Business Communication Lessons from Meta/YouTube Trial
Business communication students can learn from the Meta/YouTube case for their own presentations and messages. Three examples are emotional appeal/storytelling, concrete visualization, and document discovery.
Considered a landmark case that opens paths for other suits, KGM vs. Meta (for Instagram and Google for YouTube) found companies negligent, citing defective product design causing addiction. The plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, has a reputation of theatrics in the courtroom, which we see in these first two examples. Students need to balance ethics/credibility and effectiveness for their own presentations.
Emotional Appeal/Storytelling
At the heart of this case is how kids are affected by social media, and storytelling was key. Families brought photos and a large banner with names and ages of children who died, blaming social media companies. Plaintiff attorneys also showed a large poster with hundreds of selfies KGM posted of her when she was a child. These strategies humanized the plaintiff and contrasted Mark Zuckerberg’s stoicism. As NPR reported:
At one point, the family's lawyer brought out an internal document about how Meta's staff has pushed Zuckerberg to be more empathic and relatable and more human in public appearances and, you know, not to be fake and corporate and cheesy—these are their words—you know, during events like court appearance. And Zuckerberg responded by, you know, showing some human vulnerability. He said, quote, "I think I'm actually well known to be very bad at this."
Concrete Visualization
In legal terms, “demonstrative evidence” or a “demonstrative exhibit” “explains or illustrates” testimony; it’s not direct evidence. In persuasion communication, we might call this type of evidence examples rather than, for example, data. We also encourage encourage students to make large numbers concrete.
Lanier illustrated these strategies:
As the punitive-damages phase of the trial got under way in court on Wednesday, the plaintiff’s attorney, Lanier, revealed a jar of M&Ms—415 of them. Each one represented $1 billion of the $415 billion in total stockholders’ equity of Alphabet Inc., he said. As he removed M&Ms one by one, Lanier noted how the jar barely registered a change, symbolizing how inconsequential even a ruling of $1 billion in damages would be to a company of Alphabet’s value.
This type of illustration gets attention and does clarify points but might seem cheesy in business presentations.
Discovery
Once again, this is a good opportunity to talk with students about the legal discovery process, which makes any internal emails, texts, reports, Teams content, etc. public. Perhaps the plaintiff’s strongest evidence was Meta’s own documentation that demonstrated how leaders exploited—actually, built—platforms’ features to increase addiction.
Instead of a lesson warning students about what they put in writing, we might teach them to act with integrity. If social media executives hadn’t build systems that are now proven to be addictive, then they would not have to censor what they put in writing.
Both Meta and Google are appealing the case. They will not accept responsibility. Together, the companies will pay $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages. That’s .6% of one M&M. How could students visualize that?