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After months of hype and mere hours in front of the jury, California’s blockbuster suit against Meta ended on Wednesday with a sweeping $17-billion settlement and 130 pages of promised changes to the platforms.
Witnesses at the blink-and-you-miss-it Oakland trial echoed much of what had already been heard this year by juries in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Nashville.
But the evidence presented during the proceedings still shed new light on social media’s seedy underbelly.
Internal documents show Meta knew for years that its youngest users were the most likely to be targeted by bullies, extortionists and sexual predators.
Arturo Béjar, an ex-Meta employee, described girls being threatened with rape, boys whose feeds were flooded with snuff films, and middle schoolers inundated with sexually explicit images. Vulnerable children were algorithmically force-fed images of starving bodies and hanging teddy bears, the former engineer said while testifying for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
From Australia to India, other countries have also been cracking down on the use of social media by teens.
Yet the company excluded the majority of those harms from its public reports, designing its metrics so that many of the worst encounters were never captured.
“Whenever Mark Zuckerberg was asked about harm, he would immediately start talking about ‘prevalence,’” Béjar said, using Meta’s term for violations of its company policy. “We found the harm was 100 to 400 times what was being accounted for by prevalence.”
“The body falling and being cut at the last frame, or bones being broken, that’s content people say is violent and distressing but does not fall in [prevalence],” Béjar said. “You experience the full harm of the video even though you don’t see the thing that violates policy.”
That testimony came just after opening statements Aug. 18 . A week later, former Meta data scientist George Volichenko told jurors he and his team were forbidden from making safety settings the default for teens amid fears it would shrink the amount of time that young people spent on the app — the project’s stated goal.
During his trial testimony, Instagram’s director of product design, Francesco Fogu, reviewed an internal chat where he groused that company lawyers had scrubbed key data about teen exposure to suicide, self-injury, and eating disorder content from a presentation to top brass, over worries those executives might later be compelled to testify about them.
“At this point I feel we are purposefully omitting stats that could help them properly assess the situation,” Fogu wrote in the July 2023 exchange, where he noted children were more than twice as likely as adults to be served dangerous content and suffer bullying and harassment.
“These are pretty strong and could change the outcome of the discussion,” he wrote. “Does legal not want us to share them at all?”
