A jury just confirmed what parents have suspected for years — Meta deliberately engineered Instagram to hook kids before they were even teenagers. Internal documents showed the company knew 11-year-olds were four times more likely to return to Instagram than any competing app, yet kept the minimum age at 13. This is Big Tech's Big Tobacco moment, and 2,000 more lawsuits now have a clear roadmap to follow.
A $1.4 trillion penalty demand against Meta is a legally absurd figure with no precedent in consumer protection history, and Meta has strong grounds to appeal and reverse the verdict. Meta already raised the minimum age to 13, launched supervised teen accounts and argues that "social media addiction" isn't even an established psychiatric condition. Stricter regulations would actually hurt smaller competitors far more, strengthening Meta's dominant market position long-term.
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