Meta and YouTube have been found liable for negligence for deliberately designing addictive products that hooked a young user and led to her being harmed, a jury ruled on Wednesday. The tech companies have also been found liable for failure to warn. The jury awarded the plaintiffs in the case compensatory damages of $3m.
It took nearly nine days of deliberations for the Los Angeles jury to reach its verdict. Jurors also awarded punitive damages, which will be decided during the next phase of the trial.
The lawsuit over social media’s alleged harm to young people was the first of its kind to go to trial.
Over the course of the six-week trial, which took place in Los Angeles superior court, jurors heard from top executives at Meta and YouTube, whistleblowers, expert witnesses on social media and addiction, and a 20-year-old woman at the center of the lawsuit, who has gone by the initials KGM for court proceedings.
KGM testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said had deleterious effects on her wellbeing. By age 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm as a result. Her social media use allegedly caused her to have strained relationships with her family and in school. When she was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, which KGM attributes to her use of Instagram and YouTube.
“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones,” Mark Lanier, KGM’s lawyer said during closing arguments last week. “These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”
KGM’s lawyers say her experience is emblematic of what tens of thousands of young people have faced on social media and in their offline lives.
“Today’s verdict is a historic moment – for [KGM] and for the thousands of children and families who have been waiting for this day,” KGM’s lawyers said in a written statement on Wednesday. “A jury of [KGM’s] peers heard the evidence, heard what Meta and YouTube knew and when they knew it, and held them accountable for their conduct. Today’s verdict belongs to [KGM].”
The plaintiffs’ arguments mirrored those brought against big tobacco in the 1990s, which focused on cigarettes’ addictive qualities and companies’ public denial despite knowledge of their products’ harms. They alleged some of the features that social media companies built into their platforms, such as an infinitely scrollable feed and video autoplay, are designed to keep people on the apps and have made the products addictive.
The jury’s verdict comes just one day after Meta was ordered to pay $375m in civil penalties in a separate lawsuit in New Mexico. In that case, the jury found the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users. The back-to-back verdicts are the first ever to find Meta liable or negligent for acts committed on its platform.
Meta has said it will appeal the ruling in New Mexico. In the California case, a spokesperson for Meta said: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options.” YouTube did not immediately return request for a comment.
Both companies have consistently denied wrongdoing. A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, has called the allegations that were brought “simply not true” and said that providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.
A Meta spokesperson has previously said in statements to the Guardian that KGM’s mental health issues were brought on by a difficult home life and social media use was not to blame. “Her records show significant emotional and physical abuse, academic struggles and psychiatric conditions, separate from her social media usage,” the spokesperson said.
This trial is the first in a consolidated group of cases brought in California against Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snap on behalf of more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including more than 350 families and 250 school districts. TikTok and Snap settled the KGM lawsuit just before trial.
KGM’s case is also the first of more than 20 “bellwether” trials, which are slated to go to court over the next couple of years and are used to gauge juries’ reactions as well as set legal precedent. The next bellwether case is scheduled to go to trial in July. A separate series of federal lawsuits with hundreds of plaintiffs making similar allegations is slated to start trial in San Francisco in June.
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