Meta faces $1.4 trillion lawsuit
JUST IN: Meta hit with $1.4 trillion lawsuit over allegations it deliberately designed addictive features to keep children hooked on Facebook and Instagram, with jury selection beginning Wednesday.
One point four trillion dollars. That's the lawsuit Meta walked into this morning, and jury selection starts today.
The allegation is that Mark Zuckerberg's company deliberately designed addictive features on Facebook and Instagram to keep children hooked. Not a side effect, a design choice. Parents have been raising the alarm about their kids' mental health for years, and now the argument goes in front of an actual jury.
For scale, that figure is in the neighbourhood of Meta's entire market value. Nobody thinks a jury hands over the whole company. What worries Menlo Park is everything else, internal documents in open court, and executives under oath explaining what they knew about kids and their apps.
Big tech historically pays to keep juries away from numbers like this. So that's my question.
This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.
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