“Hook, hold, harvest, hide”: Meta on trial over children and privacy

This week in Oakland, California, a sweeping trial got underway against Meta — the owner of Facebook and Instagram. California and 28 other states accuse the company of deliberately designing addictive services and violating laws that protect children.

Prosecutor Megan O'Neill boiled Meta's entire business model down to four words beginning with H: hook, hold, harvest, hide — hook the user, hold them on the platform as long as possible, harvest their data, and hide the truth from the public. “Meta's business model worked especially well on children,” she said. The suit is built, in part, on the claim that the company collected data on children under 13 without their parents' permission.

The stakes

The threat to the company has been called existential. If found liable, it could face damages of up to $200 billion — a figure comparable to Meta's annual revenue for 2025. On top of that, the states are asking the court to force the company to redesign its products for children's safety, which could permanently change how its platforms operate.

Meta rejects all the accusations. Its spokesperson, Lisa Crenshaw, said that instead of facts and the law, the states are “chasing an outlandish payout.” The company's attorney, Paul Schmidt, acknowledged that people really can suffer from social media, but stressed that Meta has built tools to combat this, does not sign up children under 13, and has already shut down more than a million such accounts.

The star witness

The star of the first week was Arturo Béjar — a safety engineer who worked at the company from 2009 to 2021 and later became one of its most outspoken critics. He testified that he took on the problem because of his own teenage daughter: on Instagram she received unwanted sexual advances, pictures of genitalia and insults, while the built-in reporting mechanisms proved useless. He described Meta's strategy with the formula “don't ask, don't tell.”

The jury was shown a letter Béjar sent to Mark Zuckerberg in 2021. According to his survey, 51% of teenagers reported having a bad or harmful experience on Instagram in the past week, and only 0.02% of such content was being removed. “When Mark makes something a priority, mountains move,” Béjar explained as his reason for writing. Asked whether Zuckerberg had replied, the witness answered curtly: no.

Meta tried unsuccessfully to keep Béjar from testifying, and after his appearance it continued to insist that he had overstated his role and taken credit for others' work.

The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks; future witnesses include Zuckerberg himself and Instagram head Adam Mosseri. The jury's role here is advisory: the final decision will be made by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Meanwhile, Meta has already lost the first two of thousands of similar suits: in March it was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to New Mexico and more than $4 million to one young woman who had been harmed.

Source: Hacker News