Judgement Day For Social Media?
A jury in Los Angeles has just found Meta and Google liable for harming a teenage girl's mental health. It’s too early to say what the ramifications will really be – there will inevitably be appeals, for one thing – but if it sticks it’s a judgement that will affect not just the thousands of similar cases already pending, but likely bring a wave of others.
The companies were ordered to pay $3 million in compensation and the same in punitive damages, split 70/30 between Meta and Google respectively. That’s a lot of money for the complainant, though it’s almost nothing to the companies: Meta, in the last 3 months of 2025, brought in $27 million every hour. But it surely opens a door that lawyers and child-safety advocates have been pushing against for years, and it might just mark a turning point for social media and our relationship with it (for which you could read “the way it treats its customers”).
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy some social media, but as a rule I don’t do the forever scrolling, and I don’t look at the comments, the ads, the autoplay videos, the flags, notices, push messages and sponsored pages that are constantly crying, maddeningly, for our attention. And those are all very much at the centre of this court case. Debate has long been about the question of harmful posts, and how much responsibility the platforms have for things people do post (Meta, for instance, cannot be sued for a bullying comment posted on Facebook). But this case was different: it asked if the platforms themselves were, by their very nature, dangerous and addictive.
Actually, although the plaintiff here (a 20-year-old referred to only as KGM) won the argument, hers was not even the clearest case. In her complaint, she described a "dangerous dependency" on social media platforms that contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and body dysmorphia. But Meta's lawyers pointed out that she had other problems in her life (including a difficult relationship with her mother, and an older sister with an eating disorder), and while one former therapist said social media was a contributing factor to her condition, another said it had rarely come up in their sessions. Meta's argument was that these are all things that could also cause KGM’s problems, and that the plaintiff's team had failed to show that KGM’s life without Instagram would have been "meaningfully different."
The fact that the jury disagreed, even in such complicated circumstances, perhaps shows that society increasingly feels a line has been crossed. The two core questions were: whether Instagram and YouTube had been deliberately designed to be addictive, and whether that addiction had directly caused KGM's mental-health problems. The Judge ruled that, because of certain design features (like the ones I mentioned earlier), Instagram and YouTube were not just platforms for other people’s content but products themselves, deliberately engineered to maximise engagement without care for the user, without adequate warnings. That made them fair game for investigation and possible prosecution under product liability law.
The big analogy everyone has been making is with the campaigns against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, which ultimately produced massive settlements and regulatory changes. The case against social media can never be so clear-cut: without an actual chemical substance having measurable effects on the brain, it will be harder to settle the questions about addiction, harm, and corporate responsibility.
That said, it arguably makes the job of proving that they don’t cause those problems harder too, which leaves the whole thing more in the domain of the court than of science. And this verdict, while only a beginning and still subject to appeal, is a huge one, showing that the law (and the juries who serve it) are leaning towards enough-is-enough; with other large cases on similar lines already in train, this might be the year that changes social media forever.
