Zuckerberg faces potential reckoning in court over Instagram’s effects on teens
The case headed to court in Oakland, California, was brought by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. They demand that Meta pay as much as $1.4 trillion — almost as much as the company’s total value — and redesign its products as restitution for the harms it has caused young users.
The lawsuit alleges that Meta designed its Facebook and Instagram apps to get teenagers addicted to its services while at the same time mounting a public-relations campaign to convince parents and politicians that its products were safe for young people to use.
“This is hugely significant,” said Clay Calvert, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “It is a reckoning to them in terms of how they deliver content to minors.”
Meta has rejected the states’ claims in court filings, arguing the case failed to show evidence of real-world harm and asks for wildly unreasonable damages. “The State AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate,” a spokesperson for the company said. Zuckerberg is expected to testify, as is Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
The case due to start this week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is one among a recent avalanche of lawsuits against social media companies from parents, children, school districts and state governments that are winding their way through courts across the nation.
They are built on more than a decade of widespread public concern about the impact of social media on children. Prosecutors are likening the cases to the mass of legal action against the tobacco industry in the 1990s that led to massive settlements and new limitations on cigarette makers. The legal onslaught comes after attempts by Congress and federal regulators to force changes at Meta and other tech firms that the companies largely shrugged off.
The Oakland case represents just four of the 29 state governments that have sued Meta. If the company loses, the financial penalty could dent the company’s finances and force it to make major product changes while also setting a precedent for the cases still to come.
“The outcome here could influence the rest of the attorney generals’ cases,” Calvert said.
Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li issued a warning about the company’s legal challenges in prepared remarks to investors last month. “We continue to see scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets and have a number of youth-related trials scheduled for this year in the U.S., which may ultimately result in a material loss,” she said.
The cases could also force changes to Meta’s products. The company was ordered by the New Mexico judge who said the company must pay $942 million in damages and restitution to make design changes including not sending any push notifications to children during school hours and late at night.
The states that brought the Oakland case set to start this week have asked the judge to order that Meta make changes including increased enforcement of age limits, deletion of any AI algorithms trained with kids’ data and putting an end to the way that social feeds in its apps present an “infinite scroll” that never ends.
Courtroom drama
The presiding judge in Oakland is Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers, the same judge who handled Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI earlier this year. Musk lost after the jury in the case found he had missed the window to bring his lawsuit.
The Meta trial will also be heard by a jury, who will deliver an advisory verdict that Gonzelez-Rogers will take into account before making her own decision. In the Musk-OpenAI case, she accepted the jury’s decision immediately.
Jury trials have created a new challenge to the operations of the largest tech companies over the past several years, with panels repeatedly returning landmark decisions against tech giants who had largely avoided legal penalties for years as they grew bigger and more powerful.
In 2023, a jury in San Francisco found that Google’s mobile app store was an illegal monopoly. Last year, a California jury found that Meta wrongfully collected data from women using the period-tracking app Flo. Both companies said after the verdicts that they would appeal.
Meta’s recent and forthcoming trials reflect years of building anger toward Meta and other social media companies for the way they’ve marketed to and directed their algorithms toward young people, said Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization that aims to protect children from the potential harms of technology.
“The blowback is not building anymore. It’s here. It’s real,” said Steyer. He is the brother of Tom Steyer, the philanthropist who has mounted unsuccessful Democratic presidential and California gubernatorial campaigns.
Big Tech companies at times been levied with major fines, particularly in the European Union, for breaking laws and regulation. For the most part, the companies have been able to pay the money and move on.
The huge amounts of money being demanded by the attorneys general and the large number of pending cases and potential plaintiffs could make the financial penalties of adverse rulings more difficult for the company to handle.
“It kind of feels like the financial cost is finally matching the human cost,” said Kyle Morse, deputy executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit that argues Big Tech companies have amassed too much power.
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