Opening statements started Monday in a trial where plaintiffs allege that Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are acting as ‘digital casinos’ designing their platforms to addict kids, and Zuckerberg will be forced to testify.
The big global news in social media is that the nation of Australia banned social media for kids 16 and under last month. Here in the US, a series of trials are set to be heard this year over social media companies allegedly fostering addiction among kids on purpose, including nine cases in LA, and several school districts nationwide rolling up their lawsuits into one large suit that will be heard in Oakland.
And the New York Times reports that one potentially landmark case had its opening statement on Monday and continues today, with some pretty damning evidence that Facebook. Meta, and YouTube designed their platforms to be like “digital casinos” fo children that are meant to be as addictive as cigarettes.
“They didn’t just build apps, they built traps,” plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier said in his opening argument Monday, per the Times. “They didn’t want users, they wanted addicts.”
The charges are considered serious enough that Mark Zuckerberg himself will be forced to testify in this trial. Also scheduled to testify is YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
And the plaintiffs have some pretty powerful evidence on their side in the “digital casinos” allegation. Namely, they have internal Google/Alphabet/YouTube documentation that refers to the platform's offerings as “slot machines,” accompanied by images of casinos. Further, that documentation also comes right out and says “These are attention casinos,” and “The house always wins.”
The documentation has Meta employees saying that (in the Times' words) “the company’s tactics reminded them of tobacco companies." But there are also direct quotes from Instagram employees saying that their platform is “like a drug” and that employees were “basically pushers.”
The Associated Press points out that Snap and TikTok already settled on ths lawsuit, so there are probably some merits to all this. That said, both tech companies settled for undisclosed sums, so maybe they just bargained down to an amount that they were happy to just write the check and make this go away.
The plaintiffs in all of these cases are hoping for something similar to Big Tobacco’s historic 1998 $206 billion settlement where cigarette brands admitted they were marketing to kids and agreed to stop. But this may or may not get a similar result.
Remember, there have been a few of these “landmark” casses against Big Tech over the last two years. And Big Tech tends to usually win, or even when they lose, the consequences are so threadbare that it pretty much counts as a victory. We’ll see this time how the high-powered attorneys of Big Tech handle the adversaries of government lawyers and glorified class-action attorneys.
Related: Meta Wins Antitrust Battle, Does Not Have to Spin Off Instagram or WhatsApp [SFist]
Image: jjron via Wikimedia Commons
