OAKLAND: With billions of users around the world, Meta will defend itself against allegations of harming children in a new trial in the United States this week, which experts describe as social media’s big tobacco moment.
After a coalition of states sued Meta in 2023 for allegedly designing addictive features for kids in its apps, four states were selected to represent their claims: California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.
Top prosecutors of those states now aim to prove in federal court that Meta deliberately made Facebook and Instagram addictive for children.
Meta “strongly disagrees with these allegations” and is “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people”, a spokesperson told AFP, adding that the company has “listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement”.
Although it’s not the first lawsuit that seeks to hold a social media company accountable for its impact on mental health and safety, it could become one of the most consequential.
“It really feels like tobacco in the 1990s,” Vincent Joralemon, a director at Berkeley’s Life Sciences Law and Policy Center, told AFP.
While these cases about social media harms revolve around the intersection of technology and addiction, the legal argument in this case against Meta centres on its business practices, just like when the federal government sued tobacco companies around three decades ago, Joralemon said.
By the early 1990s, decades of research showed that tobacco use caused health problems such as cancer, and eventually additional investigations revealed how the industry deliberately downplayed, and even concealed, the harmful impacts of its products.
