Social media: Will jury awards protect kids from damage?

Big Tech may have reached “an inflection point,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. A Los Angeles jury last week ordered Meta and Google to pay a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman, known as Kaley G.M., who claimed their apps caused her depression, body shame, and trauma throughout her childhood. (ByteDance, which developed TikTok, and Snap Inc. previously settled out of court.)

The decision came a day after a New Mexico jury found that Meta owes $375 million for failing to protect kids from sexual predators online. Though Meta and Google will appeal the rulings, thousands of similar lawsuits are “waiting in the wings.” Social media giants could face billions in future judgments. That’s because Kaley’s lawyers made a “novel argument” others will use, said Hannah Epstein in The Dispatch. They side-stepped “First Amendment concerns” and Section 230—which shields social media platforms from responsibility for what their users post—by focusing not on the content itself but on the algorithms and app designs that keep minors hooked to Instagram and YouTube for hours. Citing “a trove” of internal documents from Google and Meta, they contended that the companies deliberately targeted preteens with intentionally addictive features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and beauty filters. “We’re basically pushers,” one Instagram employee wrote to colleagues.

Parents will “understandably celebrate those verdicts,” said David French in The New York Times. But the First Amendment is our most fundamental right, and it protects even “toxic and harmful” speech. I don’t doubt that social media can be damaging, but “a social media site is not a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette.” Parents “are not helpless,” and we can and should control kids’ use of smartphones and these apps. This “social media shakedown” is a big victory for trial lawyers, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but it’s a slippery slope that will invite countless more lawsuits. “Are platforms supposed to prohibit users from posting photos that might make someone feel depressed or insecure?” That sure covers a lot of what’s online.

It’s easy for critics to blame “greedy plaintiffs” and “runaway juries,” said Austin Sarat in The Guardian. But this case presented mountains of evidence that Meta and Google engineered “the addictive qualities of their sites.” That’s legal “negligence,” for which countless kids like Kaley “have paid the price.” For Meta and Google, it appears “the moment of reckoning has arrived, at long last,” said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. With the shield of Section 230 finally pierced, social media firms now face “the threat of immense financial harm” if they continue to “create compulsive, unstoppable engagement” with toxic garbage.

Don’t bank on it, said Nicholas Creel in Newsweek. These verdicts may not survive appeals, and have not created “any coherent legal standard governing how social media companies may or may not build their products.” Only Congress can create those standards through legislation. But how do lawmakers define what’s addictive or damaging? asked Douglas Murray in the New York Post. The onus is us—the consumers of Big Tech’s products. You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult in the U.S. who doesn’t have an “unhealthy relationship” with their smartphone. No wonder our children get hooked, too. The long-term solution to this problem “lies in all of our hands.”