Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products.

Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of addictive design. In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like to take the stand for tech justice, what the companies knew and when, and why the real significance of these cases lies not in the dollar amounts but in the injunctive relief still to come.

In the 1990s, a series of landmark cases held Big Tobacco accountable for the harms of their toxic products. This could be that moment for social media.

Tristan Harris: Hey, everyone, this is Tristan Harris, and welcome to Your Undivided Attention. Today we’re going to be talking about two verdicts that were handed down against big tech companies in two major lawsuits. One was in California where Meta, and Google were found to have been negligent, and failed to warn users about the addictive design of their products. And that trial involved a young woman who alleged these products contributed to her deteriorating mental health, and body dysmorphia. And in the other case, in New Mexico, Meta was found liable for failing to protect children from exploitation, and abuse on their apps. And actually our very own Aza Raskin of this podcast testified at the trial. Hey, Aza.

Aza Raskin: Hey, Tristan.

Tristan Harris: So, we all know in the 1990s, there was a moment when there was a series of big cases holding the big tobacco companies accountable for the harms of their toxic products. And we really feel like this might be the big tobacco moment for social media, and represents a real opportunity not just to hold these companies accountable with fines, but actual injunctive relief, and design changes that would create a better future. So, today I wanted to take a moment to talk about the New Mexico trial because you were involved in it, and because it involved a lot of real details about how the companies operated underneath the hood, how they thought about user safety beyond the verdict, and the damages.

Tristan Harris: So, Aza, you went to New Mexico. Tell us what happened here when Mr. Raskin went to Santa Fe.

Aza Raskin: When Mr. Raskin went to Santa Fe, I had to buy a suit. But this case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez back in December 2023. And what’s significant is that instead of trying to tackle this via Section 230, which if listeners remember is the rule that says that platforms are not responsible for the content that users post, instead the Attorney General went after Meta for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Trade Practices Act for failing to protect children on their apps, Facebook, and Instagram from abuse, and exploitation. So, essentially what the New Mexico Attorney General did was a kind of undercover operation where they created fake profiles of underage users, and then saw what experience they had on the platform. And what they found was that these underage users were immediately flooded with really horrific inappropriate exploitation, and abuse stuff, like sexual grooming, that kind of thing.

Tristan Harris: So, this is basically, this is the New Mexico AG. They create a fake profile. They say, “I’m 12 years old”, and they just simulate that. And then immediately they watches those accounts get inundated with all these messages from predators, basically.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, predators being shown body dysmorphics of thinspiration kinds of content. Essentially, the worst kinds of stuff, even if the kids are underage, Facebook just shows it to them. And what’s important here is that this shows that Facebook knew what they were doing, and did it anyway, and they did it in search of engagement of user numbers. So, this is willful.

Tristan Harris: And so what was the verdict of this trial?

Aza Raskin: Yeah, so the jury actually didn’t have to deliberate for very long. They deliberated for just two days, and they found Meta maximally guilty. So, this sort of shows you the limits of laws it stands, because while the jury find them the maximum amount they’re allowed to find them, they’re only amounted to $375 million in civil damages. And that’s just not a big deal to these big companies. And so what’s much more interesting is that they are going for injunctive relief. And that means the court can now go back, and tell Meta that they have to change their product in specific ways, and they can force Meta to change their product in specific ways that might really hurt engagement. And so this can really matter. It’s not just a cost of doing business, this can be something more existential.

Tristan Harris: And if you could explain for listeners, why is it that $375 million is the maximum amount that they can do?

Aza Raskin: I’m not exactly an expert on this, but essentially for every person in the lawsuit, the maximum amount of damages that the jury can ask for is $5,000, and that’s what they asked for, and that’s what they got.

