Addictive products of Meta, YouTube harmed young people: US jury

A jury on wednesday found both Meta and YouTube liable in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that aimed to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children using their services, awarding the petitioner $3 million in damages. After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, California jurors decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. The jury also decided each company's negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the petitioner, a 20-year-old woman who says her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and exacerbated her mental health struggles.
The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury decided the companies acted with malice, or highly egregious conduct, meaning they will hear new evidence shortly and head back into the deliberation room to decide on punitive damages. Meta and Google-owned YouTube were the two remaining defendants in the case after TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” Meta said in a statement. Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers' arguments, testimony and evidence, and they heard from the petitioner herself, identified as KGM in documents, or Kaley as her lawyers have called her during the trial, as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. YouTube's CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called in to testify.
Kaley says she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 and told the jury she was on social media “all day long” as a child.Lawyers representing Kaley, led by Mark Lanier, were tasked with proving that the respective defendants' negligence was a substantial factor in causing Kaley's harm. They pointed to specific design features they said were designed to “hook” young users, like the “infinite” nature of feeds that allowed for an endless supply of content, autoplay features, and even notifications.
Lawyers representing both platforms also consistently pointed to the safety features and guardrails they each have available for people to monitor and customise their use. The case, along with several others, has been randomly selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.