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Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, Monday, March thirtieth,
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twenty twenty six. I want to start today with a number,
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actually two numbers. Three hundred eighty one million dollars. That's
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what two American juries ordered Meta to pay last week
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for what they found was a deliberate pattern of harming children.
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Three hundred and seventy five million dollars in New Mexico
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for enabling child sexual predators on its platforms. Six million
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dollars in Los Angeles for engineering addiction in a young
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girl starting when she was six years old. Here's the
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other number, one point five trillion dollars. That's Meta's current
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market cap. Take a moment with that. The jury found
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that this company deliberately designed products it knew were harming children,
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concealed what it knew, and kept building anyway. And the
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price for all of that, two separate verdicts, two separate states,
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is three hundred and eighty one million dollars. That's zero
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point zero two five percent of what the company is worth.
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One of Kaylee's attorneys stood before the jury in Los
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Angeles holding a jar of M and ms. He said,
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each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of Meta's value.
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He scooped out a handful. He said, that wouldn't make
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a difference. He scooped out two handfuls. Still wouldn't make
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a difference. Then he cracked open one blue eminem with
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his teeth. Said that was roughly two hundred million dollars.
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Said they do not want to feel the pain for
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what they did. He was right, and a jury still
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gave them the blue eminem. Today we're covering everything, both verdicts,
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what the trials revealed, and what it actually means for
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the two thousand families still waiting in line behind Kaylee.
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This is the episode we've been building towards since February.
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Get into it. Segment one. Who is Kaylee and what
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did they do to her? We covered this trial on
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February nineteenth, when Zuckerberg took the stand. Go find that
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episode if you need the foundation. Today is the verdict episode,
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So I'm going to give you the context you need
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and then get into what the jury decided and why
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it matters. Her name is Kaylee. She's twenty years old.
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She's from Chico, California. In court document, she's identified as
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KGM because the claims relate to incidents that occurred while
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she was a minor, and for a long time, the
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only public name attached to this case was a set
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of initials. She is not a set of initials. She
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is a person, and her story starts at age six.
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That's when Kaylee first started using YouTube, six years old.
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At age nine, she was on Instagram. By sixteen, she
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was spending more than sixteen hours a day on the platform.
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She described getting an emotional rush from likes and notifications
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that kept her glued. She developed depression, body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts.
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She spent hours using beauty filters, digital tools that altered
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her face to look more like the images she was
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being fed by an algorithm that had learned with extraordinary
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precision exactly what would make her feel inadequate enough to
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keep scrolling. She told the jury she did not experience
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the negative feelings associated with her body dys morphia diagnosis
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before she began using social media. The platforms came first.
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The damage followed Meta's defense, and I want you to
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hear this clearly because it matters, was that Kaylee's mental
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health issues were caused by a difficult home life. Emotional abuse, bullying,
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learning disabilities. Social media wasn't the cause, they argued, She
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came to the platforms already struggling and used them as
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a coping mechanism. Look, I'm going to be honest with you.
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Even if we accepted that framing and the jury didn't,
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it doesn't do what Meta thinks it does. It actually
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makes it worse. Because Kayley's lawyers address this directly. If
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you know that vulnerable children are the most susceptible to addiction,
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and you design a product that optimizes for that susceptibility,
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and then you defend yourself by saying the most vulnerable
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kids were already vulnerable, that's not a defense. That's a
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confession of motive. We know from their own internal research.
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Their own documents entered into evidence that Meta conducted a
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study called Project Mist that surveyed one thousand teens and
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their parents. Two findings. First, children who had experienced trauma
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and stress were particularly vulnerable to addiction. Second, parental controls
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made little impact. They knew the kids most likely to
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get hooked were the ones already suffering. They knew parents
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couldn't stop it, and they kept optimizing the algorithm anyway.
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That's not a mistake, that's a choice. What the trial revealed.
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The design features at the center of this case aren't abstract.
