Age assurance gets boost from $6M judgement against Meta, YouTube

Liability in civil court is looming as a motivator for social media platforms to implement age assurance, after a jury in California found Meta and YouTube liable for negligence in their platform design. The response, at least from Meta’s chief executive, is to express remorse while shifting responsibility to the operating system providers.

The jury awarded $3 million to the plaintiff, who sued over the contribution of social media use to years of depression and anxiety, and another $3 million in punitive damages. Meta will have to pay $4.2 million, YouTube $1.8 million, if its survives an expected appeal, the New York Times reports.

The jury in another trial, this one in New Mexico, found Meta liable for $375 million in damages for failing to protect children using Facebook and Instagram from predators.

The design features in question include infinite scrolling, algorithmic amplification of notifications and engagement loops.

There are an estimated 1,600 similar cases that now have a civil law precedent on their side.

Little wonder, since internal Meta documents show Meta was aware that Instagram had 4 million users below age 13, which is its stated minimum age, when the plaintiff in the Los Angeles case joined in 2015.

Confronted with an internal email about Meta’s lack of enforcement for its stated age limit, ABC News reports CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed a wish in testimony that his company “would have gotten there sooner.” He then pointed out to the Los Angeles jury that it would be easier from his perspective if the companies providing the operating systems his apps are used on took responsibility for ensuring minors cannot access them.

“Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately,” Zuckerberg said, as quoted by Le Monde. “It would be pretty easy for them.”

Age checks for social media and other online platforms have largely been motivated so far by regulatory requirements, as in Australia.

U.S. states are locked in a series of court battles with Big Tech lobby groups over their efforts to impose age assurance, even as Ohio joins the parade of jurisdictions moving to require age checks by pornography websites and others.

At the federal level, politicians in America’s House of Congress have been feverishly stripping the enforcement mechanisms from the proposed Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  Meta  |  regulation  |  social media  |  United States  |  YouTube