Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Your Undivided Attention

Episode: "Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)"
Hosts: Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin (The Center for Humane Technology)
Date: March 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the significance of two landmark court verdicts against Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Google in high-profile lawsuits addressing tech companies’ accountability for the harms and exploitation perpetrated on their social media platforms, especially regarding children’s safety and addictive design. Co-host Aza Raskin shares insights from his firsthand experience testifying in the New Mexico case against Meta, discussing both the evidence unveiled in court and the broader implications for the tech industry and society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Landmark Verdicts and Their Context

• California Case: Meta and Google found negligent for failing to warn users about addictive design contributing to mental health issues.
• New Mexico Case: Meta found liable for not protecting children from abuse and exploitation on their platforms.
• The New Mexico trial is compared to the "Big Tobacco moment" of the 1990s—potentially a watershed for holding tech accountable.
  (00:00–01:27)

2. The New Mexico Trial Tactics & Evidence

• New Mexico AG Raul Torres created fake underage profiles to test Meta's platforms and documented immediate exposure to predatory content and exploitation.

• The AG bypassed Section 230 by charging Meta with violations of the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, focusing on product safety rather than content moderation.
  (01:27–03:05)

• The result: Jury found Meta “maximally guilty” with $375 million in damages—the legal maximum allowable, but only a symbolic cost to Meta. The more significant potential outcome is injunctive relief forcing product design changes that could reduce engagement and harm.
  (03:07–04:58)

3. Injunctive Relief: Why It Matters More Than Fines

• Injunctive relief could force design changes (e.g., stopping autoplay videos, blocking messages to minors) that strike at Big Tech’s engagement-driven business models.

• Example: Introducing friction (delays in page loading) can decrease engagement, providing courts with a tool to curb addictive usage.
  (04:58–07:12)

  “If courts decide, say, that an appropriate remedy is adding a very small amount of time delay to page loads… it gives courts a fine-grained tool… to directly punch back at the business model of engagement, like punch them where it hurts.”
  —Aza Raskin (05:40)

4. Internal Meta Documents: Discovery Process Revelations

• Court discovery revealed internal conversations showing Meta’s leadership understood the scope of the harm but chose not to act:

  • 2019: Internal acknowledgment—“We are about to do a bad thing… this is so irresponsible.”
  • Meta’s head of global safety: “Facebook allows pedophiles to find each other and kids.”
  • 2020: “What specifically are we doing for child grooming? Somewhere between zero and negligible. Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half of the year.”
  • Reductions in integrity teams and deflections of responsibility by encrypting messages to avoid liability.
    (09:11–11:32)

  “Facebook allows pedophiles to find each other and kids.”
  —Meta Head of Global Safety, as quoted by Aza Raskin (09:54)

  “Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half of the year.”
  —Meta employee, cited in court (10:47)

5. Inside the Courtroom: Aza Raskin’s Testimony

• Aza describes the tense, even adversarial atmosphere: delays, white-noise machines, and cross-examination tactics to disrupt flow.

• Meta tried to undercut his credibility—e.g., challenging his claim to having invented infinite scroll—but failed to undermine his testimony on addictive product design.

• Discovery showed Meta had been tracking the Center for Humane Technology for years; Facebook attempted (unsuccessfully) to keep their early internal analysis out of evidence.
  (11:32–15:32)

  “Anytime that I would talk about everything that we know… the Facebook lawyer would say, like, objection. The lawyers would approach the bench and they would turn on a white noise machine, which the jurors hated…”
  —Aza Raskin (12:10)

  “You could just see as I described what infinite scroll was… they could really see that land in the jury.”
  —Aza Raskin (14:45)

6. Outcome and Reflections on the Verdict

• Relief and cautious optimism: the verdict is a clear recognition of platform harm, but true change depends on the next step—court-ordered product redesigns.

• This case sets precedent against Section 230 shielding, creating legal leverage for future accountability and regulatory actions.

