For the first time, a jury trial has found that social media can be considered a defective product capable of causing addiction. A legal theory inspired by the battles against Big Tobacco that could trigger a domino effect on over 2,000 pending lawsuits in the United States.
The name is Kaley. He is twenty years old, lives in Chico, California, and has just won the most important case of his life. But the story she brought to court doesn’t begin as an adult: it begins at six years old, when her mother put a smartphone in her hand and she started watching videos on YouTube. At eleven years old Instagram arrived. From that moment, she says, social media became her entire life – “all day, every day” – dragging her into a vortex of anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts.
After a seven-week trial, nine days and about 43 hours of deliberation, a Los Angeles jury determined that the spiral was more than just a personal tragedy. It was, at least in part, the result of a deliberate choice by Meta and Google.
The trial: a pilot case for thousands of cases
The ruling marks the conclusion of first jury trial ever celebrated to determine whether tech giants should be held accountable for social media addiction. This is not an isolated case: the process was chosen as “bellwether”a pilot case, i.e. connected to over 2,000 pending lawsuits filed by parents and school districts, who argue that social media giants should be considered as producers of “defective products” for hooking an entire generation to their feeds.
Snap and TikTok were initially among the defendants, but both companies reached an out-of-court settlement before the trial began, leaving Meta and YouTube as the sole defendants.
The sentence: 6 million dollars
The California jury ruled that Meta and Google must pay the woman a total of $3 million in compensatory damages and further 3 million in punitive damageswith Meta responsible for 70% of the amount.
But the monetary amount is almost secondary to the legal weight of the decision. The jurors concluded that Meta and Google acted with «malice, oppression or fraud»a formulation that in American law opens the door to much more severe sanctions. Specifically, the judge ruled that Meta will have to pay an additional $2.1 million and Google an additional $900,000 in punitive damages.
The ruling validates the new legal theory according to which social networks and their applications can cause personal injurya theory that is very reminiscent of the strategy adopted against the tobacco industry in recent decades.
Meta and Google have already said they are ready to appeal. “We disagree with the verdict and will appeal,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Adolescent mental health is deeply complex and cannot be linked to a single app.” Google has taken a similar position: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” spokesperson José Castañeda told FOX Business.
Company leaders, including Meta’s CEO, testified at the trial Mark Zuckerbergthe head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and YouTube’s vice president of engineering Cristos Goodrow. Mosseri said he believes social media use can be “problematic” but not “clinically dependent”; Goodrow testified that his own children use YouTube for hours every day and that he believes it is “a good thing” for them.
Because it is a historic ruling: the domino effect and the legal precedent
The significance of this ruling goes far beyond the $6 million awarded to Kaley. The outcome could affect thousands of similar cases against tech companies brought by parents, attorneys general and school districts. According to the Pew Research Center, at least half of American teenagers use YouTube or Instagram daily.
This verdict is bigger than a single case. “Today’s verdict is a referendum – from a jury to an entire industry – on whether accountability has arrived,” said Joseph VanZandt, co-counsel for the families and others suing the social media companies.
The decision came a day after a separate jury in New Mexico had ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect minors from online predators and for deceiving consumers about the safety of its platforms. Two verdicts in two days: a sign that American courts are starting to see Big Tech radically differently than they did just a few years ago.
The US Congress has failed to pass comprehensive legislation regulating social media. However, at least 20 states have enacted laws regarding the use of social media by minors in the last year alone. The Los Angeles ruling could speed up this legislative process, as well as influence the federal trial scheduled for summer 2026 in the Northern District of California, which will involve similar consolidated claims from school districts and parents across the country against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.
A responsibility with few doubts
What emerges most forcefully from the Los Angeles trial is, perhaps, the paradox of awareness. The condemned companies were not unaware of the risks. This is exactly the heart of the accusation: not unconscious negligence, but negligence informed. The same metrics that should have alerted Meta executives to the dangers of the product were used to make it more engaging, more difficult to abandon.
Kaley walked out of the courtroom with a favorable ruling. But outside that classroom there are millions of children who continue to scroll, collect likes, watch autoplay videos even late at night. For them, the Los Angeles ruling is only a necessary, historic first step, but still far from being sufficient to find an adequate solution to the management of social networks. However, it remains a complex topic, with many responsibilities they are clearly not just those of tech companies.
