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Meta’s mid-week legal double whammy continued apace with a Los Angeles jury finding the social media platform guily of deliberating engineering addictive properties into its technology.
Unlike New Mexico where hours earlier Meta had also been found guilty on another charge, that of endangering child safety, this time at least it wasn’t on its own in court - YouTube was also charged and found wanting. (Snap and TikTok had been on the charge sheet, but settled out of court pre-trial.)
The punishment? A pitiful $3 million in damages, between the two platform providers, for which Meta is responsible for paying the lion’s share (70%). It’s hardly a sum that’s going to persuade any Big Tech firm to change its ways, but, as with the New Mexico case, the danger for Meta is the precedent that being found guilty here sets in terms of opening the floodgates to potentially thousands, if not millions, of similar cases worldwide.
KGM's story
The case centered on the story of a woman now in her twenties, known as KGM, who said that she became hooked on YouTube, part of Google-parent Alphabet, aged six, and Instagram, owned by Meta, aged nine.
By the time she was 10 years old, she claimed, she was depressed and engaging in self-harm and battling suicidal thoughts. When she was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic dis-order and social phobia, which KGM attributes to her use of the social media platforms.
KGM testified that her addiction to social media made her anxious and insecure, while features like beauty filters distorted her self-image. When her mother took away her cellphone to cut off access, KGM would panic that she was missing out on something, telling the court:
Because without it I felt a huge part of me was missing, and if I didn’t have it I would be missing out on something, and it would send me into a panic.
Despite all the trauma attributed to her life, KGM admitted that she is still a user today in her twenties:
It’s too hard to be without it.
Guilty as charged
In its verdict, the LA jury found Meta and Alphabet both negligent in the design and operation of their platforms. Neither adequately warned their users about the dangers of using their tech, with both firms held liable of their policies being a substantial factor in the harm done to KGM.
And it wasn’t just negligence, according to the jury, which decided that both firms acted with malice, or highly egregious conduct, meaning the trial will now move into a second phase to determine punitive damages. At this stage, the jury may consider whether Alphabet or Meta's products caused KGM physical harm or whether the companies disregarded the health of other users, Judge Carolyn Kuhl said in court.
In Meta’s defence, its legal team attempted to convince jurors that KGM’s problems stemmed from a difficult family life, with a strained relationship with her mother, and bullying at school. Meta lawyer Andrew Stanner pointed out that patient notes from six months of therapy appointments do not cite social media addiction or even name any social media apps.
KGM’s legal team picked out specific design features they contended were designed to “hook” young users, such as the infinite nature of feeds, autoplay features and notifications. Her lawyer Mark Lanier asked the jury:
How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones. These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great ... but you invite them in and they take over.
He argued:
It’s the attention economy. They’re making money off capturing your attention.
Evidence
The prosecution produced reams of internal documentation from both YouTube and Meta to back up these claims
One from YouTube in 2021 asked its company recipients, ‘How are we measuring wellbeing?’, to which the response was, ‘We’re not.’
Another document highlighted how kids under 13 are the fastest growing internet audience in the world and talked up the opportunity for YouTube to be “digital babysitter” to children as young as eight.
As far back as 2018, its own researchers surveyed 20,000 Facebook users in the US and found that 58% had some level of social media addiction—55% mild, and 3.1% severe. A researcher issued a call to action to alert users to “the effect the product has on their brain”, warning, “Our product exploits weaknesses in the human psychology to promote product engagement and time spent.”
Or as one YouTube document states bluntly, “[The] goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction”.
Meta’s own research was also shown to highlight internal awareness of the addictive nature of its offerings. The firm conducted a “deactivation study,” which found that users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results, stating that bad PR would result.
Despite all this, Meta appears to have deliberately targeted the kid demographic. In an email from 2017, one employee writes, "Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now?", to which a colleague responds, "Zuck [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg] has been talking about that for a while." That earned a riposte from the first staffer that, "Yeah it was gross the last time he mentioned it."
Another email conversation between Meta employees dating from 2020 has one staffer saying, "Oh my gosh y’all, IG [Instagram] is a drug", to which a colleague responds, "We’re basically pushers."
What now?
The two platform providers are both set on appealing their guilty verdicts. A Meta statement says:
We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.
Meanwhile a statement from Alphabet claims:
This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly-built streaming platform, not a social media site.
But if the two firms aren’t able to overturn the verdicts, stand by for a lot more trouble to come. There are more than 3,000 similar lawsuits against Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok currently pending in California courts, and the guilty verdicts in both LA and New Mexico are only likely to encourage more all around the US - and beyond.
KGM’s lawyers summed it up when they said:
[Today’s verdict is bigger than one case. For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features. Today’s verdict is a referendum—from a jury, to an entire industry—that accountability has arrived.
My take
I have to admit to being divided in my reaction to the outcome of the LA proceedings. On the one hand, accountability has been a long, long time coming for social media firms and if this provides the trigger for action finally being taken to regulate responsibly, then all to the good.
On the other hand, I do question why a six year old had access to this sort of tech in the first place. There has to be some parental responsibility that comes into play here, surely? To get from age six to early-20s and still be a user might be validation of the addictive intent on the part of the platform providers or it may be attributable to decidedly non-tech reasons?
But the LA verdict did rattle cages in Washington, where Congress still hasn't passed the Kids Online Safety Act, and legislators in California saw its planned Age Appropriate Design Code struck down in the courts following heavy lobbying efforts by Big Tech.
Wednesday saw politicos piling in to declare that old refrain of ‘something must be done’, such as ultra-conservative Trump 2.0 backer Senator Josh Hawley, who took to, er, social media, to declare :
For years these scumbag social media companies have ruined kids lives and made billions off it, Today they got caught, Now Congress needs to find some courage and do its job to protect more kids from these con artists.
(Quite how Hawley feels about Trump 2.0 announcing Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as one of the new Presidential advisors on technology on the same day as the LA verdict was delivered is not documented...)
The danger here is what form the political response will be. Resposible regulation is one thing; using ‘kids safety’ as an excuse for mass surveillance and new investigatory - aka snooping - powers is quite another. There’s also quite enough tech-centric moral panic around as it is.
And yet, sigh, something really, really must be done.
And as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reminded us at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in January:
These US tech companies, they hate regulation.
We’re also at a critical juncture as AI vendors such as OpenAI, Character AI and, yes, once again, Meta openly explore what they’re ready to let their tech do. If Sam Altman has his way, erotic chats with your AI are coming (as it were), while Character AI tech already stands accused of playing a part in encouraging a US teen to kill himself. And if the Metaverse is really no more, who knows what Zuckerberg will come up with next to amuse himself. Tech’s Captain Ahab is going to need a new white whale to chase...
That’s the brutal reality of where we are. As noted, it took over 20 years to start to hold social media firms accountable for their actions. We simply don’t have that time to wait when it comes to AI.
This has been an important 24 hours in terms of setting legal precedents. Time to build on that - responsibly. And here’s a clue - if what we do next has Elon Musk calling us all fascists, we’re probably on the right track!