Jury verdicts are meant to speak the truth, and today’s verdict in a California courtroom spoke the truth about the pernicious effects of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube on young people in the United States and around the world. The jury found two social media giants, Meta and YouTube, responsible for injuries incurred by a 20-year-old woman over the course of her childhood.
The plaintiff, referred to in court as KGM, claimed that her social media use had begun when she was six years old. Her suit alleged that the sites she regularly used had features designed to hold her attention and keep her coming back.
It detailed injuries, including body dysmorphia and thoughts of self-harm, that it attributed to those features.
Judgements of responsibility in cases like the one brought against Meta and YouTube are necessarily complex. And critics of the judgment in this case will no doubt howl about greedy plaintiffs looking to make a haul from deep-pocketed defendants and runaway juries who let sympathy guide them.
However, it seems clear that companies knew of the addictive qualities of their sites and the potential damage to young people. They apparently chose to ignore what was evident to them and people like KGM have paid the price.
The Los Angeles jury did not ignore the evidence of such negligence. Good for them.
And this may be just one moment in a sea of legal trouble that awaits Meta and YouTube in the wake of the verdict. As the New York Times reports: “Eight other cases brought by individual plaintiffs are slated to go to trial there. A set of federal cases brought by states and school districts in Oakland, California, at the US district court of northern California, are scheduled for jury trials this summer.”
The destructive effects of platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube have been well-documented. A report from Brown University puts it this way: “Social media is addicting. When you’re playing a game or accomplishing a task, you seek to do it as well as you can. Once you succeed, your brain will give you a dose of dopamine and other happiness hormones, making you happy.”
“The same mechanism,” the report continues, “functions when you post a picture to Instagram or Facebook. Once you see all the notifications for likes and positive comments popping up on your screen, you’ll subconsciously register it as a reward.”
This addictive effect is particular powerful for young people, the vast majority of whom spend many hours a day using social media.
“Social media sites,” the Brown report says, “provide tools that allow people to earn others’ approval for their appearance and the possibility to compare themselves to others. It can be associated with body image concerns. The ‘selfieholics’ and people who spend most of their time posting and scrolling are the ones most vulnerable to this.”
Other countries have recognized these dangers and acted decisively. Australia barred children under 16 from using social media last December. Several other countries are considering similar bans.
In this country, we are a long way from doing anything like that.
The closest that we have come was in 2024 when Vivek H Murthy, then the surgeon general of the United States, issued an advisory. He concluded that social media usage poses a “profound risk of harm” to young people.
Writing in the New York Times, he said: “Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours.”
Murthy proposed that social media companies be required to put “warning labels” on their sites.
But with the change in the administration in Washington, that idea died. Under the Trump administration, social media executives have had outsized influence in resisting such reforms.
Ironically, the same day that the Los Angeles jury found his company liable for the damage it did to a young woman, the US president appointed Mark Zuckerberg to the president’s council of advisers on science and technology. As Reuters notes: “The latest appointments signal closer alignment between the administration and major technology companies.”
That is why the Los Angeles jury verdict is so important. In that courtroom, their money and power could not buy influence.
Zuckerberg learned that the hard way when he took the witness stand last February. He was subject to a tough examination by the plaintiff’s lawyer and made to confront the kinds of things his products may lead young people to do.
The New York Times reports that the lawyer and six other people “unrolled a 50-foot collage of selfies K.G.M. had posted on Instagram, many of them with beauty filters. He asked Mr. Zuckerberg if Meta ever investigated her account for unhealthy behavior. Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t answer that question.”
Even more damning were the documents and emails that showed Zuckerberg and his colleagues ignoring warnings from their own employees who wanted to do more to protect young users of their platforms. That is not surprising since, as the Times explains, “Meta has long wrestled with how to attract and retain teenagers, who are a core part of the company’s growth strategy.”
The jury verdict is not the first time Zuckerberg has been made to face the consequences of a strategy that seems to put profits over people. During a 2024 congressional hearing, Senator Josh Hawley invited him to stand, face and apologize to parents who believed that social media usage contributed to their children’s deaths.
The monetary verdict that the jury has imposed may hurt Zuckerberg less than that apology. But a jury of his peers sent a clear message to him and other tech titans.
In a court of law, they will be judged not for who they are, but for what they do. We should all take comfort from that fact.
Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