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They have names, and they have purposes. Infinite scroll, the
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feed that never ends so you never have a natural
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stopping point. Algorithmic recommendations, the system that doesn't show you
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what you ask for, but what will keep you engaged,
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longest auto play videos, beauty filters, notification systems engineered to
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create the same dopamine loop as a slot machine. Plaintiff's
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attorney Mark Lanier showed the jury internal company documents, emails
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where a Meta employee said Instagram is like a drug
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and employees are basically pushers. Internal Google documents that compared
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some company products to a casino. These comparisons weren't made
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by critics or journalists or congressional committees. They were made
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by employees inside the companies, written down, saved, and event
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actually introduced into evidence in a Los Angeles courtroom. Mark
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Zuckerberg sat in that courtroom on February eighteenth and testified
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under oath, the first time he'd ever answered questions about
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child safety in front of a jury. He acknowledged four
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million children under the age of thirteen were on Instagram,
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a platform whose rules say you have to be thirteen
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to sign up. When asked how children were getting on
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the platform, he said, there are a meaningful number of
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people who lie about their age to use our services.
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That was his answer. People lie, not we failed to verify.
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Not we knew and didn't act people lie. Instagram had
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Adam Mussi testified that he doesn't believe people can be
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clinically addicted to social media. He used the phrase problematic use,
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spending more time on the platform than you feel good about.
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And here's the sentence that I keep coming back to
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from his testimony. He said, it's not good for the
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company over the long run to make decisions that profit
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for us but are poor for people's well being. Not
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good for children, not wrong, not harmful, not good for
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the company. That is how these executives think about the
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children on their platforms as a long term business consideration.
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Also from the trial, whistleblower Arturo Beijar, former engineering director
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at Meta who left the company after watching his own
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fourteen year old daughter received sexual solicitations on Instagram. He
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testified about what the algorithm that makes Meta so profitable
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actually does in practice, he said, and I want you
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to hear this. The product is very good at connecting
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people with interests, and if your interest is little girls,
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it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.
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Nobody was paying attention to her. That's the truth. Underneath
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all of the corporate language about safety tools and teen
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accounts and algorithmic guardrails, nobody was paying attention to the kids.
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The verdict the jury deliberated for more than eight days.
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They found Meta and YouTube negligent in designing and operating
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their platforms. They found those designed decisions caused harm to Kaylee.
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They found the companies were aware their platforms could have
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adverse effects on miners and failed to warn users. And
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they found the companies acted with malice, oppression, or fraud,
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which is why there were punitive damages on top of
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compensatory damages. The split metabear seventy percent of the responsibility,
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YouTube thirty percent. Total damages six million dollars three million
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compensatory three million. Punitive. TikTok and Snaps settled before trial
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for undisclosed amounts, which means even they looked at the
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evidence and decided they didn't want a jury seeing it.
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Ten of twelve jurors found both companies liable, two dissented.
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That's a super majority of regular people who heard five
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weeks of evidence, heard the executives testify, saw the internal documents,
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and said, yes, this company harmed this child, and they
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knew what they were doing. Outside the courthouse, one of
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the jurors, she gave her first name as Victoria, said
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the jury wanted to focus on the future, what teens
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and children would be subjected to in the future. They
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weren't just deciding Kayley's case. They were trying to set
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a precedent. They set one. That's what a Bellweather trial does.
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This verdict will be in the file of every lawyer
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representing one of the two thousand pending cases. Every jury
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that convenes in the next wave of trials will know
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what this jury decided. Coming up the other verdict, New Mexico.
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This one isn't about addiction, It's about predators, and meta's
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own internal documents said enabling encryption would stop them from
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reporting seven and a half million instances of child sexual
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abuse material to law enforcement. They the implemented the encryption anyway.
