A jury had found the two companies liable for designing platforms that harmed a young user and awarded $6 million in damages
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Motions filed by Meta $META Platforms and Alphabet $GOOGL's Google requesting a new trial have been denied by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who upheld a jury's findings that both companies bear liability for building social media platforms with designs harmful to minors, Reuters reported.
Kuhl ruled on the motions on Tuesday. At issue was a lawsuit brought by a woman who alleged that the deliberately stimulating design of Instagram and YouTube caused her to develop an addiction to both platforms while she was still young. The jury returned a negligence verdict against each company and set total damages at $6 million.
Central to the companies' bid for a new trial was the argument that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded them from liability. The law generally protects online platforms from claims tied to user-generated content. In her ruling, Kuhl concluded that Section 230 was inapplicable because the claims turned on design decisions rather than content, and she noted that jurors had received consistent instructions to keep content out of their deliberations.
"There was substantial evidence that Plaintiff was harmed by the design features of Instagram, regardless of any of the content found on that platform," Kuhl wrote.
Both companies said they plan to appeal. A Meta spokesperson said the company disagreed with the ruling. "The plaintiffs' legal theory attempts to improperly circumvent Section 230 and the First Amendment, and we expect this ruling to be overturned on appeal," the spokesperson said. Google spokesperson José Castañeda separately confirmed in a written statement that the company would pursue an appeal.
Plaintiff's attorney Mark Lanier described the decision as unsurprising. "The evidence of fault was mountain high," he said.
The Los Angeles verdict was one of two significant losses Meta suffered in close succession. As Quartz has tracked the broader litigation wave, a separate jury in New Mexico handed down a $375 million judgment against Meta around the same time, finding the company had deceived users about platform safety for children. Following those verdicts, plaintiff recruitment advertising tied to social media addiction suits surged across television and radio.
The scale of the litigation remains considerable. California state court is currently hosting more than 3,300 addiction-related suits targeting Meta, Google, Snap $SNAP, and TikTok parent ByteDance, while roughly 2,400 additional cases filed by private individuals, school districts, municipalities, and state governments have been consolidated before a California federal court.
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