A Los Angeles jury awarded $3 million to a 20-year-old woman who began using Instagram at age 9, finding Meta 70% liable and Google 30% liable for her mental health harm.
The verdict that changes the stakes
A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and Google liable for designing social media platforms that harmed a young woman’s mental health, awarding her $3 million in compensatory damages in the first verdict of its kind in the United States. The decision, reached after a five-week trial, assigned 70% of the liability to Meta and 30% to Google. Punitive damages have yet to be determined and could reach $30 million under California law.
The plaintiff, identified as Kaley G.M., is now 20 years old. She testified that she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, encountering no age verification on either platform. She described spending entire days on social media as a child, withdrawing from her family and developing anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. She said she began using Instagram filters that altered her facial features almost as soon as she started using the app.
What the jury heard
Kaley’s attorneys argued that features including infinite scroll, autoplay and algorithmically curated content feeds were deliberately built to maximize engagement, and that Meta’s internal growth targets explicitly aimed to attract young users because they were more likely to remain on the platform longer. Attorneys presented testimony from former Meta executives and internal company research showing that Meta knew children under 13 were using its platforms and that its products were linked to negative mental health outcomes in teenagers.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in February, acknowledging the issue but saying he had always wished the company had moved faster on identifying underage users. He maintained that Meta had reached the right place over time. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, was shown data indicating Kaley’s longest single-day session on the platform lasted 16 hours. He declined to describe that as addiction, calling it instead problematic use.
Meta’s legal team argued that while Kaley experienced genuine mental health struggles, her use of Instagram did not cause or meaningfully contribute to them. Meta said it respectfully disagrees with the verdict and is evaluating its legal options. Google described YouTube as a responsibly built streaming platform rather than a social media site and said it plans to appeal.
Addiction and the bigger picture
Kaley’s case is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation against Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok. Snap and TikTok reached undisclosed settlements with Kaley before trial, leaving Meta and Google as the two defendants that chose to contest the case in court.
The verdict arrived one day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating state consumer protection law by failing to protect children from sexual predators on its platforms. That case originated from a 2023 undercover operation by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who created a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl and found it was quickly exposed to explicit material and contact from predators. Together, the back-to-back rulings mark the first time juries have held social media companies financially liable for harms caused to young users.
Another federal trial is scheduled for June in California, and hundreds of additional cases brought by school districts and state attorneys general are lined up behind it. Legal commentators have compared the litigation wave to the tobacco industry lawsuits of the 1990s, which resulted in a $206 billion settlement and reshaped how cigarettes were marketed and regulated across the country.
What changes and what doesn’t
The immediate financial impact on both companies is limited. A $3 million compensatory award, even with punitive damages pushing it toward $30 million, is negligible for companies with a combined market capitalization exceeding $3 trillion. The New Mexico verdict is larger but still represents a fraction of a single quarter’s revenue for Meta.
The significance is precedential. A jury of ordinary citizens, presented with internal documents, expert testimony and the companies’ own research, concluded that these platforms were intentionally designed to be addictive and that this design caused measurable harm to a specific individual. That finding will be cited in every one of the 1,500 pending cases and shifts how defendants enter each subsequent trial.
The features identified as harmful infinite scroll, autoplay and algorithmic recommendation systems are not incidental design choices. They are the business model. No jury verdict, however large, can compel a company to become something fundamentally different. But this one has made the cost of staying the same considerably harder to ignore.