Tristan Harris: Maybe it’s just important to back up, and just notice that for listeners, $375 million is just a cost of doing business. If I’m Meta, I just am knowingly printing money in the meantime for many, many, many years, billions of dollars, billions, and billions, and billions of dollars. Knowing that a fine like this is coming, and when it comes in, and it’s only $375 million, I don’t have to treat this as a fine. I can treat this as just a fee. And I think why the injunctive relief is so important is because if you actually have forced design changes, like for example, maybe you can’t autoplay videos anymore, or maybe youth accounts just simply can’t receive messages from people across the network. I don’t know. There’s a lot of changes that could be made here that would lead to a different outcome. And so that seems like the next most significant part of the trial.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, that’s right. And just to put $375 million into perspective for what that means for a company like Meta, which is to say not very much, Meta is offering new employees to their superintelligence lab, something like $300 million. So, the fee that they’re doing is the equivalent of one person’s signing bonus. So, you can see this really doesn’t matter in a dollar amount. And that’s why the injunctive relief changing the product... One example we’ve talked about on this podcast, Tristan, just on the idea of a latency sanction, or a latency tax that we know that latency, or rather how fast a pace loads is directly correlated to retention, and engagement. So, if courts decide, say, that an appropriate remedy is adding a very small amount of time delay to page loads, we’re talking like a hundred milliseconds, 200 milliseconds, this is less than, or around human reaction time.

It’s really subperceptual, but it gives users a little bit of that feeling of sitting on an airplane with bad wifi, and you go to Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, and it loads a little slowly, and you decide to do something else. It’s that. It’s just adding a little bit of friction at the point of use, which drops the number of overall users by some really actually significant amount. This is Amazon finding for every hundred milliseconds their page loads slower, they lose 1% of revenue. And so this give court a fine grain tool for saying, depending on how bad Facebook has acted, they can dial up the friction a little bit, just the amount of time that it takes for a page to load. And because Facebook’s core incentive is number of users is engagement, this gives courts a tool to directly punch back at the business model of engagement, punch them where it hurts.

And then as Facebook starts to do better as their numbers go up, as the harms go down, you can lower over time the amount of friction that’s being added. And this is really, really exciting. This is not going through the legislative system, which is slow, and probably is not going to give us anything. This is going through the court system, which can move quickly, and ongoingly. And that’s the opportunity that sits in front of it. That’s why we think it can actually be the big tobacco moment, and not just a little risk slap fine.

Tristan Harris: I just want to reinforce for listeners not to sort of toot a horn here, but all of this was predicted by the incentives that Aza, and I laid out in 2013. And I want you to really, really hear that because if you know the incentives, you could understand, and predict all of these behaviors, this totally avoidable societal catastrophe. And sadly, we had to wait until this lawsuit for some of those changes to happen. And my deep hope is that lawsuits like this help further the kind of immune system of society, and culture to get more ahead of AI rather than wait until the lawsuit happens a decade later.

So, let’s just talk a little bit more about the trial. And one of the critical things about it is the discovery process. They looked at Meta’s internal documents. So, I remember actually going on the television show, CBS this morning, which is one of the biggest American television shows. And they asked me a question about Facebook making this change to make communication between people end-to-end encrypted. And they said, “Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?” And I said, “Well, one of the reasons that I think Facebook is doing this is because if they encrypt messages, then they don’t actually know what’s being sent between people, and they’re not liable if they can’t look.” And I suspected that a lot of that had to do with trying to avoid liability.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, that’s indeed exactly what Facebook was going for. In 2019, Meta’s head of policy, Monika Bickert, said when she was talking about it internally that quote, “We are about to do a bad thing as a company that this is so irresponsible.” And their head of global safety in an email had said that Facebook allows pedophiles to find each other, and kids. So, it’s very clear that Facebook was making a cynical decision to encrypt to avoid liability versus taking a moral stand to do something right. And they just encryption washed it. So, we get a lot of this behavior of if we don’t look, we can’t see it, we can’t be doing wrong.

