Meta Faces Federal Trial Over Alleged Child Safety Violations

My colleague Paresh Dave and I each spent a day in federal court in Oakland, California, this week, monitoring the latest Meta child safety trial.

In case you missed it in the spring, Meta (along with YouTube) lost a landmark social media case in California, in which a jury found the companies liable for harming a young user with certain design features in their apps. Then, earlier this month, Meta was ordered to pay more than $940 million in the state of New Mexico for being a public nuisance and causing psychological harm to children.

Now Meta is defending itself in a federal civil trial taking place in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs in this case are 29 state attorneys general. They’re claiming that Meta violated a federal privacy law protecting children, known as COPPA, by improperly collecting personal information about children under 13 without parental consent. The lead AGs, which span four states—California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey—also say that Meta made deceptive statements about its platform that were likely to mislead consumers.

Two specific Meta apps are in focus in this trial: Facebook and Instagram.

Meta maintains that it satisfied COPPA law requirements in those states, and denies that its statements about how its apps work were deceptive or misleading. It also insists it is protected from liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which essentially says that platforms like Meta aren’t responsible for the content posted on their apps by users.

I was in the packed courtroom Tuesday to hear opening arguments from both sides, presided over by chief district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Per usual, Meta was represented by an army of well-heeled lawyers, who quite ironically kept experiencing technical difficulties with the mic. Megan O’Neill, the deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice, kicked off the opening statements, laying out how the state AGs believe Meta deliberately hooked kids on its apps and harvested their data.

O’Neill emphasized that throughout the trial, the jury would be shown just “how many features work both individually and together to keep people in the apps. To draw them in and keep them in for longer. Meta has used these features to draw kids onto the apps, and to keep them coming back.”

Meta lead attorney Paul Schmidt then laid out the dozens of safety features that have been built into Meta’s apps over the past several years, and he said the company is committed to improving its apps. He also shifted some responsibility onto users, saying there’s no dispute that some kids find their way onto Meta’s apps and that some teens “struggle to manage their time.” And inevitably some people will post negative content on social media apps, Schmidt said.

Later on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday, the courtroom heard from Arturo Bejar, a former Meta employee and key witness in earlier trials. His main point: Mark Zuckerberg didn’t prioritize youth safety. It was part of company culture during Bejar’s time there that if you had an inkling of an idea for a feature that would spur growth, “you could just test it,” he said. At the same time, he described a culture in which it was “near impossible” to screen products and features for potential harms.

(On Thursday, the trial was put on pause due to a sick juror.)

Meta has been embroiled in a remarkable number of scandals over the past decade, many of which have faded from public memory, been chalked up to the cost of doing business, or were settled out of court. The company’s platforms have played a role in stoking violence and swaying elections. It has regularly siphoned personal data from users in purposefully opaque ways. Not to mention the amount of internal workplace dysfunction at Meta that’s been revealed through depositions, books, and news reports like these.

All the while, Meta’s formidable technology—the AI that underpins its apps—has successfully kept people hooked. And Meta has monetized its business by keeping their feeds lined with uncannily targeted ads. No amount of scandal can seem to keep Meta’s users away for very long.

But these recent social media trials have, shall we say, ominous vibes for Meta. So far, Meta’s legal strategy hasn’t proved to be a winning one. Other companies in Meta’s social media cohort, like Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, have opted this year to settle some suits that allege their platforms have harmed kids’ mental health. Meta instead chose to go to trial, only to very publicly lose and pay massive fines.

It’s not just billions of dollars at stake for Meta in this case (the state AGs are seeking some $200 billion in damages). Meta faces the possibility of having to make changes to core features of its platforms. Those include stricter age-gating and enforcement of existing safety features for younger users, like time limits. Meta might also be compelled to eliminate “likes” and the “endless scroll” for younger users, and offer more algorithmic transparency about how a user’s feed is tuned.

My colleague Paresh told me after reporting from the courthouse on Wednesday that while a lot of the jurors or potential jurors indicated they barely use Facebook for anything besides Marketplace (relatable!), “they do use Instagram, and many have concerns about their own use or their children’s.” At the same time, Paresh got the sense that the jurors want or expect “parents to have a role in oversight, and not just quickly blame everything on the company.”

“So there’s something about this trial that could really represent the voice of the zeitgeist around social media usage,” Paresh told me.

We both agreed that there’s probably no scandal that will make people quit Instagram en masse if they’re already hooked. But if the judge rules in favor of the AGs, based on the evidence presented, then Meta could be held accountable—not for the content it serves on its platform but for how that content is served to younger, more impressionable users. It could force small changes in the company’s growth-at-all-costs ethos and the algorithmic witchcraft with which it juices its apps. And it could change the outcomes for a generation of iPad babies who ostensibly wouldn’t grow up as hooked on Meta’s apps. Maybe.