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Meta faces 'astronomical' consequences as legal fight reaches critical moment
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Opening arguments begin Tuesday in Oakland federal court in a 2023 case brought by a coalition of 29 state attorneys general accusing Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to foster addictive behavior among children and teenagers. California Attorney General Rob Bonta is co-leading the case, with lawyers from California, Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky arguing it. The states allege violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and state consumer-protection laws; Meta says the claims are unsubstantiated and the requested financial penalties are disproportionate. The states seek nationwide injunctions that could require Meta to delete personal data collected from children under 13, along with algorithms and models trained on that data, if COPPA violations are found. For state-law violations, they seek removal of features including infinite scroll, autoplay, ephemeral content, beauty filters and engagement-optimized algorithms. Meta’s attorneys have put potential damages as high as $1.4 trillion, while state lawyers told Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that about $200 billion is more likely. The trial follows a New Mexico ruling requiring Meta to pay nearly $1 billion and make child-safety changes, which Meta plans to appeal. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said a California judgment could be far larger. Meta derives 98% of its revenue from online advertising and is using ad revenue to fund AI investment projected to cost as much as $145 billion this year.
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The AI-relevant slice of the discussion centered less on Meta’s broader corporate governance than on a proposed remedy: stronger AI-based age assurance, including a model intended to identify users likely to be under 13. Several commenters’ hostility toward Meta made them broadly receptive to harsh consequences for a platform they believe has repeatedly harmed young users through engagement-driven design. In that view, ordinary promises to improve are no longer credible, so technical safeguards for minors are part of the price of continued operation. The sharp objection was that age-prediction requirements could turn a case against Meta into a precedent for stripping anonymity from the wider internet. A commenter read the mandate not as a narrow child-safety measure but as pressure to infer or verify everyone’s age, creating infrastructure that advertisers, platforms, and governments could exploit. Another concern was procedural: privacy rules can limit the data a company may collect, yet regulators may later accuse it of deliberately ignoring information and demand more invasive detection. The thread therefore did not debate whether Meta’s systems can build such models; it debated whether deploying them to police age solves youth harm without normalizing pervasive surveillance.
The dispute is whether forcing Meta to build AI age-prediction systems is a necessary response to harms to minors or the opening move toward universal identity surveillance. Supporters of severe punishment see Meta as having exhausted the benefit of the doubt; critics argue that vague compliance mandates will let regulators demand ever more intrusive age inference after the fact.
- Concern: Mandating AI age prediction to protect children risks converting every online account into an identity-assurance target, hollowing out the anonymous internet in the process.
- Concern: Vague claims that platforms should have detected minors invite post-hoc liability while privacy restrictions limit the very data used to train and operate age-assurance models.