Meta’s Instagram and Google-owned YouTube must pay millions in damages after a Los Angeles jury found that their platforms are harmful to children’s mental health, delivering what the court characterized as a landmark trial over alleged social media addiction.
The jury’s finding came after more than 40 hours of deliberations in the lawsuit brought by a 20-year-old woman identified by her initials, KGM, who testified that she became addicted to social media as a child and that the addiction worsened her mental health struggles. The jury ultimately found both companies liable and imposed a $375 million penalty, according to the verdict described by the Associated Press.
Jurors also decided the companies had acted with malice, oppression or fraud in harming children through their platforms, and they recommended additional punitive damages on top of the $3 million in compensatory damages. The judge has final authority over how much damages are awarded, including any amount from the punitive damages recommendations.
The case sharpened the questions facing plaintiffs’ lawyers in other pending lawsuits involving social media companies and child safety online. The AP reported that California’s verdict could influence thousands of similar claims, and it described the decision as the second verdict against Meta in the same week, after a New Mexico jury found the company harms children’s mental health and safety in violation of state law.
After the verdict, Meta and YouTube issued statements disputing the result and saying they would pursue legal options that include appeals. Google spokesperson Jose Castañeda said the verdict misrepresented YouTube as “which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” A Meta spokesperson said teen mental health is “profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
The trial featured testimony from the plaintiff, along with testimony from Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri; YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called to testify. The plaintiff told the jury that she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, and she said she was on social media “all day long” as a child.
Jurors heard arguments from the plaintiff’s lawyers, led by Mark Lanier, that features such as “infinite” feeds, autoplay, and notifications were designed to “hook” young users. The jury was also instructed not to consider what content the plaintiff viewed, citing legal shielding for posts and videos under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Defense attorneys argued against a direct link between the platforms and the plaintiff’s mental health. Meta argued that her mental health struggles were not connected to her social media use and said “not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause.” YouTube, for its part, argued that it is more like a video platform than a social media platform and pointed to her declining YouTube use as she aged, describing her average viewing of YouTube Shorts as about one minute a day since the feature’s launch in 2020.
Jurors also divided responsibility between the companies, finding Meta bore 70% of the responsibility while YouTube bore 30%, a split that was reflected in the punitive damages breakdown of $2.1 million for Meta and $900,000 for YouTube. Only nine of the 12 jurors had to agree on each claim against each defendant, and the jury agreed on all seven claims against each company despite two jurors consistently disagreeing with the majority on liability.
Speaking after the verdict, one juror who did not feel comfortable sharing her full name said Zuckerberg’s testimony “changed it back and forth” and “did not sit well” with the jury. She also said jurors landed on $6 million in damages even though some jurors were advocating for a higher amount, and she said the jury still wanted the companies to understand its practices were unacceptable, saying: “We wanted them to feel it.”
Legal analysts said the decision is likely to be treated as a bellwether even if changes to the platforms are not immediate. Peter Ormerod, an associate professor of law at Villanova University, called the verdict “a momentous development” but said it was “just one step in a much longer saga,” adding that he did not expect large changes immediately and that Meta and YouTube would likely have to lose their legal arguments on appeal and in subsequent bellwether trials for significant shifts to occur.
Separately, Sarah Kreps, a professor and director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, said the case’s importance comes from its wider implications: “The reason why this case is consequential is not the individual case, but the way that it’s a bellwether test case that might guide the resolution of other lawsuits.” She noted that thousands of lawsuits were pending and that the verdict could be an inflection point similar to earlier analogies in other industries, saying it “opens the floodgates for so many more” when one case produces a verdict of this kind.