‘We did it with the tobacco settlement…we did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta,’ Kentucky AG Russell Coleman said.
A cohort of four US states are taking Meta to trial today (18 August) in hopes of proving that the social media giant knowingly causes harm to children.
The trial stems from a 2023 lawsuit filed by more than 30 states – including California and New York – which claimed that Meta specifically targets young users under 13 years old, monetises their attention through data harvesting and targeted advertising, concocts ways to prolong their time on its apps and misrepresents its platforms as being safe.
Meta and its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram “profoundly altered the psychological and social realities” of young American children, the 2023 filing read. According to the plaintiffs, the company “harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens” with hopes to maximise its financial gain.
The company “concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers”, and ignored the damages they caused, the lawsuit continued.
The states are seeking around $200bn in damages, with penalties ranging from a few hundred dollars to $50,000 per violation, depending on the jurisdiction.
Today’s trial features California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The other 25 states are expected to have trials later. Meanwhile, the social media giant is also facing thousands of other lawsuits from families across the country.
The lawsuit also hopes to enact sweeping changes to the platform’s functionalities, including implementing a process for parental verification for teenage users, removing image filters, ending video autoplay and Instagram Stories.
“We’ll show a jury that Meta concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause young people because looking away was more profitable,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman.
“AGs are in the perfect position to get this done. We did it with the Tobacco Settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta.”
Earlier this year, a New Mexico jury fined Meta nearly $1bn in damages after finding that the company endangered children by misleading users about the safety of its platforms. The damages included $375m in civil fines and $567m to address social media harms to the state’s child users.
That ruling came just a day before the company’s platforms were found to be addictive for children in a separate lawsuit that also targeted YouTube.
Meta has consistently denied these claims. “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” a company spokesperson said.
Across the world, parents and lawmakers are attempting to shield children from the provable harms posed by social media platforms, as child safety takes political priority in an online-first world.
Outside the US, several countries, including Australia, the UK and Canada, alongside many EU member states are moving to ban social media for underage children.
France is facing pushback against its own plans to ban social media for children. The country’s top court, the Constitutional Council, blocked the proposed bill banning social media for children under the age of 15, theorising that the legislation is too broad and has the potential to infringe upon young people’s right to freedom of expression.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2018. Image: Anthony Quintano via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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