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California launched a salacious opening to its hotly anticipated multistate lawsuit against Meta on Tuesday morning, detailing the tech titan’s focus on its preteen users in language that could have been lifted from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
“You’re going hear how Meta desperately tried to hold on to those kids, how it wanted them so badly, how it wanted them young,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Megan O’Neill told the eight-member civil jury in Oakland federal court.
Her voice dripped with innuendo as she read out the title of a company memo: “The young ones are the best ones.”
“You’re going to hear how Meta tried to hook kids under 13, the youngest users,” she said, previewing internal documents that Meta had unsuccessfully fought to keep out of the blockbuster trial’s opening monologue. “They were looking at tweens. Tweens.”
A federal judge dealt a blow to Meta just days before a blockbuster trial where the company is accused of developing products that are addictive to children.
Meta hit back hard in its own opening statements Tuesday afternoon, saying many of the memos and reports the states used to paint them as rapacious were actually evidence of the company’s efforts to protect its youngest users.
In the case of young children, the law itself prevents Meta from doing more, company lawyers said.
“The law says, if Meta finds people under the age of 13, it can’t keep their data. So it can’t use the very data that would let it make computer models” to exclude them, said Paul W. Schmidt, one of the lawyers representing Meta.
The lawsuit is the latest and largest of this year’s groundbreaking actions against the social media giant — cases that could radically alter how the company operates its platforms and leave Meta on the hook for billions in damages.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey led a coalition of 29 state attorneys general suing Meta over claims the company intentionally designed its platforms to hook children, left in place features it knew to be dangerous, and repeatedly lied to the public about the safety of its products.
The attorneys general also contend the company violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by mining valuable data from thousands of preteens and grade-schoolers — youngsters Meta has made limited efforts to remove or restrict from its platforms, despite terms of service that technically bar them.
Attorneys for Meta and other companies have argued that because social media addiction has not been formally recognized by the medical community, they cannot be held liable when sued over it. But the standard for a diagnosis is changing, and judges have been skeptical of those arguments.
“Meta harvested kids data. That’s how Meta makes money,” O’Neill said. “We’re all from the Bay [Area] here — I think you’ve probably heard the saying, ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.’ Kids are the product.”