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Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew.
It’s fair to say that it’s not been a great 24 hours for Meta in terms of litigation and being found to held to legal account for its actions. In two US court cases, jury verdicts have been reached that find that Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has knowingly pursued strategies that hurt kids, undermine their best interests, and put profit and growth ahead of the welfare of a large section of its user base.
In Los Angeles, the firm was found to have set out to build in addictive qualities to its product offerings in order to hook a young demographic on them. (We’ll return to that in part of two of this short article series.) Meanwhile in New Mexico, the firm’s safety policies came under fire and were found to be severely lacking.
A jury found Meta liable for endangering children and misleading the public about the safety of its platforms at the end of a long-running case brought against the vendor by the New Mexico Department of Justice.
In a landmark ruling - the first time a state has won a trial against a major tech company for harming young users! - a jury decided that Meta was guilty as charged, with a fine of $375 million in civil penalties for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection Unfair Practices Act.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who launched the lawsuit against Meta three years ago, called the ruling was “a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety.” He said:
Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying, 'Enough is enough'.
Penalty
Now $375 million might be a lot to you or me, but it’s a negligible rounding error for for a behemoth like Meta. In fact, the firm’s Vice-President of Comms Alan Stone felt the need to pop onto X to post, 'Just a fraction of what the State sought', a baffling decision many will consider to be a crass response bordering on gloating at a time when some corporate penitence might have been the order of the day. But that would have meant having to admit Meta was in the wrong, and we're not at that point...yet!
He's right about one thing though - New Mexico attorneys had been looking for $2 billion of penalties, so well done, Meta! Except, this isn’t over yet. The New Mexico Department of Justice will have its final claim against Meta heard during a separate public nuisance case in a trial slated to start on May 4, during which it will seek additional damages from Meta alongside changes to its platforms.
Some of the changes sought by the New Mexico authorities include age verification and “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors, and an independent monitor to oversee everything.
Then, of course, there’s the bigger picture of this verdict creating a benchmark for other State authorities to take or further their own actions against Meta. Having been found guilty in one location, a precedent has been set that may see a dam of pent-up litigious intent burst. Meta and other social media companies face trial in hundreds of cases this year facing allegations that their platforms threaten the safety and mental health of kids.
No wonder Meta, rather than issuing post-verdict apologies, announced its intent to appeal the verdict:
We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content.”
The background
The verdict was the climax of a seven week trial centered on a lawsuit spun out from an investigation by the Nevada Department of Justice (DoJ) into Meta’s safeguards against sexual abuse of minors.
Social media companies have long maintained they are not responsible for crimes committed via their networks because of a US federal law that generally protects platforms from legal liability for content created by their users: section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Meta’s attempts to invoke section 230 and the first amendment to get the case dismissed were denied in a judge’s ruling in June 2024.
During the course of the trial, internal Meta documents were produced by prosecutors exposing that company execs and employees were repeatedly warned about risks and harms that its platforms enabled, but did not deviate from its growth strategies.
Other evidence included details of the 2024 arrest of three men charged using Meta platforms to sexually prey on children and arrange offline meetings. This was all part of Operation MetaPhile, a sting operation organized by the New Mexico Attorney General’s office.
During the sting, test accounts were set up as ‘honeytraps’ which were then bombarded with adult sex content and outreach from alleged child predators, including “pictures and videos of genitalia”. One outreach from a predator offered a kid a six-figure payment to star in a porn video.
Expert witnesses from law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) testified about Meta’s shortcomings in reporting of crimes taking place on its platforms, including the exchange of child sexual abuse material, noting that the vendor was over-reliant on AI for routine monitoring. The reports the tech produced were found to be useless for law enforcement purposes and mean that alleged crimes went un-investigated. The New Mexico court heard how Meta’s 2023 decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger platform, which predators have often used as a tool to groom minors and exchange child abuse images, also blocked access to crucial evidence.
But were these shortcomings the result of accident or intent? For New Mexico, State Attorney Linda Singer told the jury:
The safety issues that you’ve heard about in this case, weren’t mistakes. They were a product of a corporate philosophy that chose growth and engagement over children’s safety. And young people in this state and around the country have borne the cost.
Former Meta product leader turned whistleblower Arturo Béjar, whose own young daughter was propositioned for sex by a stranger on Instagram, testified that Meta execs were well aware that under-age users were being served sexualized content:
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.
Meanwhile Brian Boland, a former Meta VP of Partnerships Product Marketing, who spent nearly a dozen years with the company, testified that he “absolutely did not believe that safety was a priority” to CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the time of his departure in 2020.
For its part, Meta called its own expert witnesses in its defense, including Mary Wirth, billed as an independent Trust and Safety Tech Expert, who said:
There is not one company I know of anywhere on the planet that is doing as much proactive detection, and that has as sophisticated of and layered of an infrastructure to detect CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material Program) and child exploitive material.
But the jury took less than one day to decide that Meta didn’t do enough and found the firm guilty.
One thing of note - when the case enters its next phase, with the prospect of far more punitive damages resulting, it will not be heard by a jury, but by a presiding judge. How that impacts on the outcome remains to be seen.
My take
As noted, the important thing here is not the paltry fine that’s been imposed on a firm valued at $1.5 trillion, but the precedent that the verdict has set. As well as other legal actions on the part of other States, there is the prospect that this ruling, if Meta is unable to overturn it, will provide the necessary incentive for legislators in Washington to finally tackle regulation in a bi-partisan manner.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, probably the most outspoken Meta critic in politics, said of the New Mexico result:
This verdict confirms what parents across America have feared: Meta knowingly put profits ahead of children’s safety. This is why we must hold Zuckerberg and Big Tech accountable for the tragedies they have inflicted on parents and kids by passing the Kids Online Safety Act...The verdict should send a clear message to anyone in Congress siding with Meta instead of working to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. It’s time to stop defying the will of the American people.
Taken in tandem with events in California where Meta suffered another appalling day in court, there might be a sense that the time has finally come for the right climate of opinion in Washington to result in meaningful action rather than pointless grand-standing and gesture politics, before then doing faff all in terms of legislative response or reining in.
But then again maybe it will be more of the same. After all, as the New Mexico jury delivered its verdict, Trump 2.0 appointed Mark Zuckerberg as one of the President’s most important technology sector advisors, where he will be asked to help shape policy around matters including regulation and safety.
And Wall Street took a long hard look at the fact that Meta was found to be guilty of putting profit ahead of the safety of the world’s children and reacted accordingly - it sent the share price of Meta up by five percent! Morality does have a price tag, it seems.
As for events in Los Angeles...