There is lore about the 1862 meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” — the influential novel about slavery — and former President Abraham Lincoln. “So,” President Lincoln is reported to have greeted her, “you’re the woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” History doesn’t indicate whether Lincoln made these remarks out of admiration, irritation, regret or some combination thereof.
Jeff Robbins
It may be that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will come to mutter something comparable about the 20-year-old California woman, identified in court records as “KGM,” who late last month won a $6 million verdict against Meta and Google, $3 million for the emotional harm the jury found they caused her and $3 million in punitive damages. The verdict against the social media platforms was for what KGM’s lawyer called “the engineering of addiction” — the deliberate design of platform features to generate addiction to social media among minors by exploiting their developmental limitations and vulnerabilities.
It is one of more than 2,000 similar cases against social media companies pending nationwide. The cases have been consolidated for trial, and the verdict comes as state attorneys general, school districts and individuals sue the platforms over abusive design, false and deceptive advertising and the creation of a public nuisance. Their core argument is that the companies have specifically designed their platforms to hook children and keep them hooked, knowing that the addiction causes severe, permanent damage.
The defendants in KGM’s case could take some comfort in the relatively paltry $6 million verdict, given their astronomical wealth. Less comforting, given the number of these cases being filed, is what the jury found: that the defendants had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud.” “We wanted them to feel it,” one of the jurors told the media post-verdict. “We wanted them to realize this was unacceptable.” There was ample evidence that Meta had carefully analyzed the need to addict young people by using specific design features and how to do it, including an email circulated among Mega’s management team, which stated: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”
If the verdict feels like the first ripple of a potential tsunami that may compare to the Big Tobacco litigation of the 1990s, which punished the smoking industry for ensnaring children, that’s because it may well be. Zuckerberg helpfully contributed to the body of arrogance-before-a-fall court performances by offering a “Let them eat cake” defense, sort of missing the point that the lawsuit was about manipulating children. “If people feel like they’re not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?” he demanded of the plaintiff’s lawyer. This was a defense that may next be trotted out in a case against cocaine smugglers.
At a time when other countries are beginning to implement restrictions on social media use by children and American politicians are gingerly wondering whether we should do the same, the verdict was sandwiched between two other court decisions, which augur poorly for social media companies’ ability to continue hiding behind a 1996 federal law exempting them from being held responsible for third parties’ content. It isn’t the hard party content that these lawsuits are about, argue the plaintiffs, but the design engineering by the social media themselves and their own false and misleading advertising.
The KGM verdict came a day after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading the public and harming their health. And last week, Massachusetts’ highest court upheld the state’s Attorney General’s right to sue Meta for the same kinds of “addiction-by-design” features at issue in KMG’s case, suing on behalf of 300,000 Massachusetts children who use Instagram, which Meta owns and operates.
“Today’s verdict is a referendum — from a jury to an entire industry — that accountability has arrived,” KGM’s lawyer said after the trial. At a minimum, it seems plain that for social media companies, the long-lasting party may be over.
Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.
