A California jury has found Meta and Google liable for hooking a young woman on social media as a child, awarding her $6 million in a landmark verdict that could reshape how tech giants design their platforms for young users.

The verdict, handed down Wednesday (March 25) at Los Angeles Superior Court, marks the first time a jury has held social media companies accountable for engineering their platforms to be addictive to children. According to NPR, the jury awarded the plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta responsible for 70% of the total.

The plaintiff, identified only as KGM or Kaley, is a 20-year-old from Chico, California. She said she began using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age 11. As she got deeper into the apps, she testified, she developed depression and body dysmorphia, constantly comparing herself to others and relying on beauty filters to change how she looked. She said she would sneak away to the bathroom at school just to check how many "likes" her posts had received.

Snapchat and TikTok were originally named in the case but settled with Kaley before the trial began.

A New Legal Strategy

For decades, tech companies have avoided lawsuits by leaning on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being held responsible for what users post. This time, lawyers took a different approach — targeting not the content on the platforms, but the way the platforms were built.

Features like infinite scroll, push notifications, autoplay videos, and beauty filters, the legal team argued, turned apps like Instagram and YouTube into what they called a "digital casino" that young people couldn't put down.

Lead trial attorney Mark Lanier put it bluntly during the trial: "How do you make a child never put down the phone? That's called the engineering of addiction."

Internal documents shown to the jury revealed that Meta executives, including CEO and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, were aware of the platforms' pull on children. One internal memo read: "If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." Another document showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to return to Instagram as users of competing apps — even though Meta's minimum age requirement is 13.

On the witness stand, Zuckerberg maintained that protecting young users has always been a company priority. "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?" he said.

Reactions From Both Sides

After the verdict was read, co-lead plaintiff attorney Joseph VanZandt issued a statement calling the decision a turning point. "Today's verdict is a referendum — from a jury, to an entire industry — that accountability has arrived," he said.

Lanier said he had hoped for a larger financial penalty, but expressed confidence in the process. "I trust the system and trust people to assess what's right and best," he told reporters outside the courtroom.

One juror, who gave her name only as Victoria, said the panel wanted the companies to feel the weight of their decision. "We wanted them to feel it," she said. "We wanted them to realize this was unacceptable."

Both Meta and Google vowed to appeal. In a statement, Meta said teen mental health is "profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," adding that the company is confident in its record of protecting young users online. Google spokesman José Castañeda pushed back on how the case characterized YouTube, saying, "This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site."

Part of a Much Bigger Fight

As noted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), this verdict is the first of many expected in a wave of litigation targeting social media companies. More than 2,000 similar lawsuits have been filed by teens, parents, school districts, and state attorneys general across the country. The Los Angeles case served as a bellwether — a test case meant to signal how juries may rule in other trials.

The outcome comes just one day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he will also ask the court to force Meta to redesign its apps to make them safer for children.

"Juries in New Mexico and California have recognized that Meta's public deception and design features are putting children in harm's way," Torrez said Wednesday (March 25).

The legal battle has drawn comparisons to the 1990s tobacco lawsuits that forced cigarette companies to stop targeting minors in their advertising. Lawyers involved in the social media cases say the Los Angeles verdict signals that major industry changes may be on the horizon.

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