• Hosts reiterate that tech’s harms stem from well-understood business incentives, with Aza and Tristan having warned of these dangers as far back as 2013.
  (15:47–17:45)

  “It gives precedent for ways that the courts can route around Section 230. And… for the first time, we might have product level changes that can actually affect engagement.”
  —Aza Raskin (16:33)

• The recurring phrase in the courtroom: “too little, too late”—highlighting that Meta’s minor changes have failed to prevent harm.
  (17:45–18:30)

  “Too little, too late. Too little, too late. Too little, too late. And this lawsuit might end up being too little, too late—except for this injunctive relief…”
  —Aza Raskin (17:45)

7. Future Hopes & Closing Thoughts

• Hosts hope for concrete, court-mandated product changes—like disabling autoplay videos—to reduce harm rapidly across platforms.
• Aza is thanked for his testimony; both reflect on the importance and impact of these legal actions for a more humane digital future.
  (18:15–18:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scale of fines vs. consequences:
  “$375 million is just a cost of doing business… when it comes in and it’s only $375 million, I don't have to treat this as a fine. I can treat this as just a fee.”
  —Tristan Harris (04:15)

• On internal Meta attitudes:
  “The more we know, the more we’re liable. Let’s just get rid of the problem by getting rid of the people pointing at the problem.”
  —Aza Raskin (11:21)

• On product changes as a solution:
  “Suddenly all the brain rot economy just goes down by at least 50% overnight if there’s no auto playing videos across not just one app, but all of them.”
  —Tristan Harris (18:15)

• On societal accountability:
  “My deep hope is that lawsuits like this help further the immune system of society and culture to get more ahead of AI rather than wait until the lawsuit happens a decade later.”
  —Tristan Harris (07:22)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–01:27 — Introduction and case backgrounds
• 01:27–04:58 — New Mexico trial, findings, and fines
• 04:58–07:12 — Why injunctive relief is a big deal for Big Tech
• 09:11–11:32 — Internal Meta documents and discovery
• 11:32–15:32 — Aza Raskin’s experience in the courtroom
• 15:47–17:45 — Significance of the verdict and precedent setting
• 17:45–18:48 — Reflections on next steps, hopes for specific product changes

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Tone and Style

Conversational, incisive, and urgent, with an emphasis on both technical details and broader societal impact; the episode blends legal analysis, personal testimony, and advocacy for concrete system change. The hosts express both hope and frustration, underscoring how long-known problems are only now being seriously addressed.

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For listeners seeking to understand the legal, technical, and ethical turning points in Big Tech accountability, this episode offers a comprehensive, inside look at a potentially transformative moment for social media regulation and child online safety.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. This is Tristan Harris, and welcome to your undivided attention. Today we're going to be talking about two verdicts that were handed down against big tech companies in two major lawsuits. One was in California, where Meta and Google were found to have been negligent and failed to warn users about the addictive design of their products. And that trial involved a young woman who allegedly these products contributed to her deteriorating mental health and body dysmorphia. And in the other case in New Mexico, Meta was found liable for failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse on their apps. And actually, our very own Aza Raskin of this podcast testified at the trial. Hey, A.

[B]

Hey, Tristan.

[A]

So we all know in the 1990s, there was a moment when there was a series of big cases holding the big tobacco companies accountable for the harms of their toxic products. And we really feel like this might be the big tobacco moment for social media and represents a real opportunity not just to hold these companies accountable with fines, but actual, you know, injunctive relief and design changes that would create a better future. So today I wanted to take a moment to talk about the New Mexico trial because you were involved in it and because it involved a lot of real details about how the companies operated underneath the hood, how they thought about user safety, you know, beyond the verdict and the damages. So, Aza, you went to New Mexico. Tell us what happened here when Mr. Raskin went to Santa Fe.

[B]

When Mr. Raskin went to Santa Fe, I had to buy a suit. But this case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres back in December 2023. And what's significant is that instead of trying to tackle this via section 230, which, if listeners remember, is the rule that says that platforms are not responsible for the content that users. Instead, the Attorney General went after Meta for violating New Mexico's Unfair Trade Practices act for failing to protect children on their apps, Facebook and Instagram, from abuse and exploitation. So essentially what the New Mexico Attorney General did was a kind of undercover operation where they created fake profiles of underage users and then saw what experience they had in the platform. And what they found was that these underage users were immediately flooded with really horrific, inappropriate exploitation and abuse stuff, sort of like sexual grooming, that kind of thing.

[A]

So this is basically, this is the New Mexico AG. They create a fake profile. They say, I'm 12 years old, and they just sort of simulate that. And then immediately they watch as those accounts get inundated with all these messages from predators.

[B]

Basically, yeah. Predators being shown body DYSMORPHICS of, like, thinspiration kinds of content, essentially the worst kinds of stuff. Even if the kids are underage, Facebook just shows it to them. And what's important here is that this shows that Facebook knew what they were doing and did it anyway, and they did it in search of engagement, of user numbers. So this is willful.

