Landmark Jury Verdicts Find Social Media Giants Liable for Youth Harm

For decades, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, education leaders, and industry whistleblowers have warned that social media inflicts severe, long-term damage to young people’s mental well-being, contributing to a cascade of devastating harms including addiction, life-threatening eating disorders, grooming and sexual exploitation, and youth suicide. This week, for the first time in U.S. legal history, juries in two separate states have formally ruled in favor of these long-dismissed claims.

On Wednesday in Los Angeles, a jury found both Meta and Google-owned YouTube legally liable for harm inflicted on children who regularly use their platforms. In a parallel trial in New Mexico, a separate jury determined that Meta was fully aware of the risks its platform posed to children’s mental health, and intentionally concealed critical information about rampant child sexual exploitation occurring on its platforms.

Tech accountability watchdog groups, affected families, and youth advocacy organizations have widely celebrated the historic decisions as a long-overdue turning point. “The era of Big Tech invincibility is over,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project. “After years of gaslighting from companies like Google and Meta, new evidence and sworn testimony have pulled back the curtain on their harmful practices, and validated what young people and parents have been telling the world for decades.”

While it remains too early to confirm whether this week’s outcomes will lead to sweeping, fundamental changes to how social media platforms design and moderate their services for young users, the dual verdicts signal a clear shifting tide of public and legal sentiment against large tech companies. This cultural shift is widely expected to pave the way for hundreds of additional lawsuits and targeted new industry regulation in the coming years.

For years, major platform leaders have pushed a defensive narrative that any harm their platforms cause children is nothing more than an unintended byproduct: an unavoidable consequence of broader societal issues or bad actors exploiting existing safety safeguards, rather than a flaw rooted in the platforms’ own design. They have repeatedly rejected the idea that social media use itself causes lasting psychological harm to minors, and actively downplayed independent research that contradicted their public claims.

During his testimony in the Los Angeles trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether users naturally engage with a platform or product more heavily when it is intentionally designed to be addictive. He responded, “I’m not sure what to say to that. I don’t think that applies here.”