As New Mexico jury finds Meta platforms harm children, social media firms await more legal decisions

For years, social media companies have disputed allegations that they harm children’s mental health through deliberate design choices that addict kids to their platforms and fail to protect them from sexual predators and dangerous content. This year, several state and federal court cases are heading to trial, and while the details may vary, they all seek to hold companies responsible for what happens on their platforms.

The lawsuits have come from school districts, local, state and the federal government as well as thousands of families. The courtroom showdowns are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether deliberate design choices make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.

The outcomes could challenge the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms. They could also be costly in the form of legal fees and settlements. And they could force the companies to change how they operate, potentially losing users and advertising dollars.

Here's a look at the major social media harms cases in the United States.

New Mexico jury fines Meta $375 million

A team led by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who sued Meta in 2023, built their case by posing as children on social media, then documenting sexual solicitations they received as well as Meta’s response.

Torrez wants Meta to implement more effective age verification and do more to remove bad actors from its platforms.

On Tuesday, a jury found Meta to be in violation of state consumer protection law. It found thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million.

The landmark decision came after a nearly seven-week trial. Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew about about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.

Meta said it disagrees with the verdict and will appeal.

“We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” the company said in a statement.

The trial kicked off in early February. In his opening statement, prosecuting attorney Donald Migliori said Meta has misrepresented the safety of its platforms, choosing to engineer its algorithms to keep young people online while knowing that children are at risk of sexual exploitation.

The Los Angeles case centers on addiction

Jurors are still deliberating in a landmark social media case that seeks to hold tech companies responsible for harms to children. The plaintiff has argued the platform design features of the two remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube, were designed to be addictive, especially for young users. TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.

At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits will play out. KGM, or Kaley, as her lawyers have called her, and a handful of other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.

“This is a monumental inflection point in social media,” said Matthew Bergman of the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents more than 1,000 plaintiffs in lawsuits against social media companies. “When we started doing this four years ago, no one said we'd ever get to trial. And here we are trying our case in front of a fair and impartial jury.”

School districts head to trial

A trial scheduled for this summer pits school districts against social media companies before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. Called a multidistrict litigation, it names six public school districts from around the country as the bellwethers.

Jayne Conroy, a lawyer on plaintiffs’ trial team, was also an attorney for plaintiffs seeking to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for the opioid epidemic. She said the cornerstone of both cases is the same: addiction.

“With the social media case, we're focused primarily on children and their developing brains and how addiction is such a threat to their well-being and … the harms that are caused to children — how much they're watching and what kind of targeting is being done,” she said.

The medical science, she added, “is not really all that different, surprisingly, from an opioid or a heroin addiction. We are all talking about the dopamine reaction.”

Both the social media and the opioid cases claim negligence on the part of the defendants.

“What we were able to prove in the opioid cases is the manufacturers, the distributors, the pharmacies, they knew about the risks, they downplayed them, they oversupplied, and people died,” Conroy said. “Here, it is very much the same thing. These companies knew about the risks, they have disregarded the risks, they doubled down to get profits from advertisers over the safety of kids. And kids were harmed and kids died.”

Resolution could take years amid dueling narratives

Social media companies have disputed that their products are addictive. During questioning by the plaintiff’s lawyer during the Los Angeles trial, Zuckerberg said he still agrees with a previous statement he made that the existing body of scientific work has not proven that social media causes mental health harms.

Some researchers do indeed question whether addiction is the appropriate term to describe heavy use of social media. Social media addiction is not recognized as an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authority within the psychiatric community.

But the companies face increasing pushback on the issue of social media's effects on children's mental health, not only among academics but also parents, schools and lawmakers.

“While Meta has doubled down in this area to address mounting concerns by rolling out safety features, several recent reports suggest that the company continues to aggressively prioritize teens as a user base and doesn’t always adhere to its own rules,” said Emarketer analyst Minda Smiley.

With appeals and any settlement discussions, the cases against social media companies could take years to resolve. And unlike in Europe and Australia, tech regulation in the United States is moving at a glacial pace.