Nobel Prize on Monday.

“Gene regulation by microRNA, first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun, has been at work for hundreds of millions of years,” the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine stated in a release. “This mechanism has enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms.”

The committee stated the scientists’ work “revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation” that are “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”

In a press conference at MGH on Monday, Ruvkun called the study of recombinant DNA starting in the 70s a “revolution” and said as a young student and researcher he “just wanted to be part of that.”

In the late 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun worked as postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. There they studied the 1 mm long roundworm, C. elegans, narrowing in on a mutation and gene function in the animals.

Ambros and Ruvkun continued the research after the fellowship at respectively at their Harvard University lab and Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School lab. The pair compared findings, discovering the existence of microRNA in the worms, and published in 1993 in two articles in the journal Cell.

The discovery was met with “deafening silence from the scientific community,” the Nobel committee wrote, until 2000 when Ruvkun published new findings on microRNA in another gene, demonstrating their presence across the animal kingdom.

In the past two decades, “research into the potential of microRNAs for the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease has expanded from the two original papers published by Ruvkun and Ambros in 1993 to 176,000 papers today,” MGH said in a statement.

The “unexpectedly short” microRNA, Ambros said, help regulate how genes are controlled in cells. The microRNAs “block gene expression by binding to regulatory segments in their target messenger RNAs,” MGH said.

Current research has shown human and most other plant and animal genomes contain “more than 1,000 microRNAs, which control many protein-coding messenger RNAs and may be involved in a broad range of normal- and disease-related activities,” the hospital said.

Researchers are currently conducting clinical trials involving microRNA for medical conditions including heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Ambros said he was “surprised and delighted” to hear about the Nobel Prize at a press conference in the UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester on Monday and emphasized that studies of laboratory organisms of this kind are “critical and key and fundamental to advancing understanding of biology.”

“I think the unexpectedness of biology is probably the most important principle, perhaps, for people to appreciate,” said Ambros. … “At any given moment, it feels like we know most of what we need to know — that is actually an illusion that we have to consciously disabuse ourselves of and leave ourselves open for the surprises.”

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to two researchers, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who helped develop mRNA vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nobel prize announcements will continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, Peace Prize on Friday and the Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.