[ericra]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that Meta (and most other big tech companies) have long been in the business of hiring a large number of recent social science Ph.D. graduates from top U.S. universities. People with a lot of knowledge of statistics and some domain-specific knowledge in their fields that could possibly be applicable to their job. The whole purpose of doing this is to create teams of marketing people doing in-house research to figure out how to best manipulate others by maximizing "engagement" or whatever other metric.

Isn't this just how all big tech companies operate as a normal business practice? Certainly Youtube is no better when it comes to targeted content and advertisements to children to their detriment.

My main point is that I don't think it makes any difference whether Meta has some internal document proving that they specifically target children with these practices. The problem is so much bigger than a single policy or company, and legislatures need to figure out a better way to address the overarching problems. I don't have much faith that these one-off lawsuits will make that much of an impact given that they almost always lead to some fine or settlement that is an acceptable business loss for the company.

I'm all for Meta being decimated by a thousand cuts in the form of lawsuits from various levels of government, but at best it would just be replaced with something else unless more regulation exists at the top levels (US / EU / etc).