Jury orders Meta and YouTube to pay $3 million in social media harm case

A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury has ordered Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube to pay more than $3 million in compensatory damages for designing social media platforms that attorneys for the plaintiff said caused severe mental health harm to a young California woman, according to a press release from the plaintiff’s law firm.

The case is described by attorneys as the first trial in a consolidated action to hold media companies responsible for their platform design choices.

Jurors found Meta 70% responsible and YouTube 30% responsible for the harm suffered by the plaintiff, identified in court by her initials K.G.M., a 20-year-old woman who testified she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9. She told the court that algorithmic content recommendations, beauty filters and push notifications led to anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts.

The jury will now move to a second phase to determine punitive damages. Jurors affirmed all questions on the verdict form finding that the two companies acted with malice, oppression and fraud.

The trial is the first in a consolidated action involving more than 1,600 plaintiffs — including families and school districts — and is expected to influence settlement negotiations in the remaining cases, as well as in a federal multidistrict litigation involving more than 2,300 pending cases in the Northern District of California, the first of which is scheduled to begin in June 2026, according to the release. TikTok and Snap, originally named as defendants, each settled their individual claims on undisclosed terms before trial.

Key evidence presented during the proceedings included internal Meta documents showing the company estimated more than 4 million users under the age of 13 were on Instagram as of 2015, representing approximately 30% of all 10- to 12-year-olds in the United States, according to the release. A Meta-sponsored study of 1,000 teenagers found that children who had experienced prior trauma were the most vulnerable to platform addiction and that traditional parental controls were largely ineffective once dependency was established. Internal communications included one employee describing Instagram as “like a drug” and referring to the company as “basically pushers,” according to plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified for approximately eight hours — the first time he has testified about child safety before a jury — and Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged that the platform’s advertising revenue model depends on user engagement, according to the release.

Plaintiff attorneys advanced the case under California product liability law, arguing that the platforms constituted defective products based on their engineered design features rather than the content users posted.