[A]

And so what was the verdict of this trial?

[B]

Yeah, so, you know, the jury actually didn't have to deliberate for very long. They deliberated for just two days, and they found Meta maximally guilty. So, you know, this sort of shows you the limits of law as it stands, because while the jury find them the maximum amount they're allowed to find them, that only amounted to $375 million in civil damages. And that's just not a big deal to these big companies. And so what's much more interesting is that they are going for injunctive relief. And that means the court can now go back and tell Meta that they have to change their product in specific ways, and they can force Meta to change their product in specific ways that might really hurt engagement. And so this can really matter. It's not just a cost of doing business. This can be something more existential.

[A]

If you could explain for listeners, why is it that 375 million is the maximum amount that they can do?

[B]

I'm not exactly an expert on this, but essentially, for every person in the lawsuit, the maximum amount of damages that the jury can ask for is 5,000 doll. And that's what they asked for, and that's what they got.

[A]

Maybe it's important to back up and just notice that for listeners, $375 million is just a cost of doing business. Like, if I'm Meta, I just am knowingly printing money in the meantime for many, many, many years. Billions of dollars, Billions and billions and billions of dollars, knowing that a fine like this is coming, and when it comes in and it's only 375 million, I don't have to treat this as a fine. I can treat this as just a fee. And I think why the injunctive relief is so important is because if you actually have forced design changes, like, for example, maybe you can't autoplay videos anymore, or maybe youth accounts just simply can't receive messages from people across the network, I don't know. There's a lot of changes that could be made here that would lead to a different outcome. And so that seems like the next most significant part of the trial.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. And just to put $375 million into perspective for what that means for a company like Meta, which is to say, not very much. Meta is offering new employees to their superintelligence lab something like $300 million. So you can see this really doesn't matter in a dollar amount. And that's why the injunctive relief, you know, changing the product. One example we've talked about on this podcast, Tristan, the idea of a latency sanction or latency tax that we know that latency, or rather how fast a page loads, is directly correlated to retention and engagement. So if courts decide, say that an appropriate remedy is adding a very small amount of time delay to page loads, we're talking like 100 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds. This is less than or around human reaction time. It's really sub perceptual, but it gives users a little bit of that feeling of sitting on an airplane with bad wi fi and you go to like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and it loads a little slowly and you decide to do something else. And it's that it's just adding a little bit of friction at the point of use, which drops the number of overall users by some really actually significant amount. Right. This is Amazon finding for every hundred milliseconds their page loads slower, they lose 1% of revenue. And so this gives court a fine grained tool for saying depending on how bad Facebook has acted, they can dial up the friction a little bit, just the amount of time that it takes for a page to load. And. And because Facebook's core incentive is number of users is engagement, this gives Courts a tool to directly sort of like punch back at the business model of engagement, like punch them where it hurts. And then as Facebook starts to do better, as their numbers go up, as the harms go down, you can lower over time the amount of sort of friction that's being added. And this is really, really exciting. This is not going through the legislative system, which is slow and probably is not going to give us anything. This is going through the court system, which can move quickly and ongoingly. And that's the opportunity that sits in front of it. That's why we think it can actually be the big tobacco moment and not just a little wrist slap. Fine.

[A]

I just want to reinforce for listeners not to sort of toot a horn here, but all of this was predicted by the incentives that Aze and I laid out in 2013. And I want you to really, really hear that because if you know the incentives, you can understand and predict all of these behaviors, this totally avoidable societal catastrophe. And sadly, we had to wait until this lawsuit for some of those changes to happen. My deep hope is that lawsuits like this help further the immune system of society and culture to get more ahead of AI rather than wait until the lawsuit happens a decade later. Let's just talk a little bit more about the trial. And one of the critical things about it is the discovery process. They looked at Meta's internal documents. So I remember actually going on the television show CBS this Morning, which is like one of the biggest American television shows, and I talked about. They asked me a question about Facebook making this change to make communication between people end to end encrypted. And they said, is this a good thing or a bad thing? And I said, well, one of the reasons that I think Facebook is doing this is because if they encrypt messages, then they don't actually know what's being sent between people and they're not liable if they can't look. And I suspected that a lot of that had to do with trying to avoid liability.

[C]

We heard the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook will become a privacy focused social network. Does that make sense to you? How do you interpret that?

