Jury’s in on social media

California and New Mexico juries issued multimillion-­dollar verdicts against social media platforms that negligently harmed users through addictive features. The bellwether cases may portend broad liability for the companies on the scale faced by tobacco companies and opioid manufacturers in recent years.

On March 24, an Albuquerque jury found Meta, parent company to Facebook and Instagram, liable for $375 million in a 2023 case brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Investigators posing as children documented sexual solicitations they received and Meta’s response. Torrez sued the outsized company under a state law barring unfair and deceptive trade practices.

The following day, a Los Angeles jury returned a verdict against Meta and Google, awarding $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to a 20-year-old woman known in court documents as Kaley G.M. Lawyers contended that Kaley—who began using YouTube at 6 and Instagram at 9—suffered severe emotional problems as a result of the companies’ negligence.

In both cases, the challengers skirted a federal law that immunizes internet platforms from liability for content posted by users by attacking the companies’ design of the platforms. Features claimed to be especially addictive and damaging to youth included infinite scrolling, auto-play videos, and algorithms that drive users deeper into destructive content.

Both companies have said they would appeal their respective verdicts.

In a post on X, Jonathan Haidt, a social-psychologist at NYU-Stern and critic of children’s access to social media, called the California verdict a “commonsense” result. “A jury affirmed what parents have long known: Meta and YouTube were designed to exploit young people, with devastating consequences,” Haidt wrote. “The companies knew they were harming children by the millions—and did it anyway.”

But a leading free speech advocacy organization, the Foundation for Indi­vidual Rights and Expression, criticized penalizing companies for what it contends are editorial choices protected by the First Amendment. In a post on X, FIRE’s Nico Perrino pointed to Kaley’s early and near-continuous use of social media and asked, “Where were the parents?”

Decency debate

In March, a U.S. Senate committee used the 30-year anniversary of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to return to criticism of its impact. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz sounded the familiar charge of censorship. “If you disagree with a particular view, Big Tech doesn’t answer that with more speech,” said Cruz. “They simply make the view they disagree with disappear, and they silence you.” Ranking Democrat Sen. Brian Schatz sounded a common theme of Democrats, calling out the companies that “used Section 230 as an excuse to avoid taking meaningful action to protect users, but especially kids.”

Matthew Bergman, the attorney who successfully obtained the verdict against Meta and Google for social media addiction, argued against repeal of Section 230. “Courts would still have the opportunity to apply time-tested First Amendment jurisprudence to determine the extent to which those claims implicate protected speech and in which cases they don’t,” he said.