Earlier this month, Meta was ordered to pay almost a billion dollars by a judge in New Mexico over child safety issues.

Today, Meta is in court once more. Twenty-nine states including California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey have sued Meta for getting children addicted to its platforms and knowingly hiding from the public the dangers that Meta platforms expose children to. The apps, Facebook and Instagram in particular, the lawsuits claim, are so designed to psychologically manipulate and exploit children.

What’s at stake? USD1.4 trillion. But the money loss for Meta has begun even as trial has just commenced.

Shares of Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) traded sharply lower Tuesday morning, falling as much as 4.1%. As of 1:10 p.m. ET, the stock was still down 3.3%.

It’s not the first time that Meta is being sued. Long before it was renamed Meta, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg had been slapped with cases many times before on various grounds. The first dates back to 2004 when Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of ConnectU and Zuckerberg’s fellow students at Harvard, sued Facebook claiming that Zuckerberg copied their idea and used the source code to build Facebook.

Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard student Eduardo Saverin each invested USD1,000 to form Facebook. Originally limited to Harvard students, when Facebook was opened to the public, anyone 13 years of age with a valid email address could join. Yes, from day one, he wanted children on Facebook. I could write about how Zuckerberg screwed Saverin later but just watch the movie The Social Network. It’s not exactly fiction.

While the current trial in California will deal mainly with Meta’s blatant disregard for children’s rights and welfare in favor of profit, I’m looking back at what else Meta and Zuckerberg should be and should have been held crminally liable for over the years. There is overwhelming documentation made public by two former Meta employees turned whistleblowers: Sophie Zhang and Frances Hugen.

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