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 capacity for his networks due to accusations that he deliberately introduced tools on Facebook and Instagram to encourage compulsive use among young users, without caring about the damage. “Looking the other way was more profitable,” according to the lawsuit.
Megan O'Neill, California's deputy attorney general, told jurors in 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 citizens.
“It worked especially well with children,” he stressed. O'Neill continued that that firm designed the platform so that minors would continue to return to it. Children are a “product,” he said, adding that Meta tracked their behavior to sell them items and keep them “hooked,” despite knowing “it was bad for them,” through features that keep people on those apps.
He insisted that Meta “did his research” and knew a lot “about children's brains and how they constantly seek rewards and are so sensitive to social response.” After listing several internal Meta studies and surveys that reflected children's negative experiences on its platforms, O'Neill accused the company of being “so concerned about what it knew about children reaching the public, that it actively intervened in its own research into mental health and well-being issues.”
The prosecutor clarified that the company also prevented people within the company from having access to these investigations and prevented others from carrying out similar studies that revealed risks or dangers for users.
“We are proud of our record of protecting teenagers on our platforms and the amount of effort we have put into developing protective measures over the years and continue to implement to this day,” Meta responded in a previous statement.
Although other courts in Los Angeles and New Mexico have already recorded conviction verdicts for something similar, with million-dollar fines, the trial that began this Tuesday is considered Meta's most significant legal battle to date in relation to safety and addiction among young people. If it loses the case, in addition to a fine that could reach $1.4 billion, the matter has the potential to fundamentally change the way 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 years of age and to stop using algorithms trained with that data. And they want Meta to be ordered to stop using “certain addictive design features,” including infinite scrolling and autoplay features.
The trial is expected to last between six and eight weeks. During this period the jury is expected to hear testimonies from Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg; from Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri; and the employee turned whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, a former Meta security investigator who gave compelling testimony in which he accused the company of exposing his teenage daughter to predators during his appearance at the New Mexico trial last February.
The 233-page lawsuit was filed in October 2023 by a group of 29 state attorneys general. It is alleged that Zuckerberg's company intentionally designed its platforms to create addiction among young people, thus boosting its business and harming the mental health of American children and adolescents.
The accusers maintain in their documents that Meta “refuses to abandon the use of features that it knows are harmful” and that its motivations are based exclusively on financial gain to “maximize its financial gains.”
