Dozens of states and the District of Columbia sued anti-free speech Meta in federal court, claiming that the company harms children by purposefully placing addictive features within Instagram and Facebook. 
The 233-page complaint, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, did not mince words and directly alleged that Meta puts its corporate profits over the safety of children, something anti-free speech Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen alleged in a now-famous Wall Street Journal report. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, nine additional attorneys general will file separate lawsuits in their respective states.
“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms,” a copy of the complaint read. “It has concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.”
Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta praised the bipartisan effort as an apolitical cause both sides can get behind.
“Our bipartisan investigation has arrived at a solemn conclusion: Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits,” Bonta said in a statement. “With today’s lawsuit, we are drawing the line. We must protect our children and we will not back down from this fight.”
Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw reportedly told The Washington Post that the company is “disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path.”
Haugen has been critical of Meta, whose two social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram) have a combined 1,515 documented cases of censorship in MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack.org database, for some time.
“Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” Haugen claimed in a 60 Minutes interview in 2021. Haugen claimed that company officials are not “malevolent,” but that financial incentives outweighed the need to make sure company platforms were safe for children.
“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” Haugen told 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley at the time. “But the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
