$1T child harms case against Meta opens in northern California court

Aug. 18 (UPI) — A landmark $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 29 states against Facebook and Instagram parent, Meta, alleging the tech giant’s products harm children and breach child privacy laws was due to go to trial in federal court Tuesday in Oakland.

Lead plaintiffs California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey accuse Meta of purposely designing the platforms to get young people hooked, causing them harm, with all 29 states alleging the firm violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection act by collecting and using the personal data of users younger than 13 without parental consent.

The states will argue Meta duped users by marketing its apps as safe, all the while fomenting mental ill-health of crisis proportions among young people across the country and violating child privacy and state consumer protection laws.

As well as damages of more than $1 trillion, the suit also seeks to force Meta to make changes to Instagram and Facebook, including terminating features like infinite scroll and tallies of “likes”.

“Meta designed a dangerous product for young users, knew it to be dangerous, and then lied to children, families and the community about how dangerous it was,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Meta denies the allegations and plans to mount a defense around safeguards it put in place to protect young people using its products and that it was honest in its relationship with consumers.

Other changes being sought by the states include parental verification for teenage users, moves away from “dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms,” the removal of features that enable photos to be altered, autoplay of video content and disappearing posts.

The case is the culmination of a suit first filed by 33 states in fall 2023 alleging Meta set out to engineer its platforms to get children addicted children, allowed children younger than 13 to have accounts and when under-age users were flagged up, failed to disable their accounts most of the time.

“We’ll show a jury that Meta concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause young people because looking away was more profitable,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman.

“AGs are in the perfect position to get this done. We did it with the Tobacco Settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta,” Coleman said.

With the potential for levels of liabilty approaching Meta’s entire market capitalization of $1.43 trillion, should it lose the case, the firm’s stock price fell ahead of the open of markets on Tuesday, trading down by a little more than $5 a share at $563.40.

Opening arguments in the trial come less than two weeks after a state court in New Mexico found against Meta in a case brought by the state attorney general for violations of consumer protection laws, ordering Meta to paypout hundred of millions of dollars after ruling it created a public nuisance that harmed young users.

The court ordered the creation of a $567 million fund, of which $420 million must be used for treatment of social media-related harms sustained by the state’s children.

The fund comes on top of a $375 million fine in March for violating the state’s consumer protection laws in the first phase of the case.

Administered by the FTC, the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act says parents must have control over information collected from their children online, including verifiable parental consent for the collection, use, or disclosure of that information and enabling them to block the storage, use or future collection of their child’s personal information.

Parents must also be granted access to personal information held about their child, while the online platforms are prohibited from asking children to provide more personal information than deemed necessary to take part in any activity and must implement reasonable measures to safeguard the confidentiality and security of their personal data.