Instagram, YouTube found guilty in lawsuits they say are aimed at child addicts

After seven weeks of trial and more than 40 hours of intense deliberations over nine days, jurors handed down a landmark decision in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, finding Instagram and YouTube to blame for the suffering of a Chico woman who sued the platform designed for new users like her in one of the most watched civil cases in the country.

Kaley GM, the 20-year-old plaintiff, arrived in court shortly before 10 a.m. wearing the same rose-colored dress she had worn to testify in February. He remained steadfast as the verdict, the $3-million punitive damages award and punitive damages award, was read. His friend who was next to him burst into tears, his chin trembling. Many observers wept silently despite repeated warnings from Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl not to respond.

“We don’t have to respond to the judge’s decision – no crying, reaction, and disruption,” Kuhl warned. “If there is, we will have to take it to court, and we don’t want to do that.”

Attorneys for Snapchat and TikTok also appeared in court Wednesday morning to hear the ruling. The two parties settled with Kaley out of court for an undisclosed amount before the lawsuit.

The decision came less than 24 hours after a New Mexico judge found Meta liable for $375 million in damages related to Atty. The claim of Gen. Raúl Torres turned Instagram into a “breeding site” for child predators—a decision the platform promised to appeal.

The Los Angeles judge took a long time to deliberate. On Friday, the jurors were on their pizza lunch break to ask Kuhl if they should all share in damages, or only those who agreed on liability. On Monday, they told Kuhl they were having trouble agreeing on one of the defendants.

Kuhl told the judge to keep trying.

Kaley said she got into YouTube and Instagram in grade school. Jurors are charged with deciding whether companies were negligent in designing their products and failed to warn of the dangers.

Their decision will join thousands of other pending cases, reshaping the legal landscape of the world’s most powerful corporations. Experts say the payment will likely put a cap on future awards.

It comes on the heels of a Delaware court ruling that clears Meta’s insurer of liability for damages in “several thousand lawsuits related to injuries caused by its platforms” – a decision that could leave it and other tech professionals at risk of unknown millions for the future.

Until this case, which began in late January, no case seeking to hold the tech titans responsible for harming children had ever reached a jury. Many are now to follow.

Kaley’s test case was chosen from among the many cases currently being consolidated in California state court. Hundreds more are joining the government program, with the first trial scheduled for June in San Francisco.

Together, the suits seek to prove that the damages did not arise from user content but from the design and functionality of the platforms themselves.

That’s an important legal distinction, experts say. Social media companies have until now been protected by a powerful 1996 law called Section 230, which shielded apps from liability for what happens to children who use them.

Lawyers for Meta and Google argued that Kaley’s difficulties were the result of her troubled home life and the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, not social media.

Phyllis Jones, right), attorney for Meta, leaves Los Angeles Superior Court on March 12.

(Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)

“I don’t think it should have been tried by a jury,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and an expert on the 1st Amendment, who also defends the platforms. “All the media are trying to keep people watching [their platform] and I’m coming back.”

Some say that social media’s algorithmic ability to capture, cultivate and control attention makes it very different from teen-friendly romance novels, Marvel movies or first-person shooters.

As the hearings that began on March 13 continued, the judges expressed similar doubts, asking to see Meta’s internal documents, and reviewing the testimony of defense experts “regarding his professional integrity; being the only doctor who said social media was not a factor in KGM’s mental health.”

They appeared to agree on Meta’s guilt on Friday, but worked on Tuesday to speed up Google’s decision, issuing their decision just after 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Their decision will likely change the already heated debate about social media addiction as a concept, what role apps play in developing them, and whether people like Kaley can prove they suffer.

Advocates of the platforms want to cast doubt on the disease – insisting that there is no official diagnosis of social media addiction – while arguing that Kaley has never been treated for it.

“Substitute the word ‘YouTube’ for the word methamphetamine,” attorney Luis Li urged jurors during closing arguments Thursday. “Ask yourself from your lifetime experience if there is anyone with an addiction problem who would say, ‘Yeah, I just lost interest.’

“He was sitting there for hours without being on his phone,” said Meta’s attorney Paul W. Schmidt.

The YouTube team also wanted to differentiate the video sharing app from Instagram and other social networks, saying that their functions are very different.

Kaley’s team called it the “gateway” to her social media addiction.

“YouTube was not a gateway to anything,” said Li. “YouTube was a toy that a child loved and put down.”

The judges didn’t agree, and ended up holding the court as guilty, although they split the bill 70-30, heavily weighted towards Meta.

Lanier leaned on his Texas slavery during the trial, telling the judge what was on his mind and writing in grease pencil on his display case. In his direct address to the judge, he used a collection of children’s wooden poles, stacks of papers, even a hammer and an egg carton.

“I got a cake – vegan vanilla. Bet it tastes bad,” Lanier said during the closing, showing off the baked goods in a metaphorical moment.

In contrast, technical teams rely on digital presentations to review evidence and illustrate their arguments.

“Focus on the facts at issue in this case,” Schmit urged the judge. “It’s not lawyers’ arguments, it’s not practical things like a glass of water or a jar of M&Ms, But the real evidence is there.”

The case was the first to get Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the witness stand, where he defended Instagram’s security record and lamented the difficulty of keeping teenagers out of the app.

It also made public tens of thousands of pages of internal documents – documents that Lanier said show companies deliberately targeting children, and building their products to last longer on the market.

“These are the internal documents that you saw specifically because you are the judge who should sit in this case,” Lanier told the judge during closing arguments on Thursday. “It’s given exposure that the world has never had.”