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Meta will head into federal court on Tuesday to fend off accusations from a group of state attorneys general that it designed its social media platforms to hook children, lied to the public about the risks those platforms posed and gathered data on kids in violation of the law.
The case is the latest in a wave of suits against social media companies, meant to hold them accountable for the way they design their products. Legal experts compare it to landmark litigation against tobacco and opioid manufacturers that changed those companies' behaviors as well as the public discussion about the risks of cigarettes and prescription painkillers.
Four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — are seeking up to $1.4 trillion in penalties and product changes under consumer protection laws that they allege were broken by Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. They say Meta also violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by hoovering up data about children.
"We allege in our complaint, and what we're prepared to prove at trial, is that they're deceiving consumers about Facebook and Instagram's dangers," said New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport in an interview with NPR. "They're putting the profits … over the health of a generation of young people."
The suit is a bellwether in what's known as multidistrict litigation. It consolidates thousands of similar lawsuits to create consistency and avoid duplication of tasks like evidence gathering.
One of the suit's central arguments is that Meta designed and deployed features to capture young users' attention and prolong their time on social media, including the "like" button, the infinite-scroll function and recommendation algorithms that "encourage compulsive use." The company financially benefited from this, the suit claims, because Meta makes money from advertising. The longer kids stay on Meta's sites — and the more effectively that advertising can be targeted to them — the more money Meta stands to make.
The lawsuit alleges that Meta prioritized engagement over young users' safety, creating products that disrupted their education and sleep and, in the case of visual filters, were known to promote eating disorders and body dysmorphia. This happened, the states argue, despite public statements by Meta that its platforms were designed to support the well-being of young users.
The lawsuit also alleges that Meta knew children under 13 were on Instagram and Facebook — a violation of its own policies — and that it collected personal information about them without parental consent, in violation of COPPA.
In a statement emailed to NPR, a spokesperson for Meta said that the states' claims are limited and unsubstantiated and that the financial demands are "vastly disproportionate."
"The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification," the spokesperson wrote. "We stand by our record of creating strong protections for teens, and look forward to making our case in court."
Social media companies have enjoyed some immunity from lawsuits brought against them because they are protected by the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely shields platforms from prosecution based on content posted by users.
But Meta has already lost two cases in state courts this year over claims similar to those made in the federal suit. In March, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta and Google were to blame for the depression and anxiety of a young woman who compulsively used social media as a small child and awarded her $6 million in damages. Separately, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million and implement new safety measures after a jury found that the company failed to protect young users from child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
In the federal case that begins trial this week, as in the larger wave of lawsuits brought against social media companies in recent years, the plaintiffs are taking issue with the design features of the platforms, which they say led to addiction by minors, and not with the user-generated content minors viewed.
Stuart Benjamin, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, said that this legal approach could get messy. It could be hard for the court to separate allegations of addictive product design from claims of addictive content.
"Can the claims you're letting go forward be disentangled from the claims you're saying can't go forward? Or is it all really one unified theory of harm, that you failed to have parental controls and you had an infinite feed of addicting content?" he said.
What did Meta know about the risks of its products?
Experts expect the case to cast a spotlight on discrepancies between what Meta leaders said in public versus in private about their products and those products' effects on minors. In the lawsuit, the states note more than 100 statements by people at Meta that were potentially deceptive.
And in a June pretrial ruling, for instance, the judge cited Meta's own documents as supporting the plaintiffs' theory that time-restriction tools were merely a "public relations stunt," because they show that Meta employees knew spending more time on social media was bad for teens.
"This litigation is shining a light on not just what Meta did, but also what Meta knew," said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor of law at Stanford University.
"The significance of this litigation isn't limited to who wins or how much Meta pays. The litigation itself can substantially change what the public knows," she said, adding that this could move public opinion, catalyze regulatory action or spur legislation.
Legal experts think Meta, which said in late July that an average of 3.6 billion people use its platforms each day, is likely to appeal any ruling against it, in part because the stakes are so high. An appeal could potentially reach the Supreme Court.
"It's not as easy as it might seem for Meta to write a check" and settle, said Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham University's School of Law. The plaintiffs are "claiming humongous amounts of money, and there's a huge number of plaintiffs — and it's a potentially endless list of people going forward."
The trial is being held in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in Oakland, in the court of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided this spring over the high-profile lawsuit that Tesla CEO Elon Musk brought against OpenAI.
It's expected to last about six weeks.
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