The Atlantic No Paywall – “After deliberating for nine days—and emerging at one point to tell the judge that it was having a difficult time reaching a decision—a jury in Los Angeles finally returned its verdict today, finding both Meta and Google liable for creating addictive products that caused a young woman’s mental-health problems. The two companies were ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages: 70 percent by Meta and 30 percent by Google. (Meta-owned Instagram played a larger role in the complaint than Google-owned YouTube, which explains the split.) This is hardly any money to either of these companies—Meta alone brought in nearly $60 billion in revenue over the last three months of 2025. But the verdict will lead others to pursue similar cases against tech companies (thousands are already pending), and possibly result in changes to the design of social-media apps. Following the verdict’s announcement, Matthew Bergman, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers and the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, sent a lengthy statement to reporters. “This verdict carries implications far beyond this courtroom,” it read in part. “It establishes a framework for how similar cases across the country will be evaluated and demonstrates that juries are willing to hold technology companies accountable when the evidence shows foreseeable harm.” A Meta spokesperson sent a shorter statement: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options.” And the Google spokesperson José Castañeda said that Google will appeal the verdict, adding, “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” The plaintiff in this case, a 20-year-old named Kaley, was referred to in case documents by her initials, KGM, because the events she was suing over happened when she was a minor. She originally filed against TikTok and Snap as well but settled with them before the trial. The core questions of the case were whether the social-media platforms had been designed to be addictive, and whether a social-media addiction could be said to have played a direct role in causing the mental-health issues that KGM experienced as a child. In her complaint, she said she had a “dangerous dependency” on the platforms and that they had contributed to her “anxiety, depression, self-harm, and body dysmorphia.”
Today’s news comes right on the heels of a verdict against Meta in another case, brought by the New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, which was announced yesterday. The jury for that trial agreed that Meta should pay a penalty of $375 million for thousands of violations of the state’s consumer-protection laws. The issue at stake there was relatively specific: The state argued that certain design and moderation choices left kids vulnerable to online predators on Meta platforms and indirectly enabled serious crimes. The facts were highly technical and, unlike the Los Angeles case, didn’t involve qualitative assessments of young people’s personal lives or thorny debates about whether social media can be addictive…”
See also WSJ Gift Article – Meta Is in Risky Legal Territory After Back-to-Back Court Losses. Social-media giants confront a potential flood of litigation challenging the design of their products…The judgments for the plaintiffs threaten to undermine long-held protections that have shielded internet companies for decades. They suggest future juries might be receptive to a product-liability argument against social media, which forms the basis of thousands of similar lawsuits waiting to be heard. And they encourage new plaintiffs to come forward, raising the prospect of mass litigation that could stretch for years and lead to settlements or changes in the industry, akin to the legal campaign against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.
