A Santa Clara County jury returned a landmark verdict Tuesday, finding Meta Platforms and Google's YouTube negligently designed addictive features that harmed a minor plaintiff identified only as Kaley — the first time a jury has reached this conclusion at trial and a decision that could fundamentally alter the legal landscape for social media companies. The jury awarded $6 million in total damages: $3 million compensatory and $3 million punitive, with Meta assigned 70 percent of fault and YouTube 30 percent. Both companies said immediately they would appeal.
The case is narrow in its facts but sweeping in its implications. Kaley began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 11, according to trial testimony from her parents. By the time she was 14, she had been hospitalized twice for self-harm behaviors that her therapists attributed, in part, to content and engagement patterns she encountered on both platforms. The plaintiff's attorneys argued that Meta and YouTube had deliberately designed recommendation algorithms, notification systems, and infinite scroll features specifically to maximize engagement time among young users — and that they knew from their own internal research that this design caused measurable psychological harm.
