After months of hype and mere hours in front of the jury, California’s blockbuster suit against Meta ended on Wednesday with a sweeping $17-billion settlement and 130 pages of promised changes to the platforms.
Witnesses at the blink-and-you-miss-it Oakland trial echoed much of what had already been heard this year by juries in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Nashville.
But the evidence presented during the proceedings still shed new light on social media’s seedy underbelly.
Internal documents show Meta knew for years that its youngest users were the most likely to be targeted by bullies, extortionists and sexual predators.
Arturo Béjar, an ex-Meta employee, described girls being threatened with rape, boys whose feeds were flooded with snuff films, and middle schoolers inundated with sexually explicit images. Vulnerable children were algorithmically force-fed images of starving bodies and hanging teddy bears, the former engineer said while testifying for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Some steps have been taken moving forward…
Under the agreement, Meta must flag parents whenever accounts it has identified as likely to solicit youngsters for nudes and then leverage those images for blackmail start messaging their kids. It will also send alerts if kids interact with posts about suicide, eating disorders and self-harm.
Some parents might wonder why such policies had to be litigated at all. But legal experts said the agreement reflects what was likely weeks, if not months, of careful backroom horse-trading.
Not everyone agrees…
“This settlement agreement is basically the government coercing Meta into censoring users,” said Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at Tech Freedom. “These are things that the government could never legislate. The government could not set a bedtime for the 1st Amendment or limit free speech to two hours a day.”
Although children are more vulnerable than adults, they have the same right to free expression, he said. Efforts to protect them will inevitably spill into censorship of all users — now on the orders of the government.