42 states are suing Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company for allegedly targeting children and altering the “psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans.”
According to the 228-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, Meta targets young users by monetizing their attention through data collection, targeted advertising, and feature deployment.
“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” the complaint read. “Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms.
“It has concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children. And it has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth,” it continued. “In doing so, Meta engaged in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal law.”
The states that signed onto the complaint are Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit also warns that Meta is expanding its “exploitative” practices into other domains, including through “Meta’s Virtual Reality Metaverse, where young users are immersed into Meta’s new Horizon Worlds platform; Meta’s communication Platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger; and other products, in which Meta uses evolving technology to replicate the harmful strategies it honed through its experiments on the young users of Instagram and Facebook.”
In response to the lawsuit, a Meta spokesperson expressed disappointment that the plaintiffs did not communicate with the multinational technology company first before filing the complaint.
“We share the attorneys general’s commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced more than 30 tools to support teens and their families. We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path.”
