Double legal setback for Meta for knowingly endangering minors

BarcelonaA landmark double legal precedent has been set against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), has ordered the tech giant to pay $375 million in damages, finding that the company prioritized profits over safety and concealed what it knew about the potential harmful effects of its apps. According to the state attorney general, who initiated the proceedings, After seven weeks of hearings and just one day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by failing to disclose the potential harms of its apps. Specifically, they pointed to risks of child sexual exploitation and consequences for the psychological development of young children. New Mexico law allows a maximum of $5,000 for violations of this type, so the total is based on the 37,500 violations the jury determined, taking into account the number of minors who could have suffered these consequences. Beyond the amount—relatively small for a corporation that generated $200 billion in revenue last year—this is the first time a state has won against a major technology company for harm to minors. And it opens the door to similar lawsuits across the United States.The verdict comes as Meta faces two other major legal proceedings. The first is in California, where the alleged permissiveness of Meta's platforms in blocking minors from accessing the platform has been judged. For now, the jury has concluded that the big tech He is guilty, but the sentence and any potential compensation have not yet been made public. The case stems from a complaint filed by a 20-year-old woman who suffered from an addiction to the group's social media platforms, which began when she was six years old. The young woman received her first mobile phone at age nine, which has also sparked debate about parental responsibility. According to records, she spent up to sixteen hours a day on the apps. The plaintiff also accused Google, owner of YouTube, which attempted to argue that its video-on-demand service could not be considered a social network.

In this process, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified for more than six hours and admitted to being slow to implement effective age verification. Instagram didn't ask for birthdates from new users until 2019, waited until 2021 to require existing profiles to declare their age, and verification of these declarations wasn't enforced until 2022. An internal company document estimated that, in 2015, there were more than four million Instagram accounts belonging to children under 13.

Aside from this process, there is also a major federal trial in June, brought by various school districts across the United States, where Meta, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok will be in the dock. The lawsuits were filed in response to the rise in mental health disorders among young people, which are believed to be exacerbated by prolonged exposure to social media.