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That's next. Welcome back the Los Angeles verdict happened on Wednesday,
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but there was another verdict the day before Tuesday, March
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twenty fourth, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, And in some
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ways this one is worse. New Mexico Attorney General Raoul
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Torres filed suit against Metta in twenty twenty three, not
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over addiction, over child sexual exploitation. His office ran an
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undercover operation. They created a fake Facebook and Instagram profile
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of a thirteen year old girl, and according to Torres,
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that account was immediately quote inundated with images and targeted
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solicitations from child abusers. An undercover fake profile of a
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thirteen year old was standing up on Meta's platforms for
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roughly thirty seconds before the predators found it. That's the
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product Zuckerberg is telling congressional committees and juries and the
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public that he works hard to protect children on The
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lawsuit accused Meta of creating what Toras called a breeding
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ground for child predators on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of
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misleading users and the public about the safety of those platforms,
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and of concealing what the company knew about how predators
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were using its tools. The jury deliberated for one day,
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one day after a six week trial. They found Meta
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liable on all counts, willfully engaged in unfair and deceptive
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and unconscionable trade practices, and ordered the company to pay
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three hundred and seventy five million dollars in damages, the
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first time a US state has successfully sued Meta over
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child safety. The jury didn't take long to decide what
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the evidence showed. There were two pieces of evidence from
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this trial that I want to spend time on because
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they're not abstractions, their documents with dates and names and
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decisions attached to them. The first, in twenty nineteen, Mark
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Zuckerberg decided to implement end to end encryption by default
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on Facebook Messenger. End to end encryption means messages can
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only be read by the center and recipient, not by Meta,
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not by law enforcement, not by anyone else. It's a
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privacy tool that has legitimate uses. It's also a tool
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that makes it significantly harder to detect and report the
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sharing of child sexual abuse material. Internal Meta documents entered
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into evidence showed that employees raise this concern directly. Their
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own people told them implementing this encryption would impact the
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company's ability to report Approximately seven point five million instances
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of child sexual abuse material to law enforcement annually seven
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point five million reports gone. The decision was made anyway,
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and then in the middle of the New Mexico trial,
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Meta quietly announced it would stop supporting end to end
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encrypted messaging on Instagram. The spokesperson said very few people
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were opting in, but they rolled it out anyway in
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twenty nineteen, knew what it would cost in reporting, and
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reversed it under legal pressure in twenty twenty six. That's
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not a product update, that's a tell there's a playbook
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for this. You implement the feature, you collect the revenue,
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you fight the lawsuits, and when the legal cause finally
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outweighs the business benefit, you quietly reverse course and hope
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no one notices the timeline. The second piece of evidence
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came from former Meta Vice president of Partnerships Brian Boland,
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who testified that he absolutely did not believe that safety
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was a priority to Mark Zuckerberg and then COO Sheryl
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Sandberg when he left the company in twenty twenty. This
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is not a disgruntled entry level employee. This is a
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vice president, a senior executive, someone who sat in the
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rooms where those decisions were made. His testimony, safety was
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not a priority to the people running the company. And
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then there was the Arturo Bijar testimony. He testified in
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both the New Mexico and the Los Angeles proceedings, the
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former engineering director who found out his own fourteen year
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old daughter had received sexual solicitations on Instagram while he
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was working there. He went to leadership, he raised the alarm,
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he documented it, He eventually left. He said, the algorithm
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is very good at connecting people with interests, and if
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your interest is children, it will connect you with children.
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Nobody was paying attention to her. The damages math, the
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jury awarded three hundred seventy five million dollars. New Mexico
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had sought closer to two billion dollars. The three hundred
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seventy five million dollar figure is the statutory maximum five
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thousand dollars per violation, which is actually a telling detail
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about the gap between how consumer protection we're written and
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the scale of harm that's possible when a company with
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a billion users violates them. But here's the thing about
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three hundred and seventy five million dollars for a company
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with a one point five trillion dollar market cap. Accountability
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doesn't have a legal department, but Meta does a very
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very good one. They're appealing both verdicts. They'll argue the damages.
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On appeal, they'll argue the legal theories. They'll write a
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check that is to their balance sheet what a parking
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ticket is to a middle class family, and they'll call
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it a cost of doing business. The New Mexico case
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isn't over either. There's a second phase beginning May fourth,
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in which a judge will decide whether Meta created a
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public nuisance and whether they should be required to fund
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programs addressing those harms. The AGE is also asking for
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mandatory platform changes, effective age verification, removal of predators, protection
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of miners from the encrypted communications that Meta itself said
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would shield bad actors. Those are the asks. We'll see
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what the judge orders. Two verdicts, two states, one week,