Two of America’s biggest tech companies suffered a stunning court defeat this week, continuing to shake up what could be a sea change in the way social media operates amid a new climate of legal risk.
Meta and Google both vowed to appeal the rulings issued by civil judges in Los Angeles County and Santa Fe, NM, dismissing the loss as a minor setback. But the lawyer Mark Lanier made a surprise victory in LA for his client – who said that Instagram and YouTube are designed to be addictive for new users – as a cosmic success.
“You’ve seen pictures of Atlas with the world on his shoulders — it’s like a weight has been lifted,” Lanier said. “This is the right time.”
Few experts believe that the test case will succeed. Few still thought it would cause a major tech countdown this spring.
But things began to tilt on February 27, the day after 20-year-old plaintiff Kaley GM testified in Los Angeles, when a Delaware court ruled that insurers were not there to defend Instagram’s parent company Meta in her suit and thousands of related lawsuits alleging the social media apps harmed children.
Then, on Tuesday, a New Mexico panel awarded $375 million in damages against Meta for the child’s involvement. Less than 24 hours later, 12 Angelenos brought $6 million to Kaley GM
Now, some predict a flurry of decisions could change the fate of social media and rewrite the future of American harassment law.
“This is what we’ve all been waiting for,” says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation.” “If we can win on social media, I think humanity has a chance.”
A Jeremiah figure among millennial parents and Gen Xers for his warnings about the doom and gloom of social media, Haidt didn’t mince his words when predicting the impact of recent court cases.
“The world is changing its thinking about this,” Haidt said. “These decisions come when they are about to forward it.”
Many legal experts agree.
Attorney Mark Lanier and his team arrived at the Los Angeles County Superior Court for the latest hearing regarding his client’s alleged social media addiction.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
“The broad signal in the market is that the shield is on,” said Peter Jackson, a privacy and cybersecurity attorney in Los Angeles. “Seeing the wealthiest and largest companies unable to withstand a case like this increases the range of plaintiffs’ lawyers who will be willing to file similar cases.”
A powerful 1996 law called Section 230 has long insulates online forums from most liability. The LA case examined the argument that harm does not come from the content of hosted applications but from activities designed for high interaction – even if, as Kaley GM said, those designs were known to carry risks for children.
This week’s win could usher in a flurry of new lawsuits, even if the rulings are overturned in appeals courts, as the companies, their supporters, and many 1st Amendment experts expect.
The Delaware decision is different. Barring a reversal, which is widely unforeseeable, the cost of defending those suits now falls squarely on the Meta.
“This is going to revolutionize communication on social media,” said insurance attorney Michael Coffey. “The insurance industry will say, ‘We don’t pay for that.’ You don’t have to make billions trying to pass the cost of a bad product on to insurance companies.”
Algorithms that expose users to harmful content or keep them connected to the platform can leave apps exposed to expensive lawsuits, he and others say. Meta and Google each had multiple white-shoe corporate partners at the defense table every day for eight weeks in Los Angeles, lawyers who can pay thousands of dollars per billable hour.
“Maybe the numbers were manageable today, but what’s happening is not happening,” Coffey said of the decision. “It’s really going to change a lot of these algorithmic-driven business models.”
The insurance law expert predicted automatic security settings, stricter age verification, stronger parental controls and new notifications to remove users from platforms will all flow from the court.
Some observers have warned of potentially catastrophic results in court for Meta and other Silicon Valley giants.
“If you’re looking at $3 billion in lawsuits, it’s not so much on Meta or Google, but 2,000 or 3,000 lawsuits at a time, that’s a real problem,” said Ari Cohn, lead technology policy advisor at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The response from the app’s designers can be swift and surprising: Think of the TikTok-style experiment of the universe and the chronological roll of the aughts, experts say.
“It’s possible that social media is becoming useless,” Cohn said.
Some see the sea change as a legal tsunami rather than a cultural shift — one judge in New Mexico and California is on board, not talking about presence.
Most of the new users now say that they spend a lot of time on apps. About half of teenagers say social media is bad for people their age, according to a survey last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Parents are more confident, research shows.
Moms like state Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the author of California’s bill to ban social media by 2022, agreed that society has reached a tipping point.
“I have a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old, so I live and breathe it,” she said of the fight to keep kids from getting into apps. “The first thing my parents talk to me about when I pick them up, I go down and practice football. i thing.”
Wicks said he worked with companies on the 2022 bill, and even saw them getting into a fight to stop it once it passed. As age verification has been tied up in court, he and other parent advocates on both sides have joined forces to push for a series of tougher laws this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was called to testify in both the LA and New Mexico trials, and his peers have long argued that there is no effective way to weed out the millions of existing young users or prevent freshmen from creating accounts.
The judges found those claims unpersuasive.
“Some of his testimony was — he changed it back and forth,” said Victoria, one of the 10 supervisors who voted for the case, who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons. “That didn’t go down well for us.”
On Friday, the second largest school district in the country, Los Angeles Unified, announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, Snap and Google, as well as Discord, Roblox and X, citing reports from The Times about the sharp increase in eating disorders, depression and suicide among teenagers to support its claim that the social networks of children’s addiction are creating characteristics and negligence in society.
That case joins hundreds of others already filed in California’s Northern District court. The first bellwether there is expected to start in Oakland this summer.
Where school districts go, survivors of school shootings can quickly follow.
“Investigators can see what content the school shooter was given in the weeks and months before the attack,” said James Densley, a criminologist and founder of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University. “If we say that the platform’s recommendation engine is a flawed product, that digital forensic trail, which was evidence of radicalization, can now be evidence of guilt.”
Experts on all sides agree that the awards reflect growing public anger at tech oligarchs who appear to be profiting from other people’s children in an era of shrinking opportunities and skyrocketing costs.
“Just make the products safer,” Wicks said. “That’s what parents want, that’s what lawmakers want, that’s what judges want, that’s what judges want: Make these products safe for our kids.”
