The awards in verdicts against two of the world’s social media giants amount to just a fraction of the companies’ wealth. But Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said these rulings against Meta and Google could signal a larger trend.
The Los Angeles verdict found Meta and YouTube were to blame for a 20-year-old woman’s depression and anxiety.
“I was frankly shocked at the magnitude of it,” Haugen told Here & Now’s Robin Young. “She got $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive, which if you worked it out across the United States, if less than 1% of kids in the states were impacted, that would be over $1 trillion. It’s huge.”
3 questions with Frances Haugen
Do you think there will be other lawsuits?
“Just in Southern California. Remember, this is a state-level lawsuit, not a federal one. There’s 1,600 plaintiffs just in Los Angeles, as we have trials warming up in Northern California. The multistate lawsuit, think like the tobacco lawsuit, is gearing up later this year. School districts are suing. It’s going to be huge.”
How does Facebook change?
“So that was the core of this court case. You know, over the course of multiple weeks, a jury of everyday citizens got to listen to real Facebook research in how they ran experiments to make their product safer. This is things like turning off notifications late at night, turning off notifications in the middle of the school day, intentionally alerting users, or allowing users to reduce how much negative content they see if they want to.
“They can do it. And that’s what the jurors heard. And the reason why they gave so much in damages was that Facebook had lots of tools in their tool chest, but they chose not to use them.”
How do you get around those content immunity laws?
“Part of why these lawsuits are so important is that up until now, every time anyone has complained about damages from Facebook, they’ve held up this law called Section 230. What changed about this lawsuit is they said, ‘Let’s not look at content. Sure, you have immunity for content. Let’s look at how you designed the products,’ and what the judge ruled at the beginning, and why we had this case at all was that you are responsible for the decisions you make in how you build digital products, just like if you were building a car.”
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Ashley Locke produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Scotto also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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