[D]

Well, the issue is that they're trying to avoid liability. I'm sure there's many things that there are good reasons for doing what they're doing, but when they move all this, you know, the Russian hacking, the pedophilia stuff, all this stuff that's going on in these different groups, when suddenly they're inside of private groups, it's not their responsibility.

[B]

And so, wow, I never thought of it like that.

[D]

So once it's encrypted, they don't have to be responsible for telling the FBI or whatever. We knew this was happening because they can't know.

[A]

And then this actually did come out in some of the documents as part of this discovery process. Can you talk about this, Asa?

[B]

Yeah, that's indeed exactly what Facebook was going for in 2019. Meta's head of policy, Monica Brechardt, said, you know, when she was talking about it internally, that, quote, we are about to do a bad thing as a company, that this is so irresponsible. And their head of global safety in an email had said that Facebook allows pedophiles to find each other and kids. So it's very clear that Facebook was making sort of a cynical decision to encrypt to avoid liability versus taking a moral stand to do something. Right. And they just sort of like Encryption washed it. So we get a lot of this behavior of if we don't look, we can't see it, we can't be doing wrong, and even when we do look, we're not going to do anything. So a couple of ones that really hit me was 2018. The VP of integrity guy Rosin at that point sent an email internally that said, we know of the scale of the problem, that there are a whole bunch of direct messages being sent to our underage kids for grooming and solicitation, but we're not doing anything. Just a year later, in 2019, another VP emailed Zuckerberg personally saying, I just need 24 additional staff members to study this kind of problematic use and build like tools. And the answer came back, nope, we're not going to change anything.

[A]

From the cfo, Susan Lee, from the

[B]

cfo specifically, yeah, Reporting on behalf of Zuckerberg.

[A]

And as I read in one of the documents, in a 2020 chat between Meta employees, one Meta employee asked the other, quote, what specifically are we doing for child grooming? And the other Meta employee responded, quote, somewhere between zero and negligible. Child safety is an explicit non goal this half of the year.

[B]

And then in 2021, our now friend Arturo Behar, who led product safety at Facebook, he sent an email to Zuckerberg directly saying, hey, the company was deeply undercounting unwanted sexual advances towards minors. And you know, Zuckerberg didn't even respond. And. And this all just shows. So you're like, okay, so Facebook knew. Facebook knew, Facebook knew. And then in 2022, what did Facebook do? They completely slashed their integrity and responsibility team and eliminated 100 positions. So Facebook was taking the viewpoint of the more we know, the more we liable. Let's just get rid of the problem by getting rid of the people pointing at the problem.

[A]

So Eza, maybe just to take people inside the courtroom for a moment, like, what was it actually like? There you are, you know, with the jury, with Meta's lawyers sitting across from you, I'm sure with their, you know, their eyebrows furrowed and angry at you. What, what? You know, what was it like to be in that room?

[B]

Yeah, well, first to say, like, a lot of going to court is hurry up and wait. Like, get down there, get to court. And then you're put, or I was put into a little side room with no windows and just flickering overhead fluorescent light. And then you just have to wait until you're called up onto the stand. And actually, one of Facebook's tactics was, was to drag out the Cross examination of the people in front of me. And what the lawyers from our side said is that Facebook was intentionally trying to make it so that I couldn't testify by, like, running down the clock and make it so that it just would have to come back day after day after day, which was interesting. I didn't. I didn't know that that was a tactic, but. But it is the other really interesting thing. Like, so you. You get in there, you sit down in the stand, and you are talking to the jury. But I was called as technically what's known as a fact witness and not an expert witness. So I was testifying from my own experience about my invention of Infinite Scroll. And so that means any time that I would talk about everything that we know about Tristan, like the effects of incentives, the Facebook lawyer would say, like, objection. The lawyers would approach the bench and they would turn on a white noise machine, which the jurors hated, so that we couldn't even hear what the.

[A]

They turn on a white noise machine?

