C4D and the Courts: Meta Guilty Verdicts

In a first-of-its-kind moment, Meta was found guilty of harming young users in two separate jury trials this week, in Los Angeles and New Mexico. C4D research and education efforts to explain how these products actually work and where companies have fallen short of their promises to keep users safe are helping finally turn this tide towards accountability.

A jury in New Mexico has found Meta guilty of misleading users about safety and enabling child sexual exploitation on their platforms. Our Co-Director Damon McCoy and our Fellow and former Meta Executive Arturo Bejar were both key witnesses in the case. And research conducted by Arturo, Damon and our Co-Director Laura Edelson, detailing where Instagram has fallen short of its promises to protect children online, was referenced in the trial.

The New Mexico and Los Angeles trials are the first two of potentially thousands of cases around the country that accuse Meta of harming young users through its product designs and business decisions. So much of our work at Cybersecurity for Democracy focuses on both proving that it is possible to design these platforms in a safer way and showing that they are not living up to their promises to the public. One of our key goals is to use our scientific research to help the public, regulators, and courts understand how these online systems work and where social media design choices impact our safety. 

This is a big moment for the tech accountability movement and for broader society. There is still so much work to be done, but this provides some much needed hope that we are on the path. And it’s worth noting that the state succeeded here where so many other cases have failed because they were actually able to clearly demonstrate the ways that platform design was harming specific users. The New Mexico Attorney General’s office used testing methods modeled on our investigation with the Wall Street Journal in 2024 in their undercover investigation that demonstrated risks to children on the platform. Empirical research and investigations are not just pointing the way to make platforms safer in the future, they are also helping hold platforms accountable today.

And, in case you missed it, we hosted a Lab Talk in February on the very issues at stake in this trial, with Damon, Arturo, and Laura discussing their research and its implications for online child safety. You can watch a recording HERE. (Forgive the technical glitch that cut off a bit of the opening talk.)

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