Meta Faces $1.4 Trillion Penalty Over Alleged Teen Addiction Design
Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
Meta Platforms could face a staggering $1.4 trillion in penalties after four states accused the company of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. This unprecedented figure, nearly matching Meta's market value, stems from alleged violations of consumer protection laws and the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. As the pivotal trial approaches in Oakland, California, the company denies the claims, arguing that social media addiction is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis.
A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.
- davedx
Some useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024...
"Meta knew what it was doing"
In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on
the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016,
Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram)
taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.”
Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of
208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact,
Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including:
• Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72
• Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894
• By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even
though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the
amount of time they spend on our app.”
One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to pu […]
- gmerc
Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
- Grombobulous
I wonder if there’s a Betterridge’s Law of Headlines but for “could.”
I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement.
The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.
- pickleglitch
I hope they lose and it bankrupts them. I'd like to see Zuckerberg thrown in prison. However, I would like to know what happens that $1.4T? Like, do the states that sued just add it to a slush fund? How would it be used to help mitigate the damage they have done?
- villish
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
- jmyeet
I firmly believe that we could solve a whole bunch of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to and target minors in online advertising on social media platforms. Remove the incentive and you'll get a lot better behavior.
The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated).
You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.
- matterhorn2000
Question is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.
- _fat_santa
I see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.