New Mexico jury recently delivered a landmark verdict against social media giant Meta, finding the company misled consumers and failed to protect its youngest users. Attorney General Raul Torrez will return to court in May for a bench trial on whether Meta created a public nuisance and if it must fund programs to help children who allegedly suffered harm
ATTORNEY GENERAL RAÚL TORREZ: We had been receiving reports from our Internet Crimes Against Children unit about the increase that they had seen in sexual exploitation on the platforms. And at the same time, there was a lot of concern that was being raised publicly by medical professionals, educators and others, about the design features in the platforms. And so the two of those things together prompted me to order an investigation into the design features and to the platforms itself. We very quickly identified that Meta was the biggest player in the space, and the one that we thought was having the biggest impact on young people in the state of New Mexico. And so that's what prompted the investigation.
KUNM: Can you walk us through how this first jury trial unfolded and what led to that verdict?
TORREZ: Well, it's significant, because it's the first time a jury has been able to actually hear the testimony, not just from educators and health care professionals in New Mexico, but insiders at Meta itself. They came in people who had been tasked with studying the features inside the company, who had identified the problematic and dangerous sort of aspect of the design, who had raised those concerns inside the company and had kind of routinely been disregarded. So what the jury got to see was a company that had prioritized profits over safety, that had prioritized user engagement and growth over basic safety standards that would have kept young people safe.
KUNM: And we've heard from sources that the state was awarded $375 million from Meta rather than the $2.2 billion originally asked for. Can you explain the difference here?
TORREZ: Oh, this has to do with the calculation based on the number of potential users. We had advanced the theory that every single underage person that had been on the platform potentially should be the measure of how to define the scope of the civil penalties. It appears, although we don't have any specific reference to it, it appears that the jurors took a smaller population as the population that was identified as potentially being subjected to specific harms, rather than the overall population. I think that is more than anything what determines the smaller size. But again, this is only one half of our presentation to the court.
KUNM: And like you've said earlier, the design features on Facebook and Instagram are making it easier for predators to find children. But what does that actually look like in practice?
TORREZ: I think the scariest testimony was offered by Arturo behad, who's sort of the primary whistleblower inside of Facebook, and what he said on the stand was these platforms are very good at connecting you with your interests. And if you happen to have an interest in little girls, the platform will be very good at connecting you with little girls. What is more troubling about that is the company has a financial incentive to lure young people onto the platform. That was also something that has been widely discussed is the internal understanding about the value of having a young person become an early user and early adopter of the technology, they've actually been able to calculate the lifetime return on investment from grabbing the attention of young people.
KUNM: In the next bench trial, you're actually looking for safety changes to be made, like age verification or even removing these predators from the platforms. What would it look like to enforce measures like these?
TORREZ: We'll be providing a range of options and encouraging the judge to consult with a range of technologists and outside experts about what is feasible and possible in terms of setting out new guardrails for this company that chooses to continue to business in the state of New Mexico, I think more importantly, we're going to have an opportunity to create a blueprint for a safer social media experience, not only within this company, but across the entire industry. If we can demonstrate that that works here in New Mexico, it's something that will be a model for the country And frankly, the rest of the world.
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