Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

Aza and Tristan break down the significance of the recent verdicts against Meta and Google.

Transcript

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products.

Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of addictive design. In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like to take the stand for tech justice, what the companies knew and when, and why the real significance of these cases lies not in the dollar amounts but in the injunctive relief still to come.

In the 1990s, a series of landmark cases held Big Tobacco accountable for the harms of their toxic products. This could be that moment for social media.

Aza Raskin: When Mr. Raskin went to Santa Fe, I had to buy a suit. But this case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez back in December 2023. And what’s significant is that instead of trying to tackle this via Section 230, the Attorney General went after Meta for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Trade Practices Act for failing to protect children on their apps, Facebook, and Instagram from abuse and exploitation. Essentially, the New Mexico Attorney General did a kind of undercover operation where they created fake profiles of underage users, and then saw what experience they had on the platform. What they found was that these underage users were immediately flooded with really horrific inappropriate exploitation and abuse stuff, like sexual grooming.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, predators being shown body dysmorphics of thinspiration kinds of content. Essentially, the worst kinds of stuff, even if the kids are underage, Facebook just shows it to them. What’s important here is that this shows that Facebook knew what they were doing, and did it anyway, and they did it in search of engagement of user numbers. So, this is willful.

Aza Raskin: The jury didn’t have to deliberate for very long. They deliberated for just two days, and they found Meta maximally guilty. The jury found them the maximum amount they’re allowed to find them, which amounted to $375 million in civil damages. This is just a cost of doing business. What’s much more interesting is that they are going for injunctive relief. The court can now go back and tell Meta that they have to change their product in specific ways.

Aza Raskin: I’m not exactly an expert on this, but essentially for every person in the lawsuit, the maximum amount of damages that the jury can ask for is $5,000, and that’s what they asked for, and that’s what they got.

Aza Raskin: Just to put $375 million into perspective for what that means for a company like Meta, which is to say not very much, Meta is offering new employees to their superintelligence lab, something like $300 million. So, this fee is equivalent to one person’s signing bonus. If courts decide, say, that an appropriate remedy is adding a very small amount of time delay to page loads, we’re talking like a hundred milliseconds, this is less than, or around human reaction time.

Aza Raskin: It’s just adding a little bit of friction at the point of use which drops the number of overall users by some really actually significant amount. So, this gives courts a fine grain tool for saying, depending on how bad Facebook has acted, they can dial up the friction a little bit, just the amount of time that it takes for a page to load. This is really, really exciting because this is going through the court system, which can move quickly, and ongoingly.

Aza Raskin: Well, first, to say a lot of going to court is hurry up, and wait. Get down there, get to court, and then you’re put, or I was put into a little side room with no windows, and just flickering overhead, fluorescent light. So, I was testifying from my own experience about my invention of infinite scroll.

Aza Raskin: The cross-examination was intense, and very annoying, and it would happen every three to four minutes during my testifying. Facebook had a 2018 funding deck of ours that they tried really hard to keep from getting admitted as evidence, but our side prevailed. In the end, you could just see the jury was very skeptical of Facebook, and Facebook had to fall back in their cross-examination of me.

Aza Raskin: My feeling sitting up there was a kind of relief, and an excitement because it’s just so obvious, but the real significant moment is what kind of injunctive reliefs the court gives to Meta, and that has the chance to be incredibly significant. This gives precedent for Facebook being found accountable.

Aza Raskin: This lawsuit might end up being too little too late except for this injunctive relief, which means that it could be enough too late. The phrase that came up in court again and again was too little, too late. This just takes a little bit of latency, just like a little bit of friction. It gives you your agency back.