For a company that has built an empire on keeping people's attention, Meta Platforms discovered Tuesday that the Supreme Court was not especially interested in returning the favor.
The justices declined, without comment, to hear Meta's request to intervene in a lawsuit brought by Vermont's attorney general — a decision that clears the way for the state to proceed with its claims that the company "addicted" young users to Instagram through deliberate design choices.
The case dates to 2023, when Vermont joined a chorus of states alleging that Meta violated consumer protection laws by incorporating features intended, as the state put it, to "cause teens to use Instagram compulsively and excessively." (One imagines the company's product designers did not describe their work in quite those terms during performance reviews.)
Meta had sought an early dismissal, arguing in part that it lacked sufficient connections to Vermont to give the state jurisdiction over the matter. Vermont's Supreme Court was unpersuaded. In a June ruling, Justice Karen Russell Carroll wrote that Instagram has teen users in Vermont, sells advertising to Vermont businesses targeting those users, and has therefore "purposefully availed itself of the Vermont social-media and advertising market."
Justice Carroll added, with the kind of directness that makes corporate lawyers wince, that Meta's business model "depends on advertising revenue" and creates an incentive to keep Vermont teenagers on the platform as long as possible.
Meta had urged the Supreme Court to review that reasoning, warning that allowing jurisdiction based on a company's "business model" would leave "nearly every large national business" vulnerable to lawsuits in all 50 states. The tech industry group NetChoice filed a supporting brief predicting "immediate and severe consequences for the internet economy."
The Supreme Court, as is its custom, offered no explanation for its decision to let Vermont proceed.
For Meta, the attention economy has apparently developed a leak.
Original story published in MediaPost: "SCOTUS Won't Intervene In Vermont Suit Against Meta"