By Erin Mulvaney, Meghan Bobrowsky and Erich Schwartzel

LOS ANGELES -- For Meta Platforms, which made $60 billion in profit last year, getting hit with legal damages of a few million dollars is ordinarily a nonevent.

But back-to-back jury verdicts holding the company liable for harms to young people could open the way to a flood of litigation that could force it -- and other social-media giants -- to make significant changes to the way they design and deliver their products.

That is the view of some legal experts, but also the stated position of Meta itself, which argued heading into the trials in California and New Mexico that for juries to endorse the theory of the cases against them would challenge their ability to keep serving products used daily by billions of people.

The judgments for the plaintiffs threaten to undermine long-held protections that have shielded internet companies for decades. They suggest future juries might be receptive to a product-liability argument against social media, which forms the basis of thousands of similar lawsuits waiting to be heard. And they encourage new plaintiffs to come forward, raising the prospect of mass litigation that could stretch for years and lead to settlements or changes in the industry, akin to the legal campaign against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta exposed minor users to harmful content, including online solicitation, sexually explicit content and human trafficking under consumer-protection laws. Within 24 hours, a Los Angeles jury issued a verdict in a similar case, saying Meta and YouTube contributed to mental-health issues of a 20-year-old woman, Kaley G.M., because of the addictive nature of its products.

The California case was the first trial of thousands of consolidated lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. More trials are scheduled for this year. TikTok and Snap settled the first case but are on the hook for the others.

Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the verdicts reflect an expansive view on tech companies' liability for their products.

"What is new is the addiction element," he said. "That could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction, there is something very abstract about it."

The ruling in the Los Angeles bellwether case could have significant ramifications for Meta and a swath of other internet platforms. The tech giants have long argued that they couldn't be held liable for the third-party content posted to their platforms, citing Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That measure is credited in part with fueling the growth of social-media companies.

The plaintiffs' lawyers in the Los Angeles case sidestepped Section 230 by arguing that the way the platforms themselves were designed was harmful and intentionally so. The success of that argument is now sending shock waves through the tech world.

"This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, AI and beyond that," said Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives. "The floodgates are already open."

Meta said it would continue to fight and focus on the evidence in each case, and noted that the damages awarded in the New Mexico case were far less than the plaintiffs had sought. The plaintiffs had sought nearly $2 billion and were awarded $375 million. In the Los Angeles case, the plaintiff was awarded $6 million. Mark Lanier, the plaintiff's lawyer, said he purposefully didn't ask for a specific amount of damages.

"Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," a Meta spokeswoman said after Wednesday's verdict. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, said it would appeal and disagrees with the verdict in the California case.

Ahead of the trials, Meta argued for the lawsuits to be thrown out and said that many of the design features at issue, such as instant notification and infinite scroll, were "inescapably linked" to the content shown to users. This could cause a flood of litigation, it warned, causing the company to change how its products deliver information to avoid liability. Meta also said the cases erode Section 230 and First Amendment protections.

In a briefing with reporters after the verdict in Los Angeles, Meta said it has been invested in identifying solutions to help teens for over a decade and that it has built tools and resources to give teens a safer, positive experience. Those include teen accounts with heightened protections on messaging and content access. Hundreds of millions of teens have teen accounts, which were introduced in 2024, Meta said.

In remarks ahead of jury deliberation over punitive damages, Luis Li, the lead trial lawyer representing YouTube, said that the platform has instituted features to interrupt long sessions and give parents an indication of how much time their children are spending on their phones.

"They're not perfect," he said, adding, "you can't walk into someone's phone and turn on all of these features."

The seven-week trial was emotional at times. Parents, some of whom blamed social media for their children's suicide or drug overdoses, entered a lottery system each day for seats. At times, there were tears during testimony.

Two jurors interviewed after the verdict said the eight days of deliberation were filled with questions about culpability and what signal they wanted their decisions to send to Meta and YouTube. They had to weigh conflicting expert testimony and research about the harms of social media to young people.

One juror, Victoria, who only gave her first name to protect her anonymity, said Zuckerberg's answers on the stand came across as inconsistent. "That didn't sit well with us," she said. She said he seemed unprepared, a position she said was surprising for "the guru" whose products were at the center of this case.

Victoria said she wasn't a regular user of social media before the trial. She planned to stay off it.

Write to Erin Mulvaney at erin.mulvaney@wsj.com, Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com and Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 25, 2026 23:11 ET (03:11 GMT)

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