Jurors recently awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., concluding that Meta (Instagram) and Google (YouTube) negligently designed their platforms to addict her as a minor and failed to warn her about risks with using them. The Los Angeles jury gave K.G.M. $3 million to compensate her for emotional distress, anxiety, depression, self-harm (cutting and suicidality), and body dysmorphia, plus $3 million to punish the defendants and deter others from engaging in similar conduct.  

Central to the soon-to-be-appealed verdict was the jury’s finding that the third-party content K.G.M. consumed on Instagram and YouTube was not what harmed her. The jury was instructed that a defendant couldn’t be held liable for “[a]llowing any third-party content to appear on its platform” or for “recommending any third-party content to the [p]laintiff.” That instruction was provided because a federal statute called Section 230 generally shields platforms from civil liability for harm caused by others’ content, meaning user-generated speech rather than a platform’s own messages.

Jurors were told that Meta and Google could only “be held liable for harm caused by a feature or activity that was part of the design or operation of” their platforms and if the negligent “design or operation of the platform[s] was a substantial factor in causing K.G.M.’s harm.” Design features at issue included infinite scrolling of content on Instagram and autoplay of videos on YouTube.

The jury concluded such features were the problem, meaning the plaintiff’s attorneys found a way to dodge both Section 230 immunity and First Amendment free-speech safeguards by treating Instagram and YouTube as defectively designed goods, not as services conveying constitutionally protected expression. Whether California Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl should have dismissed the case earlier on Section 230 grounds rather than letting it go to trial will certainly be a key issue on appeal.

In a recent essay for The American Enterprise, I examined the decision in greater detail and explained why hundreds of other cases involving minors’ claims of social media addiction won’t necessarily turn out the same way. Here are some other commentators’ concerns about the logic and outcome in the K.G.M. case.

Writing in The New York Times, columnist David French addressed why treating social media platforms like cigarettes and alcohol is misguided:

A social media site isn’t a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette. It’s not delivering a drug. It’s delivering speech. Sometimes that speech is silly and harmless. Sometimes it is toxic and harmful. Sometimes it’s educational or inspiring. But it’s all speech, and in America speech traditionally can be blocked, censored or regulated only in the narrowest of circumstances.

The Washington Post’s editorial board tapped into a similar sentiment, noting that “comparing Big Tech to Big Tobacco is off. Social media platforms are tools which, unlike cigarettes, have tremendous social value when used correctly.” Pointing out other problems with the verdict, the board added that it “risks opening the floodgates for trial lawyers to deluge courts with similar claims” as they spot an opportunity “to make generational wealth by shaking down innovators who have created something valuable for society.”

George Will astutely deplored in The Washington Post how the case’s exploitation of “addiction” leads to shifting blame away from individuals to businesses, while simultaneously opening the door for greater government control: 

The plaintiff blamed large corporations for her adolescent sadness, body dysmorphia . . . and other consequences of her obsessive consumption of the corporations’ products. Such blaming flows from this toxic idea: Individual agency is so flimsy and attenuated that accountability for an individual’s behavior must be located beyond the individual. This infantilizing premise leads to paternalism, then to domestic authoritarianism.

Also remarking on the contested notion of addiction was constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky in the Sacramento Bee. He observed that the central claim of lawsuits such as K.G.M.’s:

is that social media companies designed their platforms to be addictive and have users—including children—remain on them and return to them. But all media do exactly this. Video games are structured to keep people playing. Television series and novels use cliffhangers so people will keep watching and reading. All of these are designed to be “addictive.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board stressed significant problems with proving causation of harm. Noting that “the link between youth mental health and social media is complicated,” the board pointed out that K.G.M. was

exposed to domestic abuse as a young child, which studies show can increase vulnerability to mental illness. Studies show that parenting plays a critical role in mediating and mitigating the impact of social media. Most children who use social media don’t experience severe problems.

All of these concerns are valid and important. Beyond litigation, they should inform level-headed public policy as lawmakers, emboldened by the verdict, call for greater social media regulation.