A jury in the United States has found Meta Platforms Inc. and Google LLC liable for a young woman’s social media addiction, ordering the companies to pay three million dollars in damages.
The case, heard in Los Angeles, involved a 20-year-old woman identified as Kaley, who said she became addicted to YouTube and Instagram at an early age due to their attention-grabbing design.
Kaley told the court that she began using YouTube at the age of six after downloading the application on her iPod Touch to watch videos, and later joined Instagram at nine, bypassing parental restrictions.
According to her testimony, she spent extended hours on the platforms, describing her usage as “all day long,” which she said negatively affected her self-worth and social development.
She said the addiction led her to abandon hobbies, struggle with friendships and constantly compare herself to others.
During the trial, jurors heard about a month of arguments and evidence, including testimonies from Kaley and top executives of Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri.
The Chief Executive Officer of YouTube, Neal Mohan, was not called to testify.
The jury found that the companies were negligent in the design of their platforms and failed to provide adequate warnings about potential risks, particularly to minors.
It held that both firms knew or ought to have known that their services posed dangers to young users and that a reasonable platform operator would have taken steps to mitigate such risks.
Lawyers for the plaintiff described the verdict as a milestone, stating that “accountability has arrived.”
However, a spokesman for Meta said the company “respectfully disagrees” with the decision, while Google had yet to issue an official response as at the time of filing this report.
