A California state jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark social media case on Wednesday, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages to a plaintiff who brought the case and putting the Instagram maker’s liability at 70% and the Google company’s at 30%.
The jurors later decided to award a total of $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta to pay $2.1 million and YouTube $900,000. The verdict was reached on the jury’s ninth day of deliberation.
A 2023 complaint accused social media companies of fueling an unprecedented mental health crisis for American children through “addictive and dangerous” products. Plaintiffs accused the companies of deliberately tweaking their products to exploit kids’ undeveloped brains to “create compulsive use of their apps.”
The civil case was brought by several plaintiffs against several companies, but this state court trial, which featured testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, involved a plaintiff described by her initials as “K.G.M.” in court papers against Instagram and YouTube.
In the 2023 complaint, K.G.M. said she was a 17-year-old in California who started using social media at a much younger age, though her mother told her not to and used third-party software to try to prevent the daughter’s social media use. The complaint alleged that the corporate defendants designed their products in ways that let kids evade parental controls and that the companies knew, or should’ve known, that K.G.M. was a minor.
The plaintiff alleged that Instagram’s and other companies’ addictive designs led her to develop “a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop” and to see “harmful and depressive content, urging K.G.M. to commit acts of self-harm, as well as harmful social comparison and body image.”
She alleged that she suffered bullying, depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia through Instagram and that Meta did nothing in response to a report about it. “Meta allowed the predatory user to continue harming minor Plaintiff K.G.M., including through the use of explicit images of a minor child,” the complaint said, adding that the company’s “defective reporting mechanisms and/or deliberate failure to act caused emotional and mental health harms to K.G.M. in addition to and separate from any third-party conduct.”
The companies, which have denied wrongdoing, said Wednesday that they plan to appeal.
Jillian Frankel contributed from Los Angeles.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.