Juries Find Meta Liable in Two Social Media Harm Cases
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- Two US juries — one in New Mexico, one in Los Angeles — held Meta liable for a total of hundreds of millions of dollars for harming minors, with the LA jury also finding YouTube liable; both companies are appealing.
- The LA case is the first time social media has faced a jury judgment for specific personal injuries, per attorney Carrie Goldberg, who called it "the dawn of a new era" for the "defective product" legal theory long used to circumvent Section 230.
- Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month, and the New Mexico case hinged partly on E2E encryption creating risk for kids — a signal that privacy-protective features may be collateral damage.
- Eric Goldman warned that even if the verdicts are reversed on appeal, New York and California have already passed laws banning "addictive" feeds for teens, meaning regulatory pressure on platforms will continue regardless.
- Legal experts Goldman and Mike Masnick (Techdirt) flagged that smaller social networks could be sued under a vague harm standard, while LGBTQ teens and minors on the autism spectrum who rely on platforms for community could be harmed by further restrictions.
- The verdicts' best-case outcome, per Julie Angwin in the New York Times, is pressure to drop toxic features like infinite scroll and beauty filters; the worst case is chilling effects that make it harder for new platforms to launch in an already hyper-consolidated market.
Why it matters: The verdicts sidestep Section 230 by treating social media as a "defective product" — a theory that has repeatedly failed in court until now. If they survive appeal, Meta and Google may need to rework features like infinite scroll and beauty filters, while smaller platforms and marginalized users (LGBTQ teens, autistic minors) face collateral costs from restricted access or platform shutdowns.
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