Meta and Google both vowed to appeal verdicts that were handed down by civil juries in Los Angeles County and Santa Fe, N.M., brushing off the losses as a bit of bad luck. But attorney Mark Lanier framed the surprise victory in L.A. for his client — who alleged Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive for young users — as nothing short of a cosmic triumph.
“You’ve seen the photographs of Atlas with the world on his shoulders — it’s like that weight’s been set aside,” Lanier said. “This is a righteous moment.”
Few experts believed the test case would succeed. Fewer still thought it would spark a reckoning for the tech titans this spring.
But things began to tilt on Feb. 27, the day after 20-year-old plaintiff Kaley G.M. testified in Los Angeles, when a Delaware court ruled insurers were off the hook for the defense of Instagram parent company Meta in her suit and thousands of related cases claiming social media apps hurt kids.
Then, on Tuesday, a New Mexico panel awarded $375 million in damages against Meta for child engagement. Less than 24 hours after that, 12 Angelenos delivered $6 million to Kaley G.M.
Now, some predict the constellation of rulings could change the fate of social media and rewrite the future of American tort law.
“This is what we’ve all been hoping for,” said Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation.” “If we can win on social media, I think humanity has a chance.”
A Jeremiah figure among millennial and Gen X parents for his warnings of impending social media doom and ruin, Haidt didn’t mince words when forecasting the impact of the recent court cases.
“The world is changing its thinking about this,” Haidt said. “These verdicts coming when they do are going to shift it further.”
Many legal experts agreed.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“The broader signal to the marketplace is that the shield is wearing thin,” said Peter Jackson, a privacy and cybersecurity attorney in Los Angeles. “Seeing the richest and largest companies unable to fend off a litigation like this expands the scope of plaintiffs lawyers who will be willing to mount similar cases.”
A powerful 1996 law called Section 230 has long barricaded internet platforms against most civil liability. The L.A. case tested the argument that injuries arose not from content the apps hosted but design functions engineered for maximum engagement — even if, as Kaley G.M. alleged, those designs were known to carry risks for children.
This week’s wins could unleash a barrage of new lawsuits, even if the verdicts are overturned in the appellate courts, as the companies, their supporters, and many 1st Amendment experts expect.
The Delaware decision is different. Unless it’s reversed, which isn’t as widely predicted, the cost of defending those suits now falls entirely on Meta.
“This is going to fundamentally change engagement on social media,” said insurance defense attorney Michael Coffey. “The insurance industry is going to say, ‘We’re not paying for that.’ You shouldn’t make billions and try to put the bad product cost on the insurance companies.”
Algorithms that funnel users to harmful content or keep them hooked on the platform could leave the apps exposed to expensive litigation, he and others said. Meta and Google each had multiple partners from white-shoe firms at the defense table every day for eight weeks in Los Angeles, attorneys who can command thousands of dollars per billable hour.
“Maybe the numbers were manageable today, but the precedent is not,” Coffey said of the judgment. “It’s really going to change a lot of these algorithmic-driven business models.”
The insurance law expert predicted more defensive default settings, stricter age verification, more stringent parental controls and new alerts to nudge users off the platforms will all flow from the courtroom.
Other observers warned of potentially cataclysmic consequences in court for Meta and other Silicon Valley giants.
“If you look at $3 million in damages, it’s not that much to Meta or Google, but 2,000 or 3,000 cases at a time, that’s an existential crisis,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The response from app designers could be swift and dramatic: Think universal TikTok-style censorship and aughts-era chronological scroll, experts said.
“It could just be that social media becomes totally useless,” Cohn said.
Others see the sea change as less a legal tsunami than a tidal cultural shift — one jurors in New Mexico and California are riding, not speaking into existence.
Pluralities of young users now say they spend too much time on the apps. Roughly half of teens say social media is bad for people their age, according to a study last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Parents are even more convinced, studies show.
Moms like state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), author of California’s crusading 2022 social media age restriction bill, agreed that society has hit a tipping point.
“I’ve got a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old, so I’m living and breathing it, too,” she said of the fight to keep kids off the apps. “It’s the No. 1 thing that parents talk to me at pickup and drop-off and soccer practice. It’s the thing.”
Wicks said she worked with the companies on the 2022 bill, only to see them go to war to stop it once it passed. With age-verification tied up in court, she and other parent-legislators from both parties have joined forces to push through a suite of stronger laws this year.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who was called to testify in both the L.A. and New Mexico trials, and his peers have long argued there’s no workable mechanism to root out millions of existing underage users or keep new grade-schoolers from creating accounts.
Jurors found those claims unconvincing.
“Some of his testimony was — he changed it back and forth,” said Victoria, one of the 10 jurors who voted for liability in the case, who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons. “That didn’t sit well with us.”
On Friday, the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, announced it had filed suit against Meta, TikTok, Snap and Google, as well as Discord, Roblox and X, citing reporting by The Times about the stark rise in eating disorders, depression and teen suicide to support its claim that social media’s child-addicting features and negligent design make it a public nuisance.
That suit joins hundreds of others already consolidated in federal court in California’s Northern District. The first bellwether there is set to begin in Oakland this summer.
Where school districts go, school shooting survivors could soon follow.
“Investigators can see exactly what content a platform served to a school shooter in the weeks and months before the attack,” said James Densley, criminologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University. “If we’re saying that a platform’s recommendation engine is a defective product, that digital forensic trail, which used to be just evidence of radicalization, could now be evidence of liability.”
Experts on all sides agree the awards reflect growing public anger at tech oligarchs who seem to profit off other people’s children in an era of shrinking opportunities and sharply rising costs.
“Just make the products safer,” Wicks said. “That’s what parents want, that’s what the lawmakers want, that’s what the judges want, that’s what the juries want: Make these products safer for our children.”
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