An endless scroll of lawsuits

TL;DR: If it’s a day that ends in Y, it seems like Meta is getting sued or is in court. This time it’s facing off against a 29-state coalition (four states are leading the arguments) in federal court in California. On the line? A potential fine of roughly $200 billion for Meta, plus changes to its platforms, including the end of autoplay for videos, algorithm changes, and the removal of appearance-altering image filters.

What happened this week: Both Meta and the states presented their opening arguments, and a Meta whistleblower testified. Here are the highlights:

• California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill kicked off the trial by summarizing what the states viewed Meta’s business model as: “Hook the users; hold them for as long as they can; harvest their data; hide the truth from the public when making public statements.”

• Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar, who previously led Facebook’s Integrity and Care team, said that Meta’s metric for harm was “very narrow” and that the company under-reports the prevalence of harmful content. In his testimony, Béjar said his internal surveys found 51% of teens reported bad experiences on Instagram, yet Meta removed the content just 0.02% of the time.

• Béjar said he often briefed Mark Zuckerberg on product issues (they had spoken at least 100 times), but when he emailed the CEO warning him about persistent harm to teens, Zuckerberg didn’t respond.

• Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt rejected claims the company intentionally targeted children and argued that research hasn’t yet supported the concept that social media is addictive. (He also plans to present data that 96% of Facebook users are adults, and that Instagram skews younger but has a similar ratio.)

That’s not all: California lawmakers are set to pass a bill at the end of the month that could be one of the most transformative social media laws in the country. It would ban “addictive” features on social media platforms for teens under 16, The Washington Post reported.

Meanwhile, Meta isn’t the only company under fire. A bipartisan duo of senators has demanded that TikTok answer questions about its decision to run a “depraved” experiment: The company held back an algorithmic safety measure from 10% of US users, per Bloomberg. One of those users, randomly placed in that group in 2022, was a teen who later died by suicide.

Up next for Meta: The state attorneys general won’t say whether they’ll call Zuckerberg to the stand (more content for Aaron Sorkin if they do), but Instagram head Adam Mosseri is expected to testify in the coming weeks. Meta has already lost in court twice this year over the same issue—and mounting legal costs are starting to hurt its bottom line. —LC