What happened to social media?
Where do we start? Lots of things. But to be more specific, this week social media companies suffered a major loss.
A jury in the Los Angeles handed down a landmark ruling on social media and addiction, with Meta and YouTube, which is owned by Google, being found liable for harm caused by the design of their products.
This is being described as social media’s “big tobacco” moment, holding the companies raking in billions of dollars to account for intentionally building addictive social media platforms that caused harm to its users.
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At the heart of the case was the allegation that features of the platforms, such as the infinitely scrolling feed and video autoplay, have made the products addictive.
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The 20-year-old plaintiff, referred to as KGM, said she became addicted to YouTube at the age of six and to Instagram at nine-years-old.
[ Meta and Google case: Is this social media’s ‘big tobacco’ moment? ]
She told the court how this had affected her from her mental health to her relationships with her family and in school. At 10, she was depressed and engaging in self-harm. She was later diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia.
The original filing included other social media companies, but Snapchat owner Snap settled before the case got under way and TikTok also struck a last-minute deal.
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The six-week trial saw tech executives such as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri take to the stand, to defend their respective companies, alongside whistleblowers and other experts.
That led to gems such as Mosseri’s characterisation of KGM’s reported 16 hours of social media use in a day as “problematic” rather than addictive.
What did the ruling say?
The case, which took nearly nine days of deliberation for the jury to reach a verdict, found the companies liable for negligence for deliberately designing addictive products and for a failure to warn users.
Meta bore 70 per cent of the responsibility, the jury found, allocating 30 per cent to YouTube.
Sounds like there could be serious consequences for social media giants
Indeed. The California trial is just the first in a series of legal actions lined up against the social media companies in the US; lawyers picked the strongest cases and took these to court, with KGM’s case the first of about 20 bellwether actions.
Separately, Meta was this week ordered to pay $375 million (€325 million) in civil penalties in New Mexico after a jury ruled the company had misled consumers about platform safety and enabled child sexual exploitation.
How did we get here?
It has been a long time coming. Social media companies are no strangers to court actions, but this case concentrated on how the platforms are designed rather than the content published on them. That meant the legal protections that they may have relied on in other cases in the US – section 230 of the Communications Act – did not apply.
How much will this cost the companies?
Legal fees aside, the jury awarded KGM $3 million in compensatory damages, with a further $3 million in punitive damages.
Seems low?
In the context of either company’s revenues, this award is barely a blip. However, campaigners are hoping this will be a watershed moment, forcing change and making big tech companies take responsibility for their products.
So is that an end to it?
Unlikely. This case could drag on through the appeals system for some time. Meta said it was exploring its legal options; YouTube has already announced its intention to appeal.
Regardless, the verdict recognises something that tech companies have shied away from: that technology can be addictive. That opens a whole can of worms that the tech giants would rather have stayed closed.
This is just the first of a series of cases that have been filed against the social media companies, alleging they are responsible in some way for addiction.
There will inevitably be others to follow. Besides the cases in the US, Australian law firms are also investigating the possibility of filing legal cases against the social media companies. That follows a ban on social media use for under-16s there.
