🌊 Is Big Tech’s Reckoning Here?

We break down two court cases that could open the door to anti-tech lawsuits

Kaley G.M. joined YouTube at age 8, Instagram at 9, Musical.ly (now TikTok) at 10, and Snapchat at 11. By 15, she had uploaded hundreds of YouTube videos and was spending over a dozen hours a day on Instagram. Fiercely addicted to social media, she also came to suffer from anxiety, body dysmorphia, and depression.

Now 20, G.M. filed a lawsuit that accused the tech companies of negligence for having designed and operated products that hurt kids without warning of potential harms. On Wednesday, a California court agreed, ordering Meta and YouTube to pay her a collective $3M.

The case is the first in a series of trials seeking to punish social media companies for the harm they’ve allegedly done to kids. Activists hope it’s a landmark moment for holding Big Tech accountable.

So do the plaintiff’s lawyers, who called the verdict “bigger than one case” and pushed for an additional $3M in punitive damages. One attorney said a steeper payout is only fair: “They knew! They targeted the children.”

So what did the tech companies know? What, exactly, were they found to have done? Could this really open the doors to a Big Tech reckoning?

That’s the subject of today’s deep-dive.

G.M.’s lawsuit claimed that the companies were negligent by designing platforms in a way that led to harm and by failing to warn users about the sites’ addictive potential. They cited data showing substantial evidence of a link between childhood social media use and conditions like depression and anxiety.

This differed from other cases, which have generally argued that content on the platforms has been harmful. Because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 effectively grants social media companies immunity for the content posted on them, such content-focused lawsuits have been ineffective.

During the trial, which lasted seven weeks, G.M. explained her social media development: Watching YouTube at 6, getting on Instagram at 9, and uploading over 200 YouTube videos before she was 10. She had 15 Instagram accounts before she was 15. At one point, she was spending 16 hours a day on Instagram.

“I wanted to be on it all the time,” she said. “If I wasn’t on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something.”