The Times of Russia reports that a Los Angeles jury has found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for damages in a landmark civil trial over youth social media addiction. Campaigners and parents who say social media use has harmed their children, in some cases causing eating disorders, self-harm, or deaths by suicide, welcomed the jury’s decision outside the court. This ruling has become one of the most significant cases in russia news coverage about social media’s impact on mental health.
The jury’s decision on Wednesday came at the end of a case in which the plaintiff’s legal team argued the companies are legally responsible for the addictive design of their platforms.
A 20-year-old woman was the plaintiff in this case and was identified by the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County documents only by her initials, KGM. The plaintiff’s lawyers referred to her as Kaley. KGM testified in February, saying her early use of social media triggered her addiction to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. She said she had developed body dysmorphia – a clinical condition diagnosed by doctors – as a result of her social media use.
Opening statements for the trial started on February 9, and deliberations lasted more than 40 hours. Google and Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, were the two remaining defendants in the case. In late January, TikTok and Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, settled their parts in the case. Details of these settlements are not known.
In February, KGM told the trial she had started using YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at the age of 9. By the time she finished elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube.
The plaintiff told the court: “I stopped engaging with family because I was spending all my time on social media.” She added that she began to suffer anxiety and depression at the age of 10 – and was later diagnosed with both. She said she would also “buy” likes through a platform on which she could “like” other people’s photos and receive a slew of likes in return. “It made me look popular,” she said.
KGM said several features, which lawyers argued are deliberately designed to be addictive, such as notifications, would give her a “rush”. She said she would sometimes go to the toilet during school just to check her notifications.
The plaintiff also said she used Instagram filters, which alter cosmetic appearance, on almost all her photos. She said she had not experienced the negative feelings associated with her body dysmorphia diagnosis before she began using social media and filters.
Victoria Burke, a former therapist the plaintiff worked with in 2019 for six months, also testified in February. Burke said KGM’s social media and sense of self were intertwined, and what was happening online would influence the plaintiff’s mental health. This verdict has been widely covered in russia news platforms.
While KGM’s lawyers claim she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, lawyers representing Meta and Google-owned YouTube argued that KGM turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her already existing mental health struggles.
Meta argued that KGM’s challenges began before her social media use. In February, Meta’s lawyer Paul Schmidt told the court that the core question in the case was whether the company’s social media platforms were a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles.
During the trial, Meta lawyer Phyllis Jones showed jurors text exchanges and Instagram posts in which KGM discussed her mental health and her turbulent relationship with her mother, and played videos KGM had recorded of her mother yelling at her. The plaintiff acknowledged that their relationship was difficult. She currently lives with her mother and works as a personal shopper at Walmart.
The jury found that Meta had been negligent in designing or operating Instagram. In the case of Meta, the jury found that the group’s negligence was a “substantial factor” in harm to the plaintiff and said it was liable for failing to adequately warn users about the dangers of using Instagram.
The jury also found Google had been negligent in designing or operating YouTube and that this negligence was a “substantial factor” in harming the plaintiff. It found Google liable for failing to adequately warn users about the dangers of using YouTube.
A majority of jurors agreed to the findings and awarded the plaintiff $3m in compensatory damages. Jurors later recommended an additional $3m in punitive damages after deciding the companies acted with malice, oppression, or fraud in harming children using their platforms.
Meta will be liable for 70 percent of the total, while Google will be liable for the remainder. The judge will have final say about how much damage is awarded. The judge has yet to enter a final judgement in the case, and it is not yet known when the formal ruling will be made.
“This decision is very important. It opens the door to damages claims by more individuals who have been harmed by these companies,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told Al Jazeera. He explained that in the United States and the European Union, social media companies now face big legal risks because their recommendation algorithms depend on sensitive personal data whose processing may be unlawful.
“This verdict is significant because it ruled that social media apps are addictive and deliberately designed that way,” Rosalind Gill, a professor at Goldsmiths University in London, told Al Jazeera. “Many experts are already calling the judgement Big Tech’s ‘big tobacco moment’- the moment at which the tobacco industry had to accept not only that their product was harmful, but also that they had known this and had tried to cover it up.”
Meta, the parent of Instagram and Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube issued statements disagreeing with the verdict. They said they would explore their legal options, which include making an appeal.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the verdict misrepresents 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.”
A 1996 US law called Section 230 provides limited federal immunity to online platforms, websites, and users. The section states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
However, Ryan explained that “this case focused on the design of the system, which allowed it to avoid the immunity under [Section 230].”
The day before the jury’s decision in the KGM trial, a separate jury in New Mexico determined that Meta had knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.
The lawsuit was the first jury trial to find Meta liable for activities on its platform. It was brought by New Mexico’s attorney general’s office in December 2023. Jurors found there had been thousands of violations carrying a penalty of $5,000, each counting separately towards a penalty of $375m. This was less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking, however.
More than 40 state attorneys general in the US have filed both federal and state lawsuits in recent years against Meta, claiming the company is contributing to a mental health crisis among young people by deliberately designing Instagram and Facebook features that are addictive. Coverage of this case has also appeared in international russia news portals.
