States say Meta engineered Instagram and Facebook to keep children hooked

Meta rejected accusations on Tuesday that it deliberately built Facebook and Instagram to addict children, as opening statements began in Oakland federal court in a case brought by 29 states. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are leading at trial.

California deputy attorney general Megan O’Neill told the jury Meta’s model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can,” and then to take what those users generated and keep the company’s own findings from the public. It had worked particularly well on children, she added.

She said the states were not trying to put the company out of business and acknowledged that social media benefits some people. Meta shares closed down 4.4% at $543.67.

States say Meta made teen engagement a product goal

O’Neill said Meta had studied the psychology of youth seeking rewards and validation from others and used that knowledge to develop its product. She provided an example of an internal email to Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, about targeting teen usage time, and how employees had referred to Instagram as a drug and themselves as pushers.

Meta’s own findings favoured early adoption, she said, the earlier the better. As for users below the age limit, O’Neill made it clear to the jury that once the company identified a Facebook user as being under 13 years old, it would disable that profile while keeping the Instagram profile active.

Paul Schmidt, lawyer for Meta, said to the jurors that there is no disagreement about some people having difficulty; however, he said that there was no proof that the use of these social media platforms by teenagers harms their well-being, and that addiction is not an agreed-upon description. He admitted that sometimes employees used casual language, but jurors would hear what the employee who called Instagram a drug did next.

He says that during the past four years, the company has identified 1.4 million accounts that displayed evidence that they belonged to someone underage. Meta has separately said the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, roughly its entire market capitalisation.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman called the case the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history.

Former safety executive says Reels launched without enough safeguards

The states called Arturo Béjar first. He was an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, whose cyberbullying work brought him public prominence, and he returned as a contractor on safety from 2019 to 2021.

Béjar testified that what the company learned about safety never made it into the products, citing eating disorder content where engineers “had very good ideas on how to make it better.” He described a pattern of releases in which safety was not weighed at all, naming Reels.

Zuckerberg and Mosseri are expected to testify. The trial is scheduled for six weeks, with an advisory jury and US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers deciding liability.

A New Mexico judge ordered $567 million, then refused the design changes

The trial follows two adverse outcomes. As Cryptopolitan reported, a Los Angeles jury in March ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million combined to a woman who said the platforms harmed her as a child. That same month a New Mexico jury found 75,000 violations of state law and imposed $375 million.

On August 6, Judge Bryan Biedscheid added $567 million for a youth mental health abatement fund, bringing New Mexico’s total to $942 million, and ordered five years of safety changes. He declined to order the structural remedies the state wanted, including removing infinite scroll, auto-advancing video and visible like counts, ruling that mandating design changes would run into the First Amendment and Section 230. Meta is appealing.

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