Asian Tribune Your Multilingual Newspaper covering World and local news News
Meta and YouTube must pay millions in damages to a 20-year-old woman after a California jury found the social media giant and video streamer were designed to hook young users without concern for their well-being.
The decision, delivered Wednesday in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, could influence the outcome of thousands of similar cases accusing social media companies of deliberately harming children.
The plaintiff, identified by her initials KGM, testified that she became addicted to social media as a child and that this addiction worsened her mental health struggles. After more than 40 hours of deliberations, a majority of jurors agreed and awarded her $3 million US in damages.
Jurors later recommended an additional $3 million US in punitive damages after finding the companies acted with malice, oppression or fraud in harming children through their platforms. The judge will have the final say over how much damages are awarded.
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.
Meta, the parent of Instagram and Facebook, 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.”
A Meta spokesperson said teen mental health is “profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
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.
A jury has found Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design and operation of their platforms in a lawsuit aimed at holding them responsible for harm done to children who use their services.
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 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.
In Canada, more than a dozen Ontario school boards and independent schools are suing the parent companies of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, alleging these popular social media apps are designed for compulsive use and have rewired how students using these platforms think, behave and learn.
The allegations in the lawsuits have not been proven in court.
This week’s verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico signal a “landmark turning point in terms of where we are in the conversation” about social media harms to children, says Duncan Embury, head of litigation at Neinstein LLP, which is heading up the Ontario lawsuit.
While the U.S. verdicts won’t directly impact the Ontario case, they suggest “what juries faced with this evidence are likely or may do with it,” Embury told CBC News on Wednesday afternoon.
“It gives us confidence that what we’ve been saying all along is … something that needs to be said and something that needs to be acted on.”