Jury selection had just gotten underway in Los Angeles circuit court when attorneys announced they had reached a settlement, thus ending the latest mental-health case against Meta before it began.
There remain thousands of other cases yet to come to court, most alleging basically that the plaintiffs, tweens and teen-agers, became addicted to social media because the platforms were intentionally designed to be habit-forming.
The latest case involved two young people — S.J., a 16-year-old girl from Illinois — and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi. Meta settled with S.J. days before the trial began while K.D.B. held out until the case had reached the courthouse steps, as the popular saying has it.
Often, when a defendant settles before trial, it’s because it thinks its chance of prevailing at trial are not overwhelming. Meta has maintained, in this and other cases, that its platforms are not addictive and say they have taken preventive measures to make them safe for young people without stifling their ability to express themselves.
This was just the second major case to go to trial in California, where defendants often fear that juries are harsher than elsewhere. The first case ended in March, when a Los Angeles jury found Meta liable for $4.2 million in damages and Google for $1.8 million.
Earlier in October, a judge in New Mexico fined Meta $25 billion after a jury found it had misled Facebook users about data privacy and hate speech.
Both Meta and Google have promised in various court cases to make their sites less habituating. But can they really do that without draining the life out of the apps and making them less attractive to teens?
The answer requires separating what makes social media interactive without being compulsive, if that’s possible.
In the multibillion-dollar case with the 48 states, Meta mostly added limits around existing apps. It set a two-hour daily cap for teens using Facebook and Instagram, banned use between midnight and 6 a.m., shut down notifications during school hours and added warning prompts after 15 minutes of usage and agreed to hide some “like” counts.
According to the Associated Press, there are also features that would turn off video replay and shut off automated switching to videos chosen by Meta, although those features may be opt-in in some cases. Google already turns off YouTube’s autoplay by default for teens 13 to 17 but allows them to turn it back on manually.
Still being worked out are changes that would try to limit passive viewing. Examples might include a “you’re all caught up” marker after a certain point, requiring users to tap for the next video rather than relying on autoplay, and limiting the home feed to posts by followed accounts and friends.
Most of this can now be accomplished by parents if they dive deeply into the settings for the platforms their offspring use. Of course, human ingenuity being what it is, there probably already is a way to kids to turn everything back on.