Attorneys for the state of Tennessee told a jury in Nashville on Monday that Meta Platforms’ (META.O), opens new tab leadership disregarded internal research about its Instagram platform’s impact on teenagers as the company sought to maximize profit from young users.
During opening statements in a seven-week trial in state court in Tennessee, the state’s lawyers said Meta researchers repeatedly flagged that some teenagers were compulsively using the platform, leading to eating disorders, depression and self-harm. But despite those warnings, Meta did not disable features such as autoplay, notifications and infinite scroll that, the lawyers said, were designed to keep teens on Instagram as long as possible and increase the number of ads they viewed.
An attorney for Meta countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face on Instagram and the amount of dangerous content that it finds. The company works hard to find problems and fix them, he said.
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The lawsuit, filed by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office, seeks financial penalties and a court order directing Instagram to modify aspects of the platform that the state says are harmful to teens’ mental health.
If the jury finds the company liable, the trial will enter a second phase before Chancellor Russell Perkins, the judge overseeing the trial, who will decide whether to order the company to pay financial penalties and make changes to Instagram to make it safer for teens.
During the opening statements, which Reuters watched on Courtroom View Network, Tom Cartmell, a lawyer for the state, played the familiar dinging sound of a notification hitting a smartphone. Unpredictable rewards like notifications trigger dopamine hits that promote addiction, which has a particularly strong impact on the brains of kids, Cartmell said.
Meta understood the brain science behind why teens find its platform so irresistible, Cartmell said.
Cartmell showed the jury an internal document from 2017 in which Meta product managers wrote that features like notifications and infinite scroll “are inherently at odds with well-being” and said that the company needed to warn the public.
“This warning never came,” Cartmell said.