Meta accused of covering up children's online safety concerns as landmark social media addiction trial begins
Meta is going to trial over claims it was deliberately designed to be addictive, amid increasing concerns around the safety of young people online
Meta has been accused of covering up concerns about children's safety as it faces a landmark trial in California over social media addiction.
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The tech giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is accused of violating a series of federal and state privacy laws for children - as well as making their platforms deliberately addictive to young people.
The trial, which begins in a federal court in California on Tuesday, is set to run for between six and eight weeks, and will include testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Four US states are seeking billions of dollars from Meta, on behalf of a group of 29 states that filed a lawsuit against the company in 2023.
On the opening day of the trial, whistleblower Arturo Béjar, former senior engineering and product leader at Facebook, said that Instagram had become a "product that uses you" and one that users had lost control over.
Béjar said he was spurred on to return to Facebook in 2019 by his daughter, who received unsoliticited requests for sex and nude photographs aged just 14
"I just block them and they laugh it off and they just move on to the next person," he recounted his daughter telling him.
He told the court that Meta's research was not used "effectively" saying that changes were not made despite the detection of "significant number of harms including harms to young people”.
Opening for Meta, attorney Paul Schmidt told the court: “There can be no dispute that Meta has recognised people struggle, or can struggle, with their use of social media, and has come up with tools to try and address that."
He then pushed back on the idea that social media addiction exists.
The states claim the company violated child privacy regulations, a claim Meta said it “strongly disagrees” with, and say it will prove their “longstanding commitment to supporting young people”.
The trial, which has been likened to the fight against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, has been described by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman as "the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history".
The tech firm is under pressure to change features such as infinite scroll, which allows users to consume limitless content, and is being accused of being addictive.
On top of the trial, Meta faces thousands of lawsuits from authorities over social media addiction and child privacy concerns.