For years, parents, doctors, and researchers have argued that the way social media platforms are built — the infinite scroll, the autoplay, the relentless notifications — is not accidental. It is engineered. Last Tuesday, a jury in Los Angeles agreed.
After a seven-week trial and nine days of deliberation, jurors at the Los Angeles Superior Court found that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, and Google's YouTube had been negligent in how they designed and operated their platforms. The ruling centred on Kaley, a 20-year-old California woman identified in court as K.G.M., who testified that she began using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram at nine. By the time she finished primary school, she had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She later developed body dysmorphia and described feeling compelled to remain online even as it worsened how she felt about herself.
The jury awarded Kaley a total of US$6 million in damages — US$3 million in compensatory damages and a further US$3 million in punitive damages — assigning 70% of liability to Meta and 30% to Google's YouTube. Two other defendants in the case, Snap and TikTok, had already settled with the plaintiff before the trial began on undisclosed terms.
Legal experts have compared the case to the tobacco industry trials of the 1990s, when courts finally ruled that cigarette manufacturers had knowingly marketed a harmful product. The same argument was made here: that Meta and Google were aware their platforms could harm young users and chose not to adequately warn them.
The case is the first in a much larger wave. Thousands of similar lawsuits — filed by families, young adults, and school districts across the United States — are currently working their way through the courts. Both Meta and Google have said they will appeal. But legal experts note that verdicts like this one rarely arrive alone — they arrive first, and then they multiply. For the tech industry, the more consequential question may not be whether this particular verdict holds, but whether the era in which platforms could harm children without consequence is quietly coming to an end.