Big Tech Is Having Its Big Tobacco Moment

Many of us grew up when smoking was cool, until it suddenly wasn’t. Despite an avalanche of medical reports connecting smoking with cancer, Big Tobacco insisted that cigarettes were safe. Tobacco companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns that claimed the evidence wasn’t strong enough to justify changing the way it did business. The companies knew far more than they admitted, fought regulation at every turn, and made billions while generations of Americans continued to die of lung and throat cancer. It was partially through the confessions of industry executives that Big Tobacco was exposed.

Now Big Tech is having its own Big Tobacco moment. And no company is more clearly at the center of it than Meta, the company Mark Zuckerberg built around Facebook and later Instagram and WhatsApp.

This is not about whether social media is good or bad.  It’s whether companies can deliberately design products to maximize engagement, knowing that their design choices are harming users, particularly children and teenagers, and then claim that the consequences aren’t their responsibility.

For years Facebook has managed to elude responsibility. Despite whistleblowers – including former employees – disclosing how the company ignored research showing the harm and even the deaths their products were causing, Facebook did nothing.

But at long last that may be changing. Meta is facing a landmark case brought by attorneys general from 29 states. Prosecutors allege that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to be addictive to young people, that Meta misled the public about safety, and the company failed to adequately protect minors.

Early testimony has been damning. Former Meta engineering director Arturo Bejar testified this week that Zuckerberg and other senior executives were repeatedly warned about problems affecting young users. Bejar said the company’s culture put growth and engagement ahead of child safety and that some safety measures were ineffective because they interfered with what the company most valued: time spent on the platform, engagement, and growth.  And purposefully Meta never created reasonable safeguards that prevented the delivery of dangerous and harmful content to minors. 

At long last Meta is facing the consequences. A New Mexico jury found the company liable for children’s safety. In California, a jury also found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case involving social-media addiction, with a $6 million award (equal to the profit they make in about 40 minutes). 

But now the fines could become much, much larger.  Meta has said the states’ potential penalties in the current case could reach $1.4 trillion. Let’s hope the penalties are high enough to punish Facebook and get them to fix their products. Facebook deserves to suffer the same fate as Big Tobacco.

It’s hard to believe how just one company is able to create so much harm to so many and get away with it.