Social media addiction case against Meta can proceed in Mass.
The state’s highest court on Friday said that social media titan Meta can be sued by the commonwealth for making its popular online products Facebook and Instagram too addictive to minors.The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling comes just over two weeks after Meta and Google’s YouTube video service lost a similar case in California. A jury found in favor of a 20-year-old woman who said that she’d become addicted to the companies’ social media services as a child. The jury awarded the woman $6 million in damages. That ruling, which is under appeal, could clear the way for thousands of similar lawsuits in California alone.Today’s SJC ruling allows the continuation of a lawsuit against Meta filed in Suffolk Superior Court by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell in 2023. Similar lawsuits were filed that year by 40 other states and the District of Columbia.Get Starting PointA guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.“Big tech companies like Meta have designed platforms that harm young people, all while downplaying the risks,“ said a statement issued Friday by Campbell. “Today’s victory is a major step in holding these companies accountable for practices that have fueled the youth mental health crisis and put profits over kids.”But some civil liberties organizations have warned that such lawsuits pose a threat to the First Amendment, by exposing companies to punishment merely for providing access to words and images that are protected speech under the US Constitution.Meta argued that the state’s lawsuit was barred by a federal law that shields Internet companies from liability for materials posted by their users. The law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is credited with making social media possible by ensuring that such companies could safely publish a broad range of speech, images and audio without fear of legal repercussions.However, the SJC upheld a lower court’s ruling that Campbell’s lawsuit does not infringe Section 230. “The claims do not seek to impose liability on Meta for information provided by third parties,” Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote for the court. “Instead, the claims allege harm stemming from Meta’s own conduct, either by designing a social media platform that capitalizes on the developmental vulnerabilities of children, or by affirmatively misleading consumers about the safety of the Instagram platform.”In other words, the court held that Meta is not being sued for displaying potentially harmful materials, but for aggressively encouraging young people to view these materials, while deceiving the public about this policy.
