A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and Google guilty of creating an addictive social media platform that harmed a young woman’s mental health, awarding her $3 million in damages, the first such verdict in the United States. Wednesday’s ruling after a five-week trial found Meta liable for 70 percent of the plaintiff’s damages and YouTube for the remaining 30 percent. Punitive damages, which could reach $30 million under California law, have yet to be determined.
The plaintiff, identified as Kaley, is currently 20 years old. He stated that he started using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram at the age of nine, and that he did not encounter any age verification barriers on either platform. She described spending her days on social media as a child, becoming estranged from her family, and developing anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, a condition in which she becomes obsessively preoccupied with perceived flaws in one’s appearance. She said she started using Instagram filters that changed her facial features almost as soon as she started using the platform.
The ruling comes a day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating a state consumer protection law that failed to protect children from sexual predators on its platforms. Together, the back-to-back verdicts are the first time juries have held social media companies financially responsible for the harm their products have caused to young users.
What did the jury decide?
Kaley’s lawyers argued that features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay and algorithmically selected content feeds were intentionally designed to maximize engagement, and that Meta’s internal growth targets were clearly trying to get younger users because they are more likely to stay on the platform longer. They presented testimony from Meta’s former executives and internal company investigations that showed Meta knew Children as young as 13 were using its platforms and that its products have been linked to negative mental health outcomes in adolescents.
When Mark Zuckerberg testified before a grand jury in February, he acknowledged the problem, but said he “always wished” the company had made faster progress in identifying underage users. He claimed that Meta had reached “right place in time.” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri was presented with data showing Kali’s longest single-day session on the platform lasted 16 hours. He refuses to call it addiction, calling it instead “problematic.”
Meta’s attorneys argued that while Kaley was experiencing real mental health struggles, her use of Instagram did not cause or meaningfully contribute to them. Meta said he “respectfully disagrees with the verdict” and is evaluating his legal options. Google called the case a mischaracterization of YouTube, describing it as a “responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” and said it planned to appeal.
The circumstances behind it
Kaley’s Meta was the first of more than 1,500 similar cases brought together in federal multi-district court against Google, Snap and TikTok. Both Snap and TikTok reached undisclosed settlements with Kaley before the trial began, leaving Meta and Google as the two defendants who chose to fight the case in court.
The New Mexico ruling, though legally separate, bolstered the same basic claim: Meta knew its platforms were endangering children and chose not to act. The case stems from a 2023 undercover operation by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who created a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl and quickly discovered she was exposed to sexually explicit material and predators. The jury found Meta liable on all counts, including engaging in willfully unfair, deceptive and dishonest trade practices.
Another federal trial is scheduled for June in California, and hundreds of additional cases filed by school districts and state attorneys general are lining up behind it. Legal commentators have compared the wave of litigation to the tobacco industry lawsuits of the 1990s, which resulted in a $206 billion settlement and fundamentally changed how cigarettes are sold and regulated in the United States.
What changes and what does not change
The immediate financial impact on Meta and Google is minimal. A compensatory award of $3 million, even if punitive damages raise it to $30 million, is insignificant for companies with a total market capitalization of more than $3 trillion. The $375 million New Mexico verdict is larger, but still represents a fraction of a quarter’s revenue for Meta.
The importance is personal, not financial. The Los Angeles ruling found that a jury of ordinary citizens, informed by internal documents, expert testimony and the companies’ own research, concluded that the social media platforms were intentionally designed to create addiction and that this design caused measurable harm to a specific individual. This finding will be cited in each of the 1,500 pending cases. This shifts the burden: Meta and Google now enter each subsequent trial not as defendants facing new claims, but as companies for which a jury has already held them liable.
Mike Proulx, director of research at Forrester, judges that “breaking point” between social media companies and the public. It remains to be seen whether they, too, are a tipping point in how these platforms are structured. Kaley’s attorneys have argued that harmful, endless scrolling, autoplay, algorithmic streams and recommendation systems that increase engagementnot random design choices. They are a business model. Removing them will require Meta and Google fundamentally different companiesit is something that no jury verdict, however great, can compel.
