Anyone who has witnessed a teen pick up a phone as soon as they wake up would agree that the verdict, which was handed down on a Wednesday in late March, was long overdue. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent and ordered them to pay $6 million to a young woman named Kaley in court documents. For businesses that size, the number itself is modest. It is not the meaning.
Social media companies have long been protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which acts as a sort of legal force field. We are pipes, not publishers, is how the argument always went. Anything that passes through us is a problem for someone else. Despite the mounting evidence of harm, that defense held up surprisingly well. The plaintiffs’ lack of content-related arguments made the Los Angeles trial unique. They quarreled over design.
It’s a small change, but it’s important. scroll endlessly. Play automatically. For as long as is humanly feasible, algorithmic feeds are adjusted to keep eyes fixed on glass. These are not user experience mishaps. They are decisions made during product meetings, improved by engineers, and approved by executives. In essence, the plaintiffs asked the jury to consider those options in the same way that you might consider a cigarette designed to deliver the most nicotine possible. It appears that the jury concurred.
The paper trail caused discomfort for the defendants during the trial. An internal Facebook conversation from September 2020, in which staff members joked that they were “basically pushers,” compared Instagram to a drug, and publicly expressed concern about something they called Reward Deficit Disorder, was one of the documents made public during the case. One of them used an emoji of a worried face to end a message. Somehow, it’s that detail that sticks. Six years later, a small human admission that had been typed on a workday morning appeared in a courtroom.
The fact that Snap and TikTok reached a settlement prior to the trial’s start speaks for itself. Unless you would prefer not to have your own emails read aloud to a jury, you do not write a check. Google and Meta decided to fight, and both have now declared that they will file an appeal. According to Meta, no single app can be held accountable for a teen’s mental health crisis, which is true in the strict sense and irrelevant in all other cases. Google, on the other hand, has adopted the odd stance that YouTube is not a social network—a defense that might not hold up when interacting with the typical sixteen-year-old.
As we watch this happen, it seems like we are in one of those moments that the textbooks will record in the future. The lawsuit’s structure truly does resemble the 1990s playbook, despite the tobacco analogy being used frequently and occasionally carelessly. concealed internal study. public refutations. a gradual shift in public opinion. And finally, a jury.
The real question is what will happen to persuasive design in the future. These apps are now legally vulnerable due to the features that have made them so profitable. Will Meta discreetly change the autoplay settings for users who are younger than eighteen? Will YouTube reconsider the recommendation system that has fueled the majority of its expansion? Maybe. Most likely, even in a diluted form. The more difficult question is whether the industry absorbs this ruling as a cost of doing business or if anything actually structural changes.
There are still about 1,600 plaintiffs waiting in the wings. Twenty-two more bellwether trials are scheduled. The way the stock prices moved suggests that investors think the storm can be controlled, but the legal landscape has changed. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the most addictive products of our time must now, at last, defend themselves in court.
