LOS ANGELES — An L.A. jury has delivered a verdict sought for years by trial lawyers around the country, ordering the parent companies of the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and the YouTube video streaming platform to pay a total of $6 million to a woman who claimed her use of those sites caused her depression and anxiety disorders.
But that verdict appears to have only further inflamed a strategy among a coalition of trial lawyers and their allied lawmakers and left-wing activists to assail social media companies in the courts, in state capitols and in Congress, following a playbook established under past action against tobacco companies, in pursuit of big paydays and new laws to regulate social media use in the U.S.
On March 25, a jury in Los Angeles County ordered Meta and Google to pay $3 million in compensatory damages to a 20-year-old woman, identified in court documents only as "Kaley G.M."
In the lawsuit, "Kaley" claimed she had developed psychological disorders as a result of her use of Instagram and YouTube, beginning when she was still a small child.
Jurors agreed that Meta and Google should be held liable.
The jurors then tacked on an additional $3 million in punitive damages, for a total of $6 million. The relatively modest dollar-for-dollar ratio of the punitive damages award likely makes the result more difficult to challenge in post-trial proceedings or on appeal.
Meta and Google said in post-trial statements that they disagree with the verdict and intend to appeal.
While the total payout from the verdict is relatively small, particularly compared to the worth of the big tech companies, who are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars a piece, the fallout from the verdict appears to only be beginning.
The trial in "Kaley G.M.'s" case marked only the first in a potential avalanche of legal actions, which collectively could be worth untold billions of dollars, or more.
Already, Meta, Google and other big tech and social media platform operators, including the owners of the TikTok and SnapChat platforms, among others, are facing thousands of similar lawsuits pending in courts in California and elsewhere.
Like the "Kaley G.M." case, all of the lawsuits have generally accused the social media companies of allegedly intentionally designing their products and platforms to addict young people, allegedly causing or fueling a raft of individual and societal harms, while boosting the profits of the social media platform operators.
More specifically, the lawsuits have claimed social media operators should be held responsible for allegedly creating a mental and behavioral health crisis among American children and teens, encouraging young people to engage in potentially harmful behaviors, while increasing dysfunction, anxiety, depression and other psychological and emotional disorders and maladies.
To this point, the social media companies have found little refuge in a provision of federal law that they have argued should have shielded them from such lawsuits. That provision, known as Section 230 of the federal Telecommunications Act, generally immunizes internet service providers and social media platforms from being held legally liable for content posted online by others using their platforms.
The social media companies had attempted to argue in past proceedings in related cases Section 230 should also prevent them from being sued for alleged harms caused by people consuming and interacting with content posted on their platforms.
However, judges have ruled such protections don't necessarily apply to the specific claims that the social media companies allegedly designed their products to amplify the alleged harmful products and feed more of it to young users, in particular, to generate "compulsive use" of social media.
In addition to the private lawsuits, states have also jumped into the fray, enacting legislation and filing lawsuits of their own, seeking civil penalties and other damages, allegedly to help the states offset the cost of addressing the alleged harms caused by social media "addiction."
Meta, Google and other operators have said they intend to continue fighting the claims, saying they are not true and based on misunderstandings of the law and technology.
However, the verdict has only amplified the calls for still more lawsuits and new laws and legislation to assail the social media companies in court and in other settings.
Even before the verdict, prominent and powerful politicians, such as California Attorney General Rob Bonta, were already comparing social media "addiction" to the harms caused by cigarette smoking and marketing in the 20th Century, and directly equating social media companies to "Big Tobacco."
In the late 1990s, in what was then a groundbreaking result of state action, America's largest tobacco companies famously agreed to pay $200 billion to settle lawsuits filed by 46 U.S. states, ostensibly to help the states deal with the health and Medicaid costs of tobacco smoking. Adjusted for inflation, that would be worth more than $400 billion in 2026 dollars.
However, tobacco companies also continued to face a blitz of private lawsuits and class actions on behalf of individual cigarette smokers, as well, who claimed the tobacco companies misled them into smoking their products and contracting lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases.
Now, trial lawyers and lawmakers alike are publicly calling for a similar litigation and legislation model to assail social media companies and potentially extract massive payouts from these companies.
In the "Kaley G.M." case, the plaintiff's lawyers, led by attorney Mark Lanier and others from the Houston-based Lanier Law Firm, routinely used language used against "Big Tobacco" companies, describing the use of social media as "addictive" and "dangerous," particularly when marketed at teens and children.
"These companies made deliberate choices that prioritized engagement and profit over the well-being of the young people using their products. This verdict sends a clear message to an entire industry that the era of operating without consequence is over,” Lanier said in a statement issued following the verdict.
In the statement, the Lanier firm further indicated it believed the verdict marked a "turning point" in the litigation proceedings over alleged "social media addiction."
"The verdict against Meta and Google is expected to significantly influence settlement negotiations and trial outcomes in the remaining cases," the Lanier firm said.
They noted that more than 2,300 lawsuits are currently consolidated in San Francisco federal court, and the first trial among those thousands of cases currently is scheduled to head to trial in June.
At the same time, prominent lawmakers have called for further action. For instance, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, of Illinois, a ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, to directly call for social media companies to be treated like "Big Tobacco." And the senator further repeated his call for Congress to pass a measure, which enjoys some bipartisan support, to repeal Section 230 entirely, and allow for direct regulation and legal action against social media operators over the content posted on their sites.
And the use of the term "Big Tobacco" was further amplified in statements issued by left-wing activist groups, such as anti-"Big Tech" advocacy group Public Citizen.
In a statement following the L.A. County verdict, Public Citizen called the verdict a "watershed moment in the fight to hold social media companies accountable for building products they knew were addictive, manipulative, and harmful to children."
And they added: "The parallels to Big Tobacco litigation are becoming harder to ignore," directly likening social media use to cigarette smoking.
