After months of hype and mere hours in front of the jury, California\u2019s blockbuster suit against Meta ended on Wednesday with a sweeping $17-billion settlement and 130 pages of promised changes to the platforms. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
But the evidence presented during the proceedings still shed new light on social media\u2019s seedy underbelly. <\/p>\n
Internal documents show Meta knew for years that its youngest users were the most likely to be targeted by bullies, extortionists and sexual predators. <\/p>\n
Arturo B\u00e9jar, 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. <\/p>\n
Yet the company excluded the majority of those harms from its public reports, designing its metrics so that many of the worst encounters were never captured. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever Mark Zuckerberg was asked about harm, he would immediately start talking about \u2018prevalence,\u2019\u201d B\u00e9jar said, using Meta\u2019s term for violations of its company policy. \u201cWe found the harm was 100 to 400 times what was being accounted for by prevalence.\u201d <\/p>\n
Many of those harms were graphic. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe body falling and being cut at the last frame, or bones being broken, that\u2019s content people say is violent and distressing but does not fall in [prevalence],\u201d B\u00e9jar said. \u201cYou experience the full harm of the video even though you don\u2019t see the thing that violates policy.\u201d <\/p>\n
That testimony came just after opening statements Aug. 18 . A week later, former Meta data scientist George Volichenko told jurors he and his team were forbidden from making safety settings the default for teens amid fears it would shrink the amount of time that young people spent on the app \u2014 the project\u2019s stated goal. <\/p>\n
During his trial testimony, Instagram\u2019s director of product design, Francesco Fogu, reviewed an internal chat where he groused that company lawyers had scrubbed key data about teen exposure to suicide, self-injury, and eating disorder content from a presentation to top brass, over worries those executives might later be compelled to testify about them. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point I feel we are purposefully omitting stats that could help them properly assess the situation,\u201d Fogu wrote in the July 2023 exchange, where he noted children were more than twice as likely as adults to be served dangerous content and suffer bullying and harassment. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese are pretty strong and could change the outcome of the discussion,\u201d he wrote. \u201cDoes legal not want us to share them at all?\u201d <\/p>\n
In the trial\u2019s final minutes, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri was confronted with a 2021 email in which he excoriated underlings for proposing new child safety features on the heels of his testimony to Congress. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnnouncing this after my testify is worse than before, and we talked this,\u201d Mosseri wrote, according to the email read in court. <\/p>\n
It was, experts agreed, a bad look for the company. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe evidence wasn\u2019t getting better here for Meta,\u201d said Joseph McNally, former acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California and an expert in \u201ctechnology-related harm.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was also a big wake-up call for families, who may not yet know the extent of the horrors children have faced on the apps. <\/p>\n
\u201cParents, teachers and others are much more educated having had this litigation publicly play out over the past year than they were two years ago,\u201d McNally said. \u201cThey\u2019ve then heard and seen through the news coverage that those incidents were corroborated by admissible evidence in court.\u201d<\/p>\n
Angst over Meta\u2019s public reputation likely played a role in the decision to settle so early, experts said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWho wants to be accused of abusing children?\u201d said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. <\/p>\n
But while the settlement sidesteps any admission of wrongdoing by the company, it does compel Meta to combat problems few parents knew existed, in terms far starker than those it has articulated before. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re notching some big wins with this settlement, which would have been very difficult to achieve at trial and even more difficult to sustain on appeal,\u201d said Peter Jackson, a privacy and cybersecurity attorney in Los Angeles. \u201cParents are now aware months ahead of time that these controls will exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis settlement has been negotiated for a very long time,\u201d Jackson said. <\/p>\n
In a sudden about-face, Meta published an open letter to its competitors on Wednesday urging them to adopt sweeping changes the company itself had dismissed as commercially untenable and technologically impracticable during opening statements just days earlier. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers \u2014 TikTok and YouTube \u2014 to put the same measures in place,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n
Child safety experts lauded the settlement and the accompanying pressure campaign as a giant leap forward in the effort to regulate an industry that until this year appeared all but impenetrable to reform, either from the courts or legislatures. <\/p>\n
But not everybody is cheering. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis settlement agreement is basically the government coercing Meta into censoring users,\u201d said Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at Tech Freedom. \u201cThese 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
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 \u2014 now on the orders of the government. <\/p>\n
\u201cWould Meta have actually agreed to this if not for the government wielding its extreme authority demanding gigantic penalties?\u201d Cohn said. \u201cAs satisfying as it may feel to some people to see Meta get socked by this, at the end of the day it\u2019s going to come back and bite you.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After months of hype and mere hours in front of the jury, California\u2019s blockbuster suit against Meta ended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14712,7,9,8,3409,1804,4744,4082,405,3758,63,3412,3906,5675,177066,1796,315,72],"class_list":["post-447161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-agreement","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-child","tag-company","tag-evidence","tag-expert","tag-government","tag-harm","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-meta","tag-month","tag-settlement","tag-social-medium-harm","tag-testimony","tag-time","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}