OAKLAND - With two convictions and nearly US$1 billion in damages already stacked up, Meta will face another trial starting this week about alleged harms to children in a case brought by four U.S. states. The federal trial, one of the most consequential among a myriad of legal proceedings targeting social networks in the United States, will begin Wednesday with jury selection at a federal court in Oakland, near San Francisco. Opening statements are expected to start next week on August 18, with the trial lasting for roughly six weeks, followed by a verdict in early October. The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey allege the largest social media network in the world deliberately made Instagram and Facebook addictive for children. And they are demanding a long list of restrictions on how Instagram and Facebook operate for minors, as well as up to $1.4 trillion in penalties -- nearly Meta’s entire market cap which exceeded $1.5 trillion on Friday. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is among the star witnesses the prosecution plans to call to the stand; he also testified six months ago in a separate case that took place in a Los Angeles court. While Zuckerberg has been known to spend an increasing amount of time living at his home in Hawaii, the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park is about an hour’s drive from the courthouse. ‘Facebook Files’ The Oakland trial is the culmination of a standoff that began in late 2021, when a former employee, Frances Haugen, leaked thousands of pages of internal research, dubbed the “Facebook Files,” which showed that Meta had internally measured the potential harm Instagram was causing to some teenage girls, while publicly downplaying the impact. The revelations triggered a joint investigation by dozens of states, which two years later resulted in a complaint filed by around 30 state attorneys general. Four states will now attempt to prove their case together in Oakland. TikTok, Snapchat and Google-owned YouTube have also been sued by thousands of families, school districts and prosecutors across the country in various local, state and federal lawsuits. In a landmark trial that concluded in March, Meta and YouTube were convicted by a Los Angeles jury, which found both companies were responsible for a teenager’s social media addiction. That jury awarded the teenager $6 million. On Thursday, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to implement product changes and pay more than half a billion dollars in damages to the state to fund the treatment and prevention of harms caused by Facebook and Instagram. A jury in New Mexico previously ordered Meta to pay $375 million after it found the company liable for endangering children by making them vulnerable to predators on its platforms, among other harms. Meta has appealed, or intends to appeal, all of these decisions. Meta is “confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” Meta told AFP in a statement Thursday. The company intends to argue that mental health is an industry-wide issue, and that some of the states’ claims are protected by free speech laws. In May, Snap, TikTok, YouTube and Meta settled with a school district in Kentucky for $27 million to avoid another trial that was expected to set a precedent for around 1,200 similar lawsuits. Immunity over content The four states in the Oakland trial accuse Meta of violating their consumer protection laws, in addition to a federal law that protects children’s data, known as COPPA. They allege that multiple features were designed to keep minors hooked, particularly infinite scrolling, excessive notifications and “like” counts. It’s a strategy that focuses on how apps are designed, not what is posted on them, essentially sidestepping the broad immunity internet sites enjoy in the U.S. regarding content created by their users. The staggering $1.4 trillion in alleged damages comes from estimating the number of affected users in the four states. However, the jury will have only an advisory role and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers -- who oversaw major trials between Apple and Epic Games, and Elon Musk and OpenAI -- will decide on penalties, if Meta loses the case. Parents of teenagers allegedly harmed by social networks might watch from inside the courtroom, as they did in Los Angeles, while the rest of the country can follow the proceedings from an audio-only livestream on YouTube. By Benjamin Legendre
