No more doom scrolling or Instagram Stories? A Meta trial loss could end the social media we know

Conceptual Portrait of Smartphone Addiction and Endless Scrolling.Marco_piunti | E+ | Getty ImagesThis report is from this week's The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.Meta says it faces a trillion-dollar penalty and damage to its advertising model. But the trial could go well beyond one company. It could make social media unrecognizable. The states want the court to force Meta to remove "certain addictive design features" from its platforms, Instagram and Facebook. These include infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos, disappearing content such as Instagram Stories, beauty filters, and algorithm-dominated feeds.During her opening statements on Tuesday, California's deputy attorney general, Megan O'Neill, said that Meta is choosing profit over safety, hiding the "reality" of under-13s on its platforms, and that its business model is to "hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the public." "This trial is potentially the end of social media as we know it," Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester, said."Any verdict against Meta would set a massive precedent," Winick added. "These trials ...