And even when we do look, we’re not going to do anything. So, a couple of the ones that really hit me was 2018, the VP of integrity, Guy Rosen at that point sent an email internally that said, “We know of the scale of the problem that there are a whole bunch of direct messages being sent to our underage kids for grooming, and solicitation, but we’re not doing anything.” Just a year later in 2019, another VP emailed Zuckerberg personally saying, “I just need 24 additional staff members to study this kind of problematic use, and build tools.” And the answer came back, “Nope, we’re not going to change anything.”

Tristan Harris: From the CFO, Susan Li

Aza Raskin: From the CFO specifically, yeah, reporting on behalf of Zuckerberg.

Tristan Harris: And as I read in one of the documents, in a 2020 chat between Meta employees, one Meta employee asked the other, quote, “What specifically are we doing for child grooming?” And the other Meta employee responded, quote, “Somewhere between zero, and negligible. Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half of the year.”

Aza Raskin: And then in 2021, our now friend, Arturo Bejar, who led product safety at Facebook, he sent an email to Zuckerberg directly saying, “Hey, the company was deeply undercounting unwanted sexual advances towards minors.” And Zuckerberg didn’t even respond. And this all just shows, so you’re like, okay, so Facebook knew, Facebook knew, Facebook knew. And then in 2022, what did Facebook do? They completely slashed their integrity, and responsibility team, and eliminated a hundred positions. So, Facebook was taking the viewpoint of the more we know, the more reliable. Let’s just get rid of the problem by getting rid of the people pointing at the problem.

Tristan Harris: So, Aza, maybe just to take people inside the courtroom for a moment, what was it actually like? There you are with the jury, with Meta’s lawyers sitting across from you, I’m sure with their eyebrows furrowed, and angry at you. What was it like to be in that room?

Aza Raskin: Yeah. Well, first to say a lot of going to court is hurry up, and wait. Get down there, get to court, and then you’re put, or I was put into a little side room with no windows, and just flickering overhead, fluorescent light. And then you just have to wait until you’re called up onto the stand. And actually one of Facebook’s tactics was to drag out the cross-examination of the people in front of me. And what the lawyers from our side said is that Facebook was intentionally trying to make it so that I couldn’t testify by running down the clock, and make it so that I just would have to come back day after day after day, which was interesting. I didn’t know that that was a tactic, but it is. The other really interesting thing, so you get in there, you sit down in the stand, and you are talking to the jury, but I was called as technically what’s known as a fact witness, and not an expert witness.

So, I was testifying from my own experience about my invention of infinite scroll. And so that means anytime that I would talk about everything that we know about, Tristan, like the effects of incentives, the Facebook lawyer would say “Objection”, the lawyers would approach the bench, and they would turn on a white noise machine, which the jurors hated so that we couldn’t even hear what the-

Tristan Harris: They turn on a white noise machine?

Aza Raskin: Yeah, they turn on a white noise machine so that the lawyers can talk with the judge about whatever it is they’re talking about, and I can’t hear, and the jury can’t hear. And it’s very annoying, and it would happen every three to four minutes during my testifying. In fact, anytime that I’d start to get on a roll, Meta would call for this kind of thing, and they’d go up, and they’d try to break the flow. So, there’s just a lot of tactics, and counter-tactics happening at the object level even before we get into the content. Just one of the other interesting moments is it turns out that Facebook has been tracking Center of Humane technology for a very long time.

Tristan Harris: Oh, really?

Aza Raskin: And actually, yeah, what was discovered in discovery is they had a 2018 funding deck of ours that you had wrote, and I wrote, and Randy wrote.

Tristan Harris: Wow.

Aza Raskin: And Facebook tried really hard to keep that funding deck from getting admitted as evidence, but our side prevailed. And there’s a great moment where they had me read out our original funding deck where it could say things that I couldn’t say on the stand about what the effects against teams were against democracy was, because I was just reading a document, and Facebook used their white noise generator many times during that.

Tristan Harris: Wow.

