Meta and Google have been found liable for a woman’s social media addiction and have been ordered to pay her $3 million in damages.
The first-of-its-kind lawsuit saw the plaintiff, a 20-year-old referred to only as Kaley, accuse the tech giants of hooking her to their platforms.
Kaley started using YouTube at six, downloading the app on her iPod Touch to watch videos about lip gloss and an online kids game. She joined Instagram at nine after getting around a block her mother had put in place to keep her off the platform.
After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, California jurors decided the tech giants were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms.
The jury also decided each company’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to Kaley, who alleged her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and exacerbated her mental health struggles.
Jurors also found that both companies knew or should have known their services posed a danger to minors, that they failed to adequately warn users of that danger, and that a reasonable platform operator would have done so.
Jurors assigned Meta 70 percent of the responsibility for Kaley’s harm – a $2.1 million share of the compensatory award – and YouTube the remaining 30 percent, or $900,000.
The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury decided the companies acted with malice or highly egregious conduct, meaning they will hear new evidence shortly and head back into the deliberation room to decide on punitive damages.
Meta and Google-owned YouTube were the two remaining defendants in the case after TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.
Meta CEO and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg (center) leaves the Los Angeles Superior Court after testifying in the landmark social media addiction trial on February 18, 2026
Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers’ arguments, testimony and evidence, and they heard from Kaley, as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called in to testify.
Kaley told jurors that her near-constant social media use ‘really affected my self-worth,’ saying the apps led her to abandon hobbies, struggle to make friends and constantly measure herself against others.
In closing arguments, plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier cast the case as a story of corporate greed. He argued that features on the apps were engineered to drive compulsive use among young people.
But the tech giants maintained throughout the trial that Kaley’s mental health struggles had nothing to do with their platforms.
Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt highlighted her turbulent relationship with her mother, playing jurors a recording that appeared to capture her mother yelling and cursing at her.
YouTube disputed how much time Kaley actually spent on its platform, with its attorney telling the court that usage records showed she averaged little more than a minute a day on the very features her lawyers called addictive.
The jury rejected both defenses across all seven questions on each verdict form.
After the guilty verdict rang out, lawyers for Kaley said in a statement: ‘Accountability has arrived.’
A spokesman for Meta said they ‘respectfully disagree’ with the verdict.
Supporters of plaintiff Kaley hold signs outside the courthouse in Los Angeles as she takes the stand on February 25, 2026
Kaley’s lawyers, led by Mark Lanier, were tasked with proving that the tech firms’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing her harm.
They pointed to specific design features on the social media platforms that they said were designed to ‘hook’ young users, like the ‘infinite’ nature of feeds that allowed for an endless supply of content, autoplay features, and notifications.
The jury was told not to take into account the content of the posts and videos that Kaley saw on the platforms because tech companies are shielded from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Meta consistently argued that Kaley had struggled with her mental health separate from her social media use, often pointing to her turbulent home life.
The company said ‘not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause’ of her mental health issues in a statement following closing arguments.
But the plaintiffs did not have to prove that social media caused Kaley’s struggles – only that it was a ‘substantial factor’ in causing her harm.
YouTube focused less on Kaley’s medical records and mental health history and more on her use of YouTube and the nature of the platform.
They argued that YouTube is not a form of social media, but rather a video platform akin to television, and pointed to her declining YouTube use as she got older.
Amy Neville, whose son Alexander died after buying counterfeit pills on social media, is embraced outside the Los Angeles court as she awaits the jury’s verdict on Wednesday
According to their data, she spent about one minute a day on average watching YouTube Shorts since its inception.
YouTube Shorts, which launched in 2020, is the platform´s section of short-form, vertical videos that have the ‘infinite scroll’ feature the plaintiffs argued was addictive.
Lawyers representing both platforms also consistently pointed to the safety features and guardrails they each have available for people to monitor and customize their use.
The case, along with several others, has been randomly selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center and the counsel of record for Kaley, said this trial was ‘a vehicle, not an outcome’ during deliberations.
‘This case is historic no matter what happens because it was the first,’ Marquez-Garrett said, emphasizing the gravity of getting Meta and Google’s internal documents into the public record.
Marquez-Garrett said social media companies are ‘not taking the cancerous talcum powder off the shelves,’ likely in reference to a past case that Lanier and his firm worked on, securing a multi-billion-dollar verdict.
‘And they’re not going to because they’re making too much money killing kids.’
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a Los Angeles Superior Court trial in a key test case accusing Meta and Google’s YouTube of harming kids’ mental health through addictive platforms, in Los Angeles, California on February 18, 2026
The trial was one of several that social media companies face this year and beyond.
They are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether the companies make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.
Some experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see similar outcomes as cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.
