• This seems to be largely an American phenomenon, that people sue the maker of a product for themselves failing to use the product correctly, no? Or at least I can’t remember a single instance outside America where either someone sued the producer for using a product incorrectly or the producer pre-emtpively puts warnings on for ridiculous stuff to not get sued if people try these things.

    Either way, good to know that cotton swabs were primarily made indeed to clean ears. I don’t use them for that, but it always weirded me out when they came in those pastelle color packages with openings like tissues, perfect for a bathroom, but someone said “Yo, don’t use them for your ears! They were made for swabbing grease off motor chains.”

    • Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

      Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.

    • Yep, somehow America wound up doing thing that way, where instead of regulating preemptively, lawsuits are expected to do a lot of what regulatory bodies do in other countries. It’s an awful system and rarely benefits those that have been caused harm, especially when there are limits on punitive damages that are supposed to encourage corporations to not be shitbags. Individuals don’t have the resources to sue companies, either, so at best one occasionally gets a check for $2.14 for being part of a class that won a class action lawsuit.

    • Americans are giga sheep. If you want prospective of just how little they think for themselves, there was a misconfigured road in a GPS app and people kept literally driving off the road because their GPS told them to, even though it was clearly and visibly into a body of water.

      Then there’s also the hilarious Apple Wave prank, where a single image tricked people into nuking their phones. What makes that prank even funnier is that it was directly inspired by the iOS update that made your phone waterproof which people also fell for.

    • Basically every absurd lawsuit you hear Americans do is either:

      • genuinely frivolous, tossed out of court immediately, amplified to paint suing corporations as bad

      • someone trying to get damages from a company which genuinely wronged them, often with life altering consequences

      Also jeez folks, clean your ears any other way, shoveling wax out of your canals with a non sterile tool regularly is asking for infections. The wax is there for a reason!