Meta is being sued by 41 states for knowingly putting teens in danger. There are two big complaints.
The first is that Facebook and Instagram recruit users under 13 in violation of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. This is plausible and easy to understand.
But the other, bigger complaint is that Facebook and Instagram are dangerous for teens—and Meta knows it. Nevertheless, they actively try to get teens addicted to their platforms. This one is much trickier to evaluate, not least because about half the complaint is redacted. But having read the entire court filing, the states' basic case goes like this:
- Facebook and Instagram try hard to get teens to use their platform.
- They have also adopted features that keep teens coming back for more.
- There is landslide evidence that use of these platforms is bad for teen mental health.
- Facebook and Instagram publicly deny all of this.
- This is a violation of the business codes in the various states.
This sounds like a big stretch. It's obviously not illegal to market social media to teens. It's also not illegal to make a product they like a lot. Nor is it at all clear that Facebook and Instagram are broadly dangerous. A mere deterioration of teen mental health over the past decade doesn't prove anything. Instagram's infamous internal "body image" study really doesn't prove anything. The Frances Haugen whistleblower roadshow ended up mostly a bust. And the evidence of serious mental health effects is very, very thin.
Given all this, it's going to be tough to make a case that Meta's repeated denials of being the online equivalent of a heroin pusher constitute misleading representations under the law. But of course, you never know what a jury will think, do you? I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually ends in a "no admission of guilt" settlement.
It is the new rock-and-roll, or the new comic books, or the new video games. Take your pick.
my generation spent their spare time driving around getting stoned, drinking, and engaging in unprotected sex
so fb is bad for our yout' ?
please.
When I was a yout' I knew this dope who thought he'd invented huffing. Tried to get everyone else to do it. No one was interested.
No idea what happened to him, but I have a vague memory he started his own church and had a radio show.
Might be closer to the 'new cigarettes' than music, books or games. Addiction, harm, deceptive trade practices....check, check, check.
I was about to make the comic book comparison. It's apt:
Try to get teens to buy comic books.
Serialize stories so they come back for more.
Claim that reading them is bad for teen mental health.
DC Comics and Marvel publicly deny all of this.
Some of the AGs have said that there's a lot of confidential information that they've seen but can't make public that is at the center of this case. Their statements read as though they have Meta documentation of their targeting teens through specific methods. As such, it'd be a mistake to assume their case is tough to prove.
I think they have insider information that FB/Meta was intentionally targeting its youngest users through very finely-tuned algorithms to get them to stay on the platform and "up their engagement". And they knew it was harmful because they were using precisely those psychological studies about what keeps kids addicted to the screen to adjust the algorithm. Journalist Jonathan Hari came out with a whole book on this a little while ago where he talks with former Facebook engineers about how they did this.
I think FB's best defense is that absolutely no teenager in America has used their platform in over a decade, so it's moot point.
Their statements read as though they have Meta documentation of their targeting teens through specific methods.
Good heavens, no. They're targeting a $175 billion market with "specific methods"? Next we're going to be told Kellogg's is trying to sell sugary breakfast cereal to pre-teens, and Matel is trying to sell them toys.
The implication is that these "specific methods" are against some law (CHOPA
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act) and some states laws).
If they actually can prove that, then they have a good case.
So why not go after Quaker Oats for marketing Cap'n Crunch to kids and starting them on the path to obesity and diabetes?
The Cap'n's pockets aren't as deep as Meta's...
The Cap’n is owned by Quaker, which is owned by PepsiCo. So the pockets are pretty deep.
Still only a bit more than a quarter as deep at Meta’s, based on market cap.
Actually over the years networks have sharply limited advertising for sugary snacks like Cap'n Crunch or Kool Aid during hours when kids are likely to be watching. A lot of stores no longer intentionally stock sweet cereals at kids' eye-level like they used to back in my day. I don't think they've been held legally liable for anything, but they're definitely no longer sponsoring Saturday morning cartoons like they used to.
I agree with KD but I keep thinking that 41 states joined in this lawsuit so there must be some meat to it.
States are loath to raise taxes--but fees and fines, well, that's a different story.
Is it anything more than a way to get on the local news with a story that shows the AG's "standing up" to things that old people don't like?
I wish that were the case. Find a defendant you can vilify and our tort system can be little more than legalized extortion.