[B]

Yeah, they turn on a white noise machine so that the lawyers can talk with the judge about whatever it is they're talking about. And I can't hear and the jury can't hear, and it's very annoying. And it would happen every, you know, like three to four minutes during my testifying. In fact, anytime that I'd start to get on a roll, Meta would call for this kind of thing and they go up and they'd try to break the flow. So there's just a lot of tactics and counter tactics happening at the object level even before we get into the content. Just on one of the other interesting moments is it turns out that Facebook has been tracking center for Humane Technology for a very long time. And actually, yeah, what was discovered in discovery is they had a 2018 funding deck of ours that like, you wrote and I wrote and Randy wrote, and Facebook tried really hard to keep that funding deck from getting admitted as evidence, but our side prevailed. And there's a great moment where they had me read out our original funding deck where it could say things that I couldn't say on the stand about, like, what the effects against teams were against democracy was because I was just reading a document and Facebook tried to use their white noise generator, like, many times during that.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

But, you know, in the end, you could just see as we just. I described what Infinite scroll was, that even I, as the inventor, who know exactly how it works and how it sort of removes stopping cues to get you to, like, use the product more, and they could really see that land in the jury. And you just see that in this case, the jury was very skeptical. Facebook and Facebook sort of had to fall back in their cross examination of me. There's sort of a funny moment when their lawyer was trying to pin me down and they said, like, so you're the inventor of Infinite scroll, right? Like, yes. And they're like, do you know that just a couple months before you invented it, somebody else had published a blog post about inventing Infinite Scroll. So you're not the real inventor of Infinite Scroll. Right. And I was like, oh, well, that's sort of great, actually. Like, I get to absolve a little bit of my guilt, but. And you could see it sort of deflating out of them as their, their line of attack didn't work. But that's the level that Facebook was resorting to because they didn't really have an argument.

[A]

They don't have an argument.

[B]

Yeah. And honestly, my feeling sitting up there and it's, it's intense being cross examined like that. You have to like, like breathe and remember, like, why you're there.

[A]

So, Iza, just curious, what was your personal reaction hearing this verdict?

[B]

The feeling was twofold. One, one was a kind of relief and an excitement because one, it's just so obvious. But to have New Mexico and now the case in LA both just hand out the obvious verdict of Facebook being guilty and having known that they're making addictive products. That's. That's awesome. That's a moment to be celebrated. And of course, the other side of it is being like, well, if it just stays at the $375 million fine, then all this doesn't really matter that much. We have to get the next step, the injunctive changes to product.

[A]

That kind of brings us to the last question, which is where, where is going from here? What's the next step?

[B]

Well, of course Meta is going to appeal and the case in California ends well, so we have to wait and see what happens there. But the real significant moment is what kind of injunctive reliefs, what kinds of penalties the court gives to Meta. And that has the chance to be incredibly significant. And it's very important that this gives precedent for Facebook being found accountable. It gives precedent for ways that the courts can route around section 230. And it is incredibly important because for the first time we might have product level changes that can actually affect engagement.

[A]

For those who are interested, we have covered all of this before for the last decade. If you go back to our early interviews with Francis Haugen, if you go back to our interview with Arturo Bihar, we've been talking about these issues for such a long time. What gives me hope is that this verdict is finally happening, this lawsuit is coming due, and real accountability is happening. And we just hope that the next move of the court case with these injunctive relief actually makes design changes so the material reality that our kids are living in, in their psychological environment is not dictated by this kind of cynical behavior.

[B]

Yeah. The phrase that came up in court again and again and again was too little too late. Facebook would say we're adding stopping cues like, you know, you're scrolling a lot. And it'll say, like, take a break. Trying to capture people in hot versus cold states again and again. Expert after expert get up and just be like, too little, too late. Too little, too late. And this lawsuit might end up being too little too late. Except for this injunctive relief, which means that it could be like, enough too late.

[A]

Yeah. I hope that they include in that no auto playing videos across the board. That would just make. Make auto playing videos opt in. Suddenly all the brain rot economy just goes down by at least 50% overnight if there's no auto playing videos across not just one app, but all of them. Right. That, that.

[B]

That's exactly it. Yeah. It just takes a little bit of. Of latency, just like a little bit of friction, like gives you your agency back.

[A]

Well, is. I also just want to thank you for testifying. You know, thank you for doing this. It's so important. I really hope that this moves forward and onward and upward to the next things.

[B]

It's a true honor to be there.

[E]

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the center for Humane Technology. We're a nonprofit working to catalyze a humane future. Our senior producer is Julia Scott. Josh Lasch is our researcher and producer. And our executive producer is Sascha Feigen. Mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudeikin and original music by Ryan and Hayes Holliday. And a special thanks to the whole center for Humane Technology team for making this show possible. You can find transcripts from our interviews and bonus content on our substack and much [e-mail] and if you like this episode, we'd be truly grateful if you could rate us on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It really does make a difference in helping others join this movement for a more humane future. And if you made it all the way here, let me give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.