Jury finds Mehta and Google liable for $6 million in social media addiction trial
A jury has found Meta and Google liable for $6 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that their apps were designed to addict children. (A previous version of this video incorrectly listed damages.)
A settlement brokered by the Trump administration prohibits three federal agencies from forcing social media companies to censor speech.
The agreement ends a long-running lawsuit brought by Missouri, Louisiana and several social media users during President Joe Biden’s presidency. The lawsuit alleges that the Democratic administration unlawfully threatened social media platforms to remove or suppress posts about the coronavirus, the 2020 presidential election and other controversial issues.
The Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will be prohibited for 10 years from applying legal, regulatory, or economic pressure to persuade platforms to remove protected speech.
The settlement comes nearly two years after the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s finding that federal officials likely violated free speech protections and refused to impose limits on how the Biden administration communicates with social media platforms.
“The Biden administration has forced social media companies to suppress free speech they disallow,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Social Media X.
The Justice Department’s settlement is “an important step toward undoing First Amendment abuses, especially against conservative media outlets,” she wrote.
In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order condemning the federal government’s actions under the Biden administration, saying they “violated the constitutionally protected speech rights of Americans across the country by advancing the government’s preferred speech on important matters of public debate.”
In 2022, the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and a handful of social media users filed a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of overstepping the line by pressuring social media platforms to suppress content they believed to be false and dangerous, including posts about the coronavirus and election fraud.
At issue was “jawboning,” or the practice of influencing social media companies to remove controversial posts or change their policies regarding public health misinformation.
Missouri and Louisiana argued that these efforts violated the First Amendment. The exchanges included tense conversations the Biden administration had with Facebook’s parent company Meta and X (formerly Twitter) about coronavirus vaccines.
The lawsuit was one in a series of conservative complaints that Big Tech conspired with Democrats to stifle Republican opinion.
At the time, conservatives argued that social media platforms violate their First Amendment rights when their posts are labeled, removed, or banned for violating company policies. Social media companies said they were not targeting conservatives, but only harmful speech that violates their rules.
Political commentator Dan Schnur told USA TODAY in 2024 that unless Trump is re-elected and reverses the federal government’s position, social media censorship will remain a mainstream powder keg.
“There are certainly conservatives who will continue to fight on principle, but under the Trump administration, many of them will probably find other battles to consider,” Schnurr, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Government and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication, said at the time.
