GoKawiilMeta lost a lawsuit against the state of New Mexico last week, marking the first time that the company has been held liable by the court system for endangering child safety. This was a landmark decision on its own — but the next day, Meta lost another case when a jury in Los Angeles found that the company knowingly designed its apps to be addictive to children and teens, therefore endangering the mental health of the plaintiff, a 20-year-old known as K.G.M.
These precedents open the floodgates for a wave of lawsuits concerning Meta’s intentional pursuit of teen users, despite its knowledge that its apps can have negative mental impacts on teens. Thousands of cases like K.G.M.’s are pending, while 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta that are similar to New Mexico’s case.
While social media platforms are legally protected so that they cannot be held responsible for what users post on their platforms, this time, it wasn’t the content on these platforms that was on trial. It was the design features themselves, like endless scroll and round-the-clock notifications.
“They took the model that was used against the tobacco industry many years ago, and instead of focusing on things like content, they focused on these addictive features — how the platform is designed, and issues with the design, which is different than content, where you have this First Amendment argument,” Allison Fitzpatrick, a digital media lawyer and partner at Davis+Gilbert, told TechCrunch. “It turned out to at least be, in these two cases, a winning argument.”
The jury in the New Mexico case, after a six-week trial, found Meta liable for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act, ordering the company to pay the maximum $5,000 per violation, totaling a $375 million fine. The Los Angeles case, which found Meta 70% liable and YouTube 30% liable for plaintiff K.G.M.’s distress, will fine the companies a combined $6 million. (Snap and TikTok settled the case before trial.)
“That’s nothing to the Metas of the world,” Fitzpatrick said. “But when you take that $6 million and you multiply it by all of the cases that they have against them, that becomes a huge number.”
“We respectfully disagree with these verdicts and will appeal,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risks leaving the many, broader issues teens face today unaddressed and overlooks the fact that many teens rely on digital communities to connect and find belonging.”
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