AGs Seek Unredacted COPPA Complaint in Social Media Case vs. Meta

The 33 attorneys general suing Meta in California et al. vs. Meta over Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) violations filed an administrative motion (docket 4:23-cv-05448) Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in Oakland to consider whether materials designated as confidential by Meta should be sealed.

The heavily redacted complaint “looks like something that was released by the CIA,” said Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti at a Tuesday news conference announcing the filing of the 235-page complaint. “Black boxes all over” are covering up certain portions of the complaint based on protective orders in place when they conducted their investigation, but the AGs have asked the court to release the unredacted complaint to “get all of that information to the public,” Skrmetti said. Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell (D) echoed those concerns about her state’s complaint in Massachusetts Superior Court: “Folks may look at it and be alarmed, but we’re in the same boat,” and her office will “keep folks updated as we proceed.”

Meta's practices “have harmed and continue to harm the physical and mental health of children and teens and have fueled what the U.S. Surgeon General has called a 'youth mental health crisis,' which has ended lives, devastated families, and damaged the potential of a generation of young people,” said Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez in a Tuesday news release. The federal and state lawsuits allege Facebook and Instagram collect the personal information of children on their platforms without first obtaining, or attempting to obtain, “verifiable parental consent,” as required by COPPA.

The administrative motion called out certain allegations included in the filing states’ complaint, identified in exhibit A, saying Meta “solely bears the burden of establishing that any or all of the referenced material is sealable." The filing states “take no position at this time on whether, and do not concede that, any of the referenced material satisfies the requirements for filing under seal,” it said.

An unredacted version highlighting where the redactions were made in the complaint is attached as exhibit B and provisionally filed under seal, said the motion. The AG plaintiffs filed the motion with the opening of the federal case and the filing of the states’ complaints. Meta and other defendants “had yet to appear" when the 33 AGs filed their conditionally redacted complaint, so plaintiffs’ counsel "was unable to confer with the defendants to obtain a stipulation," the motion said.

The lawsuit alleges Meta and its advertisers want to attract young people because they are more likely to be influenced by ads, become lifelong customers and set trends that "the rest of society emulates," said the complaint. To draw young people to their platforms and keep them coming back, Meta “employs technologies designed to maximize young users’ time on, and engagement with,” its platforms, it said.

At a Senate subcommittee hearing in 2021, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, denied that Meta considered the profit value of developing products when it makes decisions on how products look, saying that would be a “terrible business model,” the complaint said. But the AGs assert Meta develops and implements features to attract young users and keep them engaged on their platforms “for as long as possible.” Those features include “engagement-based (as opposed to chronological) feeds; infinite scroll; push notifications; ephemeral content; and video-based content.”

Meta originally displayed content on a user’s feed chronologically, in the order the content was posted by people the user followed, but it moved to “engagement-based” feeds in 2009 for Facebook and 2016 for Instagram, said the complaint. An engagement-based feed “is different and alters the users’ experience,” it said. Posts with more “’Likes,’ comments, and other indicia of user engagement are displayed to users first,” which was designed to prioritize material more likely to engage users for longer periods of time, it said.

Instagram’s infinite scroll system has a partial display of additional content at the bottom of a user’s screen, “such that the user is typically unable to look at a single post in isolation” without seeing a portion of the next post in the feed. “The ‘teasing’ of yet-to-be-viewed content continues indefinitely,” and as a user scrolls down the feed, “new content is automatically loaded and ‘teased’” to keep young users of the platform “engaged and continuing to scroll” to new content.

Instagram added push notifications in 2015, which send auditory and visual cues to alert users when accounts they follow add new content, the complaint said. Meta sought to bump engagement through making certain content available to users temporarily, “with notifications and visual design cues indicating that the content would soon disappear forever (ephemeral content),” it said. That leads young users to the platforms frequently so they don’t “miss out” on new content, what’s known as “Fear of Missing Out (FOMO),” it said. "Story" features on both platforms have images and narratives that appear briefly before disappearing, which also contribute to FOMO behavior, it said.

Meta has reassured parents, lawmakers and users that its platforms are suitable for young users and designed to promote their well-being, said the complaint, but it “continues to develop and implement features that it knows induce young users’ extended, addictive, and compulsive social media use." Those include algorithmic recommendation and sequencing, engagement metrics such as “likes,” face and body image manipulation filters, “disruptive” audiovisual and haptic alerts, and permitting and “encouraging” users to create multiple accounts, it said.

Also contributing to higher social media engagement are variable reinforcement schedules that don’t follow a predictable pattern, the complaint said. They “trigger a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter released by the brain in response to certain stimuli,” said the complaint, citing a 2020 article in Neurology & Neurophysiology. Dopamine, viewed as a “pleasure chemical,” is released in anticipation of a potential reward, but “dopamine neurons fire for only a relatively short period of time, and after dopamine is released, an ‘individual can become disheartened and disengaged,’” it said. That can lead to social media addiction, it said.