Meta and Google blamed for woman’s social media addiction and told to pay her $3,000,000
Meta and Google have been found liable for a woman’s social media addiction in a landmark case.
The case in Los Angeles involves a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram at a young age because of their attention-grabbing design.
Identified only as Kaley during the trial, she described how she began using YouTube at six, downloading the app on her iPod Touch to watch videos about lip gloss and an online kids game.
Kaley joined Instagram at nine, getting around a block her mother had put in place to keep her off the platform, and was on social media ‘all day long’, she said.
She told jurors that her near-constant social media use ‘really affected my self-worth’, saying the apps led her to abandon hobbies, struggle to make friends and constantly measure herself against others.
Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers’ arguments and evidence, and they heard from Kaley herself, as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri.
YouTube’s chief executive, Neal Mohan, was not called to give evidence.
A jury found the tech giants were negligent in the design of both apps and failed to warn about their dangers.
They ordered the companies to pay $3 million in damages – opening the door to potentially far larger punitive awards as thousands of similar cases progress.
Jurors also found that both companies knew or should have known their services posed a danger to minors, that they failed to adequately warn users of that danger, and that a reasonable platform operator would have done so.
‘Accountability has arrived,’ lawyers for the plaintiff said in a statement.
A spokesman for Meta said they ‘respectfully disagree’ with the verdict. Google did not have an immediate comment.
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 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.
The jurors were told not to take into account the content of the posts and videos that Kaley saw on the platforms, because tech companies are shielded from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Meta consistently argued that Kaley had struggled with her mental health separately from her social media use, often pointing to her turbulent home life.
The company also said ‘not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause’ of her mental health issues in a statement following closing arguments.
But the plaintiffs did not have to prove that social media caused Kaley’s struggles, only that it was a ‘substantial factor’ in causing her harm.
YouTube focused less on Kaley’s medical records and mental health history and more on her use of YouTube and the nature of the platform.
They argued that YouTube is not a form of social media, but rather a video platform akin to television, and pointed to her declining YouTube use as she got older.
According to their data, she spent about one minute a day on average watching YouTube Shorts since its inception.
YouTube Shorts, which launched in 2020, is the platform’s section of short-form, vertical videos that have the ‘infinite scroll’ feature the plaintiffs argued was addictive.
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 affect the way thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.
The jury panel assigned Meta 70% of the responsibility for the plaintiff’s harm – a $2.1 million share of the compensatory award – and YouTube the remaining 30%, or $900,000.
Jurors further found that both companies had acted with malice, oppression or fraud, a finding that sets the stage for a separate punitive damages phase.
The trial was one of several that social media companies face this year and beyond.
They are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether the companies make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.
Some experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see outcomes similar to those of cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.
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