A New Mexico jury ruled Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.
The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case.
Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew about about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.
The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.
Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million.
$375m?
$375 fucking million?
For how many hundreds of millions of children did Meta harm, and to pay a fucking pittance. Fucking CSAM is a slap on the wrist for the rich.
Which is why I’m all for killing anyone who enables this shit. I’m so fucking tired of being manipulated by the rich, who’s causing harm to millions of people, but as long as they get more money, the don’t care.
Well guess what: I don’t care about you, and I would happily become a martyr if I’d have the chance of taking you down with me!
I know this comment will be deleted due to “community guidelines”, but here it is: kill 👏 the 👏 rich👏!
We need to enact age verification laws to protect the kids tho!
Who’re we protecting them from? Apparently not the people doing it.
I guess the crime was worth it for Meta
Meta sucks, but not for the reasons claimed by the state. It’s bad for everyone’s mental health, and the best fix shouldn’t be apology money and undoing end-to-end encryption but restructuring with robust parental controls and making it so it doesn’t constantly encourage you to interact with strangers.
Well that law is going to change fast
While a win, it’s pocket change for Meta, who will be further disincentivized to fix the problem when even a loss is so cheap.
Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That’s less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.
Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news.
Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta’s platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.
Seriously need to up the maximum fine
Seriously. When downloading an MP3 carries a fine of $30,000 to as much as $150,000 per download, damages of a measly $5,000 maximum for facilitating, enabling and even encouraging child exploitation is beyond insulting.
You’re comparing federal and state laws is part of the reason. Feds carry the big stick
…But not X/Grok for actually creating CSAM?
I’ll take the win against Zuck, maybe the Elongated Muskrat should be worried?
Were they part of the case? Did this trial start before that even happened?
Your sentiment makes sense. But what you wrote is illogical when you consider the timelines.
AFAIK, lawsuits about grok were just filed in the past few weeks.
I see where you’re coming from. It’s not really illogical though — it logically follows that if one did the same thing as the other but worse (use AI to seduce kids vs use AI to generate CSAM), then if the weaker one is found illegal, the stronger one should be found more illegal.
It might be a non sequitur though (“it does not follow”) because, as you say, Twitter wasn’t involved in that case.
Still worth mentioning.
My local news is full of people who were found to be looking at CSAM and the years of prison time they’re getting. Basically they were found to have naked pictures of kids, or pictures/video of people abusing kids on their phone or computer. But they haven’t actually harmed any real kids, IRL. Meanwhile, western politicians are actually doing the thing and not being punished. I don’t know if Trump has any CSAM on his phone (probably not), but he’s gone to a private island to abuse minors, and so have a bunch of other people. One in the UK got stripped of his titles, but still lives a life of luxury. I wanna say “make it make sense” but it seems to me that it’s not doing the thing that is punishable by prison, it’s having the proof someone else did the thing. And that’s sick. But that’s the world we live in.
Exactly. Justice is not fast food. It takes more than a few weeks or even months to go through the steps.
Yup. If that case is over within two years it’s because of shenanigans
It’s entirely likely several teams of lawyers were waiting for this ruling to create precedent.
Jury trials do not create precedent. Think about it. You’re a judge or lawyer. Are you going to leave something as incredibly consequential as precedent up to 12 untrained hill folk?
NOTE TO SELF to get out of jury duty next time wear butt flap overalls
I love seeing Meta take it in the ass, but this seems like it could be a building block for future age/ID verification laws.
Ah. Of course it’s New Mexico. Don’t know, but I’d bet there’s a statutory cap on judgments. Like around $5,000 a criminal violation, regardless what it is.
We should be glad that tech comoanies are finally getting some warmth on the arse about this.
Dear reader, I’m not sure if you follow Chris Hansen’s podcast, but he currently has a series in regards to the ongoing investigations into Roblox and their alleged and apparent housing + protection of pedophiles.
That’s really awesome. Go Hanson!