Aza Raskin: But in the end, you could just see, as I described what infinite scroll was, that even I, as the inventor who know exactly how it works, and how it removes stopping cues to get you to use the product more than I could really see that land in the jury. And you just see that in this case, the jury was very skeptical of Facebook, and Facebook had to fall back in their cross-examination of me. There’s a funny moment when their lawyer was trying to pin me down, and they said, “So, you’re the inventor of infinite scroll, right?” I’m like, “Yes.” And they’re like, “Do you know that just a couple months before you invented it, somebody else had published a blog post about inventing infinite scroll. So, you’re not the real inventor of infinite scroll, right?” And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s sort of great actually. I get to absolve a little bit of my guilt.” And you could see it deflating out of them as their line of attack didn’t work. But that’s the level that Facebook was resorting to because they didn’t really have an argument.

Tristan Harris: They don’t have an argument.

Aza Raskin: Yeah. And honestly, my feeling sitting up there, and it’s intense being cross-examined like that, you have to just breathe, and remember why you’re there.

Tristan Harris: So, Aza, just curious, what was your personal reaction hearing this verdict?

Aza Raskin: The feeling was twofold. One was a kind of relief, and an excitement because one, it’s just so obvious, but to have New Mexico, and now the case in LA both just hand out the obvious verdict of Facebook being guilty, and having known that they’re making indicative products, that’s awesome. That’s a moment to be celebrated. And of course, the other side of it is being like, well, if it just stays at the $375 million fine, then all of this doesn’t really matter that much. We have to get the next step, the injunctive changes to product.

Tristan Harris: So, that kind of brings us to the last question, which is where is going from here? What’s the next step?

Aza Raskin: Well, of course, Meta is going to appeal, and the case in California as well. So, we’re going to have to wait, and see what happens there. But the real significant moment is what kind of injunctive reliefs, what kinds of penalties the court gives to Meta, and that has the chance to be incredibly significant. And it’s very important that this gives precedent for Facebook being found accountable. It gives precedent for ways that the courts can route around Section 230. And it is incredibly important because for the first time we might have product level changes that can actually affect engagement.

Tristan Harris: For those who are interested, we have covered all of this before for the last decade. If you go back to our early interviews with Francis Haugen, if you go back to our interview with Arturo Bejar, we’ve been talking about these issues for such a long time. What gives me hope is that this verdict is finally happening. This lawsuit is coming due, and real accountability is happening. And we just hope that the next move of the court case with these injunctive relief actually makes design changes. So, the material reality that our kids are living in, and their psychological environment is not dictated by this kind of cynical behavior.

Aza Raskin: Yeah. The phrase that came up in court again, and again, and again was too little, too late. Facebook could say, “We’re adding stopping cues.” You’re scrolling a lot, and I’ll say, “Take a break trying to capture people in a hot versus cold states.” Again, and again, expert after expert, get up, and just be like, “Too little, too late, too little, too late.” And this lawsuit might end up being too little too late except for this injunctive relief, which means that it could be enough too late.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. I hope that they include in that no autoplaying videos across the board that would just make autoplaying videos opt in. Suddenly all the brainrot economy just goes down by at least 50% overnight if there’s no autoplaying videos across, not just one app, but all of them.

Aza Raskin: That’s exactly it. Yeah. This just takes a little bit of latency, just like a little bit of friction. It gives you your agency back.

Tristan Harris: Well, Aza, I also just want to thank you for testifying. Thank you for doing this. It’s so important. I really hope that this moves forward, and onward, and upward to the next things.

Aza Raskin: It’s a true honor to be there.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Further reading on the New Mexico trial

Further reading on the California trial

Arturo Béjar’s “Broken Promises” Report

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

What if we had fixed social media?

Jonathan Haidt On How to Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis

Social Media Victims Lawyer Up with Laura Marquez-Garrett

Real Social Media Solutions, Now with Frances Haugen