A U.S. court for the first time found Meta and Google liable in a youth social media addiction lawsuit. On the 25th, a jury at a Los Angeles, Calif., trial court found that in a youth social media addiction case, Meta and Google neglected platform structures that lead users into addiction—such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations—causing devastating harm to adolescent mental health.
The jury ordered the two corporations to pay a total of $6 million (about 9 billion won) in damages. The amount combines $3 million in compensatory damages for the plaintiff's actual harm and $3 million in punitive damages. Of that, $4.2 million is to be paid by Meta and $1.8 million by Google.
The plaintiff who brought the suit is a woman in her 20s named Kaylee, who joined YouTube at age 8 and Instagram at age 9. She said she used Instagram up to 16 hours a day and suffered from depression, and in 2024 filed suit against four platforms—Meta, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok. Snapchat and TikTok exited this case through a pretrial settlement.
In this lawsuit, the plaintiff's side criticized the corporations for deliberately introducing addictive features like algorithmic recommendations and infinite scroll to keep adolescent users hooked. Meta and Google countered that the plaintiff's mental distress stemmed from an unstable home environment.
The jury sided with the plaintiff's argument that the corporations prioritized profit over protecting adolescents. Plaintiff's attorney Joseph VanZant said, "It is a historic moment in which the jury reviewed executive testimony and internal documents and proved that these corporations chose profit over children."
The legal and information technology (IT) industries compared the verdict to the wave of lawsuits against major tobacco companies in the 1990s and watched for the fallout. Currently, there are about 2,000 lawsuits nationwide in the United States related to social media addiction filed by state governments and parents against Meta, Google, and others. Cornell University Professor Sarah Krebs said, "There are hundreds in California alone and thousands in total pending," adding, "This ruling is likely to open the floodgates to numerous follow-on suits."
Meta and Google said they could not agree with the jury's decision and declared they would appeal. But experts said Big Tech corporations now face pressure to overhaul the structure of their social media platforms. Clay Calvert, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted, "If plaintiff-friendly verdicts keep coming, corporations will have to fundamentally reconsider how they design platforms and how they provide content to minors."