by Vani Sanganeria | EdSource

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A jury in Los Angeles County issued a landmark verdict on Wednesday, finding Instagram owner Meta and YouTube owner Google liable for harming a 20-year-old woman who alleged the platforms designed features to addict children and harm mental health, awarding $3 million in damages.

The jury deliberated for over 40 hours across nine days, finding that the companies acted with malice or highly egregious conduct, and will hear new evidence to decide on punitive damages. The trial involved defendants Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google, which owns YouTube, after TikTok and Snap settled before the trial.

Lawyers representing the lead plaintiff, who is identified as Kaley, and said she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, argued the platforms’ negligence and designed features hooked young users like Kaley and significantly harmed her mental health. In response, Meta argued that “not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause” and pointed to Kaley’s difficult home life as the cause of her mental health issues.

The case had been considered a bellwether, or test case, for how juries would respond to arguments in multiple lawsuits alleging harms from social media platforms nationwide.

“This is a monumental inflection point in social media,” Matthew Bergman of the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents more than 1,000 plaintiffs in lawsuits against social media companies in the U.S., told Associated Press before the verdict.

“When we started doing this four years ago, no one said we’d ever get to trial,” Bergman said. “And here we are trying our case in front of a fair and impartial jury.”

The Los Angeles verdict follows a day after a jury in New Mexico found that Meta harmed children’s mental health, imposing a $375 million penalty in that case.

Vani Sanganeria covers student health and wellbeing as EdSource’s Local News Fellow, a partnership with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.