Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Facebook
On Tuesday, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had violated state law, misleading users about safety measures and engaging in “unconscionable” trade practices to take advantage of young users, earning it a $375 million penalty. The next day, in a closely watched bellwether trial in California, a jury found that the “negligence” of Google and Meta had been a factor in the past mental-health struggles of a 20-year-old plaintiff, ordering the companies to pay her $3 million, with punitive damages still to come.
On their own, these numbers mean nothing to two of the largest companies in the world. But the legal theories behind these cases, and the signal they both send about future litigation and regulation, could be enormously consequential. The courts are starting to treat social platforms not as purveyors of protected speech — a safe legal haven for internet companies over for the last two decades — but rather like tobacco companies or asbestos manufacturers, firms whose products are obviously addictive, or dangerous, or marketed in misleading ways.
The New Mexico case focused on child safety and involved investigators setting up underage decoy accounts that prosecutors said were flooded with interest from predatory Facebook users. As a former Meta engineer testified during the trial: “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.” (Meta’s head of communications responded to the verdict, saying the company “will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” adding that the $375 million was “just a fraction” of what the state sought.) The California trial, which Snap and TikTok settled, hinged on claims by the plaintiff about the effects of spending “all day long” on social media starting at the age of 6. (On that case, Meta said, “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.” Google made a different argument: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”) Mark Zuckerberg testified in both courts, telling the New Mexico jury that he took issue with the word “addictive” and trying to reassure the California jury that his company was taking more measures to keep underage users off its platforms and that he wasn’t “trying to maximize the amount of time people spend every month.” Ultimately, he seemed to convince no one.
The cases follow years of backlash and mounting angst about social-media companies, which have been accused of causing or worsening a massive range of societal and personal harms, with the most intense criticism centering on how they handle young users, drawing together a wide and unusually politically diverse coalition aligned against them. For the most part, social platforms have avoided major liability by invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which prevents providers of “interactive computer services” — Meta, for example, but also the guy who runs a personal blog with a comment section — from being treated by default as a “publisher” or “speaker” of content posted by third parties.
These cases tried to circumvent that defense entirely. They focused instead on the platforms themselves, making the argument that, as products, they can cause personal injury — again, inspired directly by the pre-social-media legal fight against the tobacco industry. The immediate possible consequences fall into two main categories. In May, New Mexico prosecutors plan to ask a judge to force Meta to make changes to its platform, “including enacting effective age verification, removing predators from its sites, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that can shield bad actors.” That could meaningfully change how these services work and what sorts of data they’re able to collect, and not just for young users. Both court victories are will also likely be cited in efforts to pass broader legislation, with popular school bans, state age-verification laws, and international under-16 social-media bans providing a strong tailwind. And the California case teases another big possible problem for Meta and its brethren, according to the Verge:
Thousands of cases brought by individuals, school districts, and state attorneys general are part of two different groups of complaints filed in the LA state court and a federal court in Oakland, CA. The outcome in [this] case — and the next bellwether cases, the first of which is slated to begin in July — will help attorneys representing both sides understand how juries are likely to rule on novel questions of product liability.
Government, individuals, civil society — the whole gang is here! And very, very angry. If this trial is a sign of things to come, in other words, it could result in a massive flood of similar claims, culminating, eventually, in a massive group settlement potentially involving changes to the platform as well, a reckoning that could change both these companies and the internet they’ve thoroughly colonized in profound and unpredictable ways.
More broadly, the trials confirm that the social-media backlash — which has been intense, unfocused, complicated by platforms’ profound entanglement with users private and public lives — has truly broken through, particularly when it comes to kids. This isn’t just a public-relations issue. It’s evidence that juries are, and will be, more eager than ever to simply make tech companies pay.
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