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Meta shows up to court with a losing streak already on the board
Meta is back in a courtroom, and this time it’s not one state suing, it’s twenty nine of them. The federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, and here’s the part that makes it interesting: Meta didn’t walk in undefeated. Back in March a New Mexico jury already tagged them for $375 million over failing to protect kids from predators, and a judge later piled on another $567 million on top of that. A day after the New Mexico verdict, a Los Angeles jury separately found Meta and YouTube liable in a different case. So Meta shows up to the biggest trial yet with the scoreboard already reading 0 and 2.
This one is not about a single teenager, it’s about the whole feed
Every other case so far has been one plaintiff, one story, one bad experience. This trial is different. It’s state attorneys general going after the actual architecture, the infinite scroll, the notifications, the stuff that keeps a fifteen year old opening the app forty times a day. If the states win here, lawyers are already saying it could force every platform to rethink how feeds and alerts get built, not just Meta’s. Nobody has a verdict yet, testimony is expected to run something like six or seven weeks, but the fact that this case survived Meta’s attempt to get it thrown out on free speech grounds is itself a pretty big deal.
Meanwhile everyone else in tech is suddenly very concerned about children
Funny timing. The same week this trial opened, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for Teens, a separate walled off version of the chatbot with content restrictions and parental controls built in. Nobody is pretending this is a coincidence. When your biggest AI competitor is about to spend two months in federal court explaining why kids got hooked on your product, launching a safety mode of your own is just good timing, or good lawyering, depending how cynical you want to be.
And the DOJ just collected its receipt from TikTok
Also that same week, TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit over collecting data from kids under thirteen without parental consent. Not a court loss exactly, a settlement, but the number is real and it lands right in the middle of everything else happening. Three companies, three different flavors of “we got caught,” all in the same seven day stretch.
Why this week actually matters
None of this is Europe passing a law nobody in the US pays attention to. This is US courtrooms and the DOJ, right now, actually putting numbers on the table. Whatever the Oakland jury decides in a few weeks, the direction is already obvious. The teens using these apps in five years are probably going to be looking at something that works pretty differently from what’s on your phone today. Whether that means less addictive or just more lawyered up, we’ll find out.
Sources: NPR, CNBC, Axios, Associated Press, Justice Department, TechCrunch, PBS, Al Jazeera