Juries in California and New Mexico have found the tech giants Alphabet and Meta liable for knowingly causing harm to children and teens who used their social media platforms. Over the course of the trials, documents revealed that tech companies were well aware of the addictive properties of their social media products and exploited these properties to increase their profits. “They take advantage of the undeveloped frontal cortex of young people and their emotional need for validation by showing them things, not that they want to see, but what they can’t look away from,” says attorney Matthew P. Bergman, who represented the plaintiffs in the California case. Youth advocate Zamaan Qureshi, who testified in the New Mexico case against Meta, says the verdicts indicate that “Meta’s house of cards is falling, and it is absolutely clear that they will be held accountable.”
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
In two landmark court decisions this week, juries in California and New Mexico found tech giants Alphabet and Meta are liable for knowingly causing harm to kids and teens on their social media platforms. The verdicts are being hailed as a watershed moment for Big Tech accountability.
Alphabet is the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube. Meta owns and operates Facebook and Instagram.
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury sided with a plaintiff who accused Alphabet and Meta of designing products to addict young users. The plaintiff in the case was a 20-year-old referred to as K.G.M. who says she became addicted to social media at a young age, with severe harm to her mental health. The jury awarded her $3 million in damages. The case was considered a bellwether for thousands of other similar lawsuits that have been filed.
Many parents attended the trial. This is Julianna Arnold, who says her daughter Coco spiraled into self-doubt and depression after becoming addicted to social media platforms like Instagram. She spoke outside the courthouse after the verdict.
JULIANNA ARNOLD: Being in that courtroom and hearing those answers from the jury, it’s really validated, been a complete validation of what we’ve been screaming on the top of roofs about for years. … They knew the harm. Right? They knew the damage. They assessed the risk. And they moved forward anyway.
AMY GOODMAN: And on Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for knowingly harming children and concealing child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Here in New York, Matthew Bergman is with us, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. The L.A. plaintiff, K.G.M., is their client. And joining us from Washington, D.C., Zamaan Qureshi, 23-year-old co-founder of Design It For Us. He testified in the New Mexico trial.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Matthew Bergman, let’s begin with you. The significance of these two massive verdicts?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: Well, this is just a inflection point in the effort to hold social media companies accountable for the carnage that they are inflicting on the mental and physical health of young people, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, a trial, you get discovery. What did you discover? What did you find out you didn’t know before?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: What we didn’t know before was that in internal documents, Meta and YouTube knew that their platforms were addictive and deliberately designed them to addict young people.
AMY GOODMAN: How do they deliberately do that?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: They take advantage of the undeveloped frontal cortex of young people and their emotional need for validation by showing them things, not that they want to see, but what they can’t look away from. They literally take advantage of the fact that young people’s brains aren’t fully developed. They know that, and they specifically—and these documents show they specifically use the term “addict’s mentality,” or YouTube says the goal is to make our product addictive. So, this is not just some theory anymore. These are the actual documents that were released for the first time in this trial.
AMY GOODMAN: You represented K.G.M.
MATTHEW BERGMAN: I do.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain who she is and the significance of the many young people who were not in the courtroom, their parents were.
MATTHEW BERGMAN: Yeah, well, K.G.M. is a young woman from Chico, California—she could be anybody’s daughter—who suffered severe mental health harms after being addicted to YouTube and to Instagram. Thank God, she’s still with us. In the courtroom were parents whose children have died of suicide, who bore moral witness. Some of them literally camped outside the courthouse before Mark Zuckerberg testified, so that they could look him in the eye while he testified.
AMY GOODMAN: And that’s interesting, because when he testified before Congress, he looked forward, they were behind him. Now they looked directly at him.
MATTHEW BERGMAN: They looked—
AMY GOODMAN: And he—more importantly, he looked directly at them.
MATTHEW BERGMAN: They looked at—they looked directly at them. And through Mark Lanier’s adept examination, Zuckerberg had to admit that he did not testify accurately to Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: He misled Congress by saying, “We don’t allow children under 13 on our platform.” And he had to admit that that was somewhat of a prevarication, because they know and they specifically target. Their document says, “To get teens, we have to target them as tweens.” And he had to acknowledge that document.
AMY GOODMAN: So, then, I mean, he had to testify under oath in Congress. Does that mean he could be charged with perjury?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: I would have to leave that to Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: You recently testified in front—let me ask you about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Can you talk about what this is?
MATTHEW BERGMAN: Yeah, it’s basically a license to kill. It was a statute that was passed in 1996 when Netscape was the biggest internet browser. Facebook didn’t exist, and Google didn’t exist. It provides immunity, absolute immunity, for social media companies for their publishing of third-party content. And unfortunately, it’s been interpreted far beyond what Congress ever intended, to provide carte blanche immunity for virtually anything that was done. We developed a new theory of liability about four years ago and pushed it forward in this case, holding them responsible not for the content that they host, but for their design decisions. And that was a legal argument that ultimately allowed us to take this case to the jury.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Zamaan Qureshi, co-founder of Design It For Us. You testified — you were the last one to testify in the New Mexico trial, New Mexico v. Meta. You refer to your generation, Gen Z, as “the guinea pig generation.” You are 23 years old. Explain what you told the court.
ZAMAAN QURESHI: Yeah. So, I was the last witness for the state in New Mexico, and I told the court about what it’s like to grow up as a young person on Instagram, when you have to quantify your self-worth through likes and views, and you are constantly inundated through push notifications and these design features which are designed to keep young users on these products for longer than they want to be. And in Instagram’s case, in particular, the company knew that this was its strategy, this was its strategy all along, and that young people were telling the company that the product was harming their mental health, and yet they were still not taking steps to actually create a safer space and safer product for our generation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us, Zamaan, your reaction when you saw the documents from Frances Haugen? And explain her significance.
ZAMAAN QURESHI: Yeah, so, I really wouldn’t be in this work if it wasn’t for Frances Haugen coming forward to bring forward documents that showed that Meta knew that its products were causing harm. Frances Haugen, through The Wall Street Journal, brought forward these documents that showed that young users felt worse about themselves after using Instagram, that they were being exploited on these products, and that in many cases it was the design features of Meta’s products themselves that kept young users on the product longer than they wanted to be, longer on Instagram than they wanted to be. And this was significant, because this is—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.
ZAMAAN QURESHI: —this is things that we know as young people growing up online.
AMY GOODMAN: Zamaan, I want to thank you for being with us. In five seconds, your response to the huge win against Meta in the New Mexico case?
ZAMAAN QURESHI: Meta’s house of cards is falling, and it is absolutely clear that they will be held accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: Zamaan Qureshi, co-founder of Design It For Us, and Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of Social Media Victims Law Center.
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