Meta on trial. Again.

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.

Sophie Zhang

She worked in Facebook between 2018 and 2020. As part of the “Fake Engagement” team, she discovered how foreign national governments were using Facebook to manipulate public opinion.

In 2018, she found that Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernández was artificially boosting his grassroots popularity by having his social manager create and administer fake Facebook Pages that pushed up the “likes” on Hernández’s posts.

(Hernandez was later convicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking but was pardoned by Donald Trump.)

While the Honduras case was addressed by Facebook (the Honduras network later reconstituted and Facebook decided that taking it down was not a priority), the rest of her findings were largely ignored. Until she left Facebook in 2020, she found patterns of abuse from several other governments including Azerbaijan, India, Mexico, Iraq, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines (if you’re a Filipino, note that Rodrigo Duterte was president from 2016 to 2022, and his Facebook tactics are). But Facebook deemed that the political affairs of these countries did not get much traction in the U.S. and feared negative PR, so, the abuses remained unchecked.

But Zhang was careful to document everything and keep records. She testified before British Parliament. What she uncovered became The Facebook Loopholes, a series of articles published by The Guardian, a British newspaper (see reading list below).

Frances Hugen

She joined Facebook in 2019 and left in 2021. She leaked internal documents to show that Facebook knew the dangers of its platforms but prioritized profits over public safety. These documents became the basis of a series of investigative reports published by The Wall Street Journal (see reading list below). Zugen has testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security) and part of her statement reads:

… I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more. The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people.

…

During my time at Facebook, first working as the lead product manager for Civic Misinformation
and later on Counter-Espionage, I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. In other cases, their profit optimizing machine is generating self-harm and
self-hate — especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls.

…

Facebook chooses what information billions of people see, shaping their perception of reality. Even those who don’t use Facebook are impacted by the radicalization of people who do. A company with control over our deepest thoughts, feelings and behaviors needs real oversight. But Facebook’s closed design means it has no oversight — even from its own Oversight Board, which is as blind as the public. Only Facebook knows how it personalizes your feed for you. It hides behind walls that keep the eyes of researchers and regulators from understanding the true dynamics of the system.

Mark Zuckerberg is Meta’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder. And that means it is he who calls the shots and makes the final decisions. Too bad he’s not getting sued in his personal capacity. He should be.

Reading list

The Facebook loophole (6 articles), The Guardian

The Facebook files (17 articles), The Wall Street Journal