A jury found both Meta and YouTube liable in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that aimed to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children using their services, awarding the plaintiff $3 million US in damages.
After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, jurors in Los Angeles on Wednesday decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms.
The jury also decided that each company’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who says her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and exacerbated her mental health struggles.
This is the second verdict against Meta this week after a jury in New Mexico determined the company harms children’s mental health and safety, violating state law.
The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury decided the companies acted with malice, oppression or fraud. They are expected to decide on punitive damages after hearing new evidence Wednesday.
Meta and Google-owned YouTube issued statements disagreeing with the verdict and vowing to explore their legal options, which include appeals.
Google spokesperson Jose Castañeda said in the company’s statement that the case “misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on the stand
Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers’ arguments, testimony and evidence, and they heard from the plaintiff herself — identified as K.G.M. in documents, or Kaley, as her lawyers have called her during the trial — as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called to testify.
During testimony in front of a jury in Los Angeles, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back against claims that his company’s social media apps target young users.
Kaley, who says she began using YouTube when she was six years old and Instagram at age nine, told the jury she was on social media “all day long” as a child.
Lawyers representing Kaley, led by Mark Lanier, were tasked with proving that the respective defendants’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing Kaley’s harm.
They pointed to specific design features they said were designed to “hook” young users, like the “infinite” nature of feeds that allowed for an endless supply of content, autoplay features and even notifications.
Emma Duerden, a Western University associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience and Learning Disorders, outlines how social media really taps straight into teens’ developing brains.
The jurors were told not to take into account the content of the posts and videos that Kaley saw on the platforms. That’s because tech companies are shielded from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Meta, which owns Instagram, consistently argued that Kaley had struggled with her mental health separate from her social media use, often pointing to her turbulent home life.
The company also said that “not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause” of her mental health issues in a statement following closing arguments. But the plaintiffs did not have to prove that social media caused Kaley’s struggles — only that it was a “substantial factor” in causing her harm.
YouTube focused less on Kaley’s medical records and mental health history and more on her use of YouTube and the nature of the platform. It argued that YouTube is not a form of social media but rather a video platform akin to television, and it pointed to her declining YouTube use as she got older.
According to its data, she spent about one minute a day on average watching YouTube Shorts since its inception. YouTube Shorts, which launched in 2020, is the platform’s section of short-form, vertical videos that have the “infinite scroll” feature the plaintiffs argued was addictive.
Lawyers representing both platforms also consistently pointed to the safety features and guardrails they each have available for people to monitor and customize their use.
‘Historic’ case a potential bellwether
The case, along with several others, has been randomly selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, a lawyer with the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center and the counsel of record for Kaley, said during deliberations that this trial was “a vehicle, not an outcome.”
“This case is historic no matter what happens because it was the first,” Marquez-Garrett said, emphasizing the gravity of getting internal documents from Meta and Google into the public record.
The Social Media Victims Law Center and the parents who trace their children’s deaths or harms back to social media will continue to keep fighting, Marquez-Garrett said, wearing several rubber wristbands in honour of victims that have not come off since the trial began.
Large technology companies in the U.S. have faced mounting criticism in the last decade over child and teen safety. The debate has now shifted to courts and state governments. The U.S. Congress has declined to pass comprehensive legislation regulating social media.
At least 20 states enacted laws last year on social media usage and children, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization that tracks state laws.
The legislation includes bills that regulate the use of cellphones in schools and require users to verify their ages to open a social media account. NetChoice, a trade association backed by tech companies such as Meta and Google, is seeking to invalidate age verification requirements in court.
Separately, a New Mexico jury on Tuesday found Meta violated state law in a lawsuit brought by the state’s attorney general, who accused the company of misleading users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and of enabling child sexual exploitation on those platforms.
After a six-week trial, the jury found that Meta violated New Mexico’s consumer protection law and ordered the company to pay $375 million US in civil penalties.
Another social media addiction case brought by several states and school districts against technology companies is expected to go to trial this summer in federal court in Oakland, California.
Meanwhile, an additional state trial is slated to begin in Los Angeles in July, said Matthew Bergman, one of the attorneys leading the cases for the plaintiffs. It will involve Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat.