They don't have to be confident they'd win all or even a majority of the suits. All it takes is one very-convinced jury, and a state and its lawyers are swimming in billions.
I can't say I'm particularly sympathetic to Meta in this instance (hence why the case will succeed regardless of the merits - if I feel like that, it's not going to be hard for a skilled AG to find 12 folks who feel even more vengeful toward them); the phenomenon I describe is a bigger problem, in my view, for other industries - such as medical devices - where this post-hoc swindle dance with the AG's is a significant cost of doing business - diverting funds that should be funding innovation or facilitating lower prices to the AGs' favored law firms (and the friends of the judge fortuitously assigned to the case).
If only this could be done to Fox News.
Well, they recently had to cut Dominion Voting Systems an $800 million check for knowingly defaming them in their reporting on the 2020 election. That's not nothing, even for a massive media conglomerate like Fox.
Addiction? I suspect they ought to sue the whole Internet, at least the world wide web part of it. Well, add in the newsgroups from way back in the 1980s-1990s on the old Arpanet.
Or possibly it's just me.
I seriously wonder how many of these lawsuits are filed to raise money. Or by people who really want money but who have convinced themselves that they are doing it for a more noble cause?
(And I share the general unease of suing a company for making their product too appealing... O mean are they supposed to not make it appealing or something?)
Presumably, if states are doing the suing, the goal isn’t to make money. Or more correctly: the amount of money that the state earns every year from general taxation will dwarf whatever they get from filing a lawsuit, so it’s not like states are doing this to “get rich quick,” like an individual would. So yes, possibly states are doing this for the money… but they *already* have more money than this lawsuit can possibly produce, so it can’t be the sole goal of the lawsuit.
Let’s take the tobacco lawsuit settlement as an example. California got $919M from that. But every year CA raises and spends about $225B. The total “winnings” from the lawsuit wasn't even barely 0.5% of the annual revenue raised by the state.
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/state-indicator/tobacco-settlement-payments/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/state-budget-explained-california/#:~:text=The%20enacted%20budget%20includes%20%24225.9,major%20cuts%20to%20core%20services.
Facebook’s total value today is about $804B according to their stock price. So even if CA got a court to drive Facebook into bankruptcy (ignoring the fact that that alone would drive the stock price way down) and got ALL of that value for itself (didn’t have to share with the other 40 states), that amount would only fund about 3 years of operations for the state.
I doubt all the states are doing this solely for a cash grab.
I don't think it's all a cash grab, but you also have to consider the specific decision making parties' motivations. If i'm a state AG, i'm not really as concerned with CA's long term budget outlook as I am with short term politics. Getting a billion dollar settlement from FB would be a massive political win and short term financial boon for important allies in state government, even if it's a drop in the bucket for the state's long term budget. A billion dollars is still a helluva lot of money to dish out.
I guess. But “helluva lot of money” is all relative. In CA’s case, billions isn’t really a “helluva lot.” It’s barely a rounding error on their budget. It just sounds like a “helluva lot” to people making 5 figures… which admittedly is most people, even in CA. (Most people are really innumerate.)
Also minor quibble: it’s not CA’s “long term budget.” CA *annually* spends a quarter of a trillion dollars. That’s not “long term” unless you think 12 months is a long time for a state that’s existed for over a century and a half.
What you're saying is logical, yet states absolutely pursue these as a source of revenue - particularly revenue earmarked for a specific purpose that otherwise wouldn't get funded, like smoking cessation or reducing teen social media use.
They're also a source of revenue for lawyers in those states who bring the suits on behalf of the states. A get-rich-quick scheme in some states, and in all states a nice source of fundraising revenue from the AG (from the law firms that funnel a portion of the proceeds they collect back to the campaign of the politician who hired them).
I think the goal is less to levy a fine and more to expose how social media companies are very consciously manipulating their users not in order to "build communities" or "connect people" but to keep their eyeballs on a screen as long as possible so they can see targeted advertising. Of course we've all known for a long time that platforms like FB or Xitter were really just advertising brokers that used a social media tool to hoover up and analyze user data. But the broader public is probably not aware of just how completely unethical they've been about it.
Me getting money IS a noble cause. Maybe the most noblest cause ever!
yeah, i wouldn't be surprised if the states' strategy is simply to pressure meta to make policy changes and probably cough up some cash to avoid the bad PR, cost and risk of a trial.