More than just another trial of the century for Mark Zuckerberg. Meta appeared this Tuesday before a court in Oakland (California) to face a high-risk oral hearing with great transformative potential for its networks due to accusations that it deliberately introduced tools into Facebook and Instagram to encourage compulsive use among young users, regardless of the harm. “Looking the other way was more profitable,” according to the lawsuit.
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Megan O’Neill, California’s deputy attorney general, told the jury in the opening arguments that Meta’s business model was to hook users, keep them connected for as long as possible, collect their data, and then hide the truth from the public.
“It worked especially well with children,” she emphasized. O’Neill continued that the company designed the platform so that minors would keep coming back. Children are a “product,” she stated, adding that Meta tracked their behavior to sell them items and keep them “hooked,” despite knowing it “was bad for them,” through features that make people stay on those apps.
She insisted that Meta “researched” and knew a lot “about children’s brains and how they constantly seek rewards and are so sensitive to social feedback.” After listing several studies and internal Meta surveys reflecting children’s negative experiences on its platforms, O’Neill accused the company of being “so concerned that what it knew about children would become public knowledge that it actively interfered with its own research on mental health and well-being issues.”
The company prevented its workers from accessing research that revealed risks
The prosecutor clarified that the company also prevented people within the company from accessing this research and avoided others conducting similar studies that would reveal risks or dangers to users.
“We are proud of our track record in protecting teens on our platforms and the amount of effort we have dedicated over the years to developing safeguards that we continue to implement to this day,” Meta responded in a prior statement.
Although other courts in Los Angeles and New Mexico have already recorded guilty verdicts for something similar, with multimillion-dollar fines, the trial that began this Tuesday is considered Meta’s most significant legal battle to date regarding safety and addiction among youth. If it loses the case, in addition to a fine that could reach $1.4 trillion, the matter has the full potential to fundamentally change how the company’s social media platforms operate.
Because a coalition of attorneys general from several states wants to force Meta to delete all data illegally obtained from children under 13 and to stop using algorithms trained with that data. They also want Meta to be ordered to give up using “certain addictive design features,” including infinite scrolling and autoplay functions.
The trial is expected to last between six and eight weeks. During this period, the jury is expected to hear testimonies from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri; and whistleblower employee Arturo Béjar, a former Meta security researcher who gave compelling testimony accusing the company of exposing his teenage daughter to predators during his appearance at the New Mexico trial last February.
The major trial will last between six and eight weeks
The 233-page lawsuit was filed in October 2023 by a group of 29 state attorneys general. It alleges that Zuckerberg’s company intentionally designed its platforms to create addiction among young people, thereby boosting its business and harming the mental health of American children and adolescents.
The accusers argue in their documents that Meta “refuses to give up the use of features it knows are harmful” and that its motivations are solely based on economic profit to “maximize its financial gains.”
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