Meta is pushing back against a pair of verdicts that awarded plaintiffs hundreds of millions. The company has vowed to appeal the New Mexico and California rulings, and has already taken countermeasures against attorneys looking to recruit plaintiffs on the very social media platforms that they’re looking to fight.
In New Mexico, a jury found Meta liable for misleading customers about the safety of its platforms. The New Mexico Department of Justice celebrated the victory, which made the southwestern state the first in the country to score that kind of legal win. The jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $5,000 per violation, totaling $375 million in civil penalties.
The California case was focused on a 20-year-old California woman, identified as K.G.M., who alleged the platforms fueled addictive use as a minor and contributed to her depression and suicidal thoughts through their engagement-driven design. In that instance, Meta was ordered to pay a total of $4.2 million.
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“We think we have strong grounds on appeal on a number of counts,” Ethan Davis, VP and Head of Global Litigation Strategy at Meta, told Fox Business. “We think these cases threaten to erode fundamental principles of free speech. And so we are optimistic about our chances on appeal.”
Davis told Fox Business that Meta did not believe the cases should have been brought under Section 230, a part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that protects platforms from being liable for the content of posts. There have been debates about how Section 230 has been applied to social media platforms, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when some saw the censoring of posts as a reason to get rid of the protections for big tech companies.
“If you look at court decisions, they’ve recognized a number of times that you cannot hold a platform liable based on the content that’s on that platform or on that platform’s publishing decisions,” Davis said. “These cases are about the content that teens are seeing on the platforms and that falls squarely within what Section 230 is designed to apply to.”
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Even as some attorneys argue that the social media platforms have caused harm, they have used those same tools to recruit clients. The ads have since been removed by Meta.
One removed ad read, “Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren’t just teenage phases — they’re symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway,” according to Axios. The outlet noted that almost all the ads ran on both Facebook and Instagram, with some appearing in Threads and Messenger.
“It makes no sense to allow these plaintiff lawyers to use our platform to recruit plaintiffs to bring cases against us when the very crux of their complaint against us is that our platforms are harmful,” Davis said.
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Meta has taken steps in the past to make its platforms safer for young users by creating teen accounts, which allow parents to have oversight of their children’s social media experience. Additionally, in February, Meta rolled out a new system that sends parents alerts if their teens repeatedly try to search for terms related to suicide and self-harm.
With Meta’s appeals looming, the cases could become a testing ground for the limits of Section 230 and whether social media companies can be held financially accountable for the effects their platforms have on younger users.
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