Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Meta has gone on trial in the United States again over claims that its platforms put children at risk, while the company says it works continuously to keep young users safe. In a California federal court, four states are seeking billions of dollars in damages and major changes in how Meta runs Facebook and Instagram.
The case is part of a wider lawsuit filed in 2023 by 29 states over child safety and privacy. A jury will decide whether the states have proved their claim that Meta designed its apps to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and hide the truth from the public”, as Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, said in her opening statement.
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California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are the first states to go to trial, while the other 25 will be heard later. Meta is also facing lawsuits in state courts, including one already under way in Tennessee. The lawsuit says Meta contributed to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features that addict children to its platforms and by hiding those harms from the public. It also says the company routinely collected data on children under 13 without parental consent, in violation of federal law.
During opening statements in Oakland, O’Neill told the eight jurors that Meta understood how children’s brains work, including their search for rewards, their sensitivity to social feedback and their still-developing ability to control impulses. She said Meta researched these vulnerabilities and discussed how Instagram could be changed to respond to them. “The young ones are the best ones” is the title of a Meta study we are going to show you, she said, adding that for Meta, “kids are the product”.
O’Neill also said Meta knew that children under 13 were using its products despite being barred from them, and “failed to take the simplest most obvious steps to keep them off”. She said that when Meta found a Facebook user was under 13, it would disable that Facebook account but not the person’s connected Instagram account.
The states called former Meta executive Arturo Bjar as their first witness. Bjar worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and returned as a contractor from 2019 to 2021 to work on safety issues. He said Meta’s research on safety problems was not being used to improve products in the way the company claimed. Referring to eating disorder content, he said Meta’s engineers “had very good ideas on how to make it better” so that users, especially young ones, would not be exposed to it. “But once it was reviewed, it got whittled down to a little pebble that didn’t make a difference,” he said.
Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt told the court there were some facts not in dispute, including that some children under 13 lie about their ages to get on the apps, that some teenagers struggle to manage their time and that some people post “negative content” on Facebook and Instagram. But he said his case would focus on the steps Meta has taken to make its platforms safer and to share information with the public. “Much of this lawsuit is about the government attorneys and their witnesses saying in trying to improve, we’d do it a little differently,” Schmidt said. “In talking about how to improve, we disagree with how you talk about it. It’s meaningful, and the evidence will be meaningful, these efforts Meta has taken to improve.”
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the case in Oakland. The trial is expected to last six weeks and is set to include testimony from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, along with other current and former executives and employees. If Meta loses, the court will have broad discretion in deciding any financial penalty. Meta has said the case could leave it liable for damages of USD 1.4 trillion, though legal experts have said an amount close to that would be unlikely.
The trial comes amid thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other social media companies, including Google’s YouTube, TikTok and Snap, over claims that their platforms harm young people, collect their data illegally and are deliberately designed to be addictive. As the trial began on Tuesday, child safety advocates and parents gathered outside the courthouse, many holding photographs of children they said had died because of social media-related harms. Mary Rodee, whose son Riley Basford died by suicide at 15 after being sextorted on Facebook Messenger, said parents had added 39 new names to a banner since March. “It’s not just a banner,” Rodee said. “Every name that I wrote on there is a promise that these children will never be forgotten and that their stories will force accountability where silence once reigned.”
The trial will now test the states’ claims that Meta knew about risks to children and failed to act, while the company argues that it has worked to improve safety across its platforms.
With PTI Inputs
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
