By Adam Levine

In what may turn out to be a bellwether decision, on Wednesday a state court jury in Los Angeles awarded $3 million in damages from Meta Platforms and Alphabet to a woman who is now 20 years old. During the trial, the plaintiff claimed that addictive design in social media apps caused her mental health to spiral downwards as a child, and face exploitation by adults.

This is just a small amount of money to these tech giants, but it may become a dangerous precedent. Farther north in California in the federal district courtroom of Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, another trial is brewing that consolidates over 2,000 similar cases into a single trial. Meta is named first as the defendant in most of these complaints, but every social media app of note is included in at least one of the cases.

On top of that there are thousands of state-level cases like the one just decided, hundreds of school districts suing social media companies, and most of the U.S. state attorneys general as well.

The key issue that worked against Meta and Google in the California case is that the jury decided that so-called Section 230 protections do not apply to how an app is designed. Section 230 of U.S. Code Title 47 says that companies are not liable for the third-party content hosted by social media platforms. They must obey laws, but beyond that, social media companies can filter content as they like, and anything objectionable is the responsibility of whomever posted it.

But the Los Angeles jury rejected the Section 230 defense put forth by the defendants. The plaintiff successfully claimed elements like the "infinite scroll" are meant to keep users glued to their phones, staying in the app even as their mental health declines.

If this legal logic gets used in the other trials and the social media companies lose, the damages will go way beyond $3 million.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 73% of U.S. teens used Google's YouTube daily, 57% used TikTok every day, and 50% used Meta's Instagram.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

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March 25, 2026 15:56 ET (19:56 GMT)

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