In Los Angeles a new page of legal history has been written: a court has convicted Meta and Google to compensate a twenty-year-old woman for 3 million dollars. According to the accusation, the use of social media caused her forms of anxiety and depression due to an addiction comparable to that of smoking or gambling. In the same case, TikTok and Snapchat instead they avoided the trial by reaching an out-of-court financial agreement with the young woman.
Nearly 900 miles away, in the city of Santa Fé, New Mexicois always Meta at the center of a historical process. In this case, the legal action was brought by the State itself, which accused the company of Mark Zuckerberg of having given greater importance to profit than to the safety of children, exposing them to inappropriate content and online risks. For this trial a much heavier sentence arrived: 375 million dollars in compensation.
Although the figures represent only a tiny fraction of Meta’s market value (around 0.00025% of its capitalization), the symbolic and legal value is very high. For the first time, in fact, a jury has viewed internal documents that would prove companies’ awareness of the risks to minors, and the theory according to which social media can be considered products harmful to public health has been validated.
Meta has already announced that it will appeal, but the path seems to be clear. Many observers compare what is happening today to what happened at the end of the twentieth century with the tobacco multinationals: a wave of lawsuits that could force social media giants to pay billions in compensation and much more restrictive rules for operating on the market.
