Have We Just Witnessed A Historic Moment For The Future Of Social Media?

A trial that largely flew under the radar could prove to be a game changer.

A California jury found Meta and YouTube (owned by Google) liable for negligence, ruling that the design of their apps harmed children. The two companies were ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages to the plaintiff, Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old woman who argued that these platforms contributed to her severe addiction and declining mental health.

What gives this case its potentially historic significance is the plaintiff’s lawyers’ strategic brilliance. Unlike their predecessors, they did not challenge the two companies over the content posted on their platforms. Doing so would have inevitably run into Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields digital services from legal liability for user-generated content.

Instead, they argued that the design of these services was inherently defective and that their creators failed to adequately warn users about the associated risks. By targeting product design, they not only sidestepped Section 230 by moving further upstream in the value chain, but also addressed the root of the problem posed by social media. The issue is not so much that human beings sometimes say outrageous things, something they have always done, but rather that social media platforms (i) encourage such behavior and (ii) amplify it far more than reasonable discourse.

This process of inciting outrage is not accidental; it is deliberately designed and coded into the product. It is what underpins the now well-known distinction articulated by activist Tristan Harris between freedom of speech, which allows anyone to say harmful things online, and freedom of reach, which reflects social media platforms’ deliberate strategy of amplifying such toxic expression to maximize user engagement and, ultimately, monetization.

The legal strategy pursued by Kaley G.M.’s attorneys is all the more compelling because it strikes at the very heart of the unhealthy and anti-civic logic of what are, in reality, anti-social media: Exploiting the lowest human instincts to generate record revenues. Social media platforms, as they have been designed since their emergence in the mid-2000s, are inherently dangerous. This is not a flaw – it is their core purpose.

Executives at these companies would have us believe that users themselves are the problem, a view implicitly supported by Section 230, which protects platforms from users’ excesses while offering no protection to users from the platforms’ own. The Los Angeles trial sets the record straight: Without constant amplification, the worst content would remain marginal. Disguised as neutral hosts under Section 230, social media platforms are exposed by this ruling as operators of harmful products. They are not merely distributors of content; they make editorial choices. What has long been technically obvious is finally beginning to be legally recognized.

For that reason, this case is, in my view, more significant than the one lost by Meta just days earlier in New Mexico. In that case, another jury found that the company led by Mark Zuckerberg had failed to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms. Jurors concluded that the company knowingly exposed minors to sexually explicit content and engaged in deceptive practices. While this was the first verdict so explicit on the matter – and it clearly confirmed that Meta prioritizes growth over the protection of underage users, despite being aware of the risks -, I do not believe it carries the same potential, in terms of legal theory, as the Los Angeles verdict.

It is, of course, too early to determine whether this ruling will set a precedent or what impact it will have on product design decisions across the industry. What is clear, however, is that more than 3,000 similar lawsuits against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube are currently pending in California courts alone, with over 2,000 more in U.S. federal courts. The stakes are therefore considerable, and the issue will almost certainly make its way, sooner or later, to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Have we just seen the early signs of a regulatory shift comparable to those experienced by the tobacco industry and the opioid sector? At this stage, one can only hope so. It would be all the more symbolic if such a shift were driven by citizen juries stepping in to protect their children, doing what political leaders have failed to accomplish over the past two decades.

In a sense, it would amount to grassroots regulation of companies that have long believed themselves to be above it all.