Kali Hayes,Technology journalist,
Nardine SaadAnd
Regan Morris,Los Angeles
A Los Angeles jury has awarded an unprecedented victory to a young woman who sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.
Jurors found that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, which owns YouTube, intentionally created addictive social media platforms that harmed the 20-year-old’s mental health.
The woman, known as Kaley, was awarded $6 million (£4.5 million) in damages, an outcome likely to have implications for hundreds of similar cases currently pending in US courts.
Meta and Google separately said they disagreed with the verdict and would both appeal. Meta said: “Adolescent mental health is deeply complex and cannot be tied to a single app.
“We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves as every case is different, and we remain confident in our ability to protect teens online.”
A Google spokesperson said: “This case does not include YouTube, which is a responsibly constructed streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Jurors estimated that Kaley should receive $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages because they determined that Meta and Google “acted with malice, oppression, or fraud” in the way the companies operated their platforms.
Meta will have to assume 70% of the damages awarded to Kaley, Google the remaining 30%.
The parents of other children, who are not part of Kaley’s trial but say they have also been hurt by social media, were outside the courthouse Wednesday, as they had been on several days during the five-week trial.
When the verdict came in, parents like Amy Neville were seen celebrating and hugging other parents and well-wishers who were awaiting a decision.
Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said these back-to-back verdicts highlight a “breaking point” between social media companies and the public.
In recent months, countries like Australia have restrictions imposed for children to stop or limit their use of social media. The United Kingdom currently operates a pilot program to see how a social media ban for people under 16 can work.
“Negative sentiment toward social media has been building for years, and now it has finally boiled over,” Proulx said.
During his appearance before the jury in February, Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaned on his company’s long-standing policy of barring users under 13 from accessing any of its platforms.
When presented with internal research and documents showing that Meta knew that young children were indeed using its platforms, Zuckerberg said he “always wished” for faster progress in identifying users under 13. He insisted the company had reached the “right place over time”.
Although Google, as owner of the video-sharing site YouTube, was also a defendant in the case, most of the legal proceedings focused on Instagram and Meta.
Snap and TikTok were also initially defendants, but both companies reached undisclosed agreements with Kaley before the trial.
“I stopped communicating with my family because I was spending all my time on social media,” Kaley said during her testimony.
Kaley said she was 10 years old when she began experiencing feelings of anxiety and depression, disorders she would be diagnosed with years later by a therapist.
She also became obsessed with her physical appearance and began using Instagram filters that would change her appearance – making her nose smaller and her eyes bigger – almost as soon as she started using the platform as a child.
Kaley has since been diagnosed with body dysmorphia, a condition that causes people to worry excessively about their physical appearance and prevents them from seeing themselves as others do.
His lawyers argued that Instagram features, like infinite scrolling, were designed to be addictive.
Meta’s growth goals were aimed at getting young people to use its platforms, Kaley’s lawyers said.
Drawing on testimony from experts and former Meta executives, they argued that the company sought younger users because they were more likely to stick with its platforms for longer periods of time.
Instead, he called a teenager who spends most hours of the day on Instagram “problematic.”
Kaley’s lawyers said Wednesday that the jury’s verdict “sends an unequivocal message that no company is above its responsibilities when it comes to our children.”
Another case against Meta and other social media platforms for alleged harm to children is expected to begin in June in federal court in California.