Two Verdicts. Zero Accountability Yet.

Within 24 hours this week, two separate juries found Meta liable for harming children and young people on its platforms. First, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect children from predators. Then a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent for engineering addictive platforms. The plaintiff in that case started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9. During the five-week trial, Zuckerberg took the stand and was forced to answer for those decisions directly. By her teenage years she had developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia.

I covered the New Mexico verdict in detail. This piece is about what both verdicts together actually mean — and where they fall woefully short.

The Los Angeles case centered on a young woman identified as K.G.M., who accused Meta and Google of building products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Her lawyers didn’t argue about the content she saw on those platforms. They argued about the design of the platforms themselves — infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, and constant notifications — features engineered to exploit the developing brains of young people and make the apps impossible to put down. The jury agreed, finding the platforms legally equivalent to defective products.

That legal framing matters enormously. For decades, tech companies have hidden behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from liability for content their users post. By targeting product design rather than content, these lawyers found a way around that shield. It is a genuinely significant legal development and it opens the door for thousands of similar cases still pending.

Internal documents introduced at trial showed Meta executives knew exactly what they were building. One memo described their strategy to attract children as young as 11 — four years below their own minimum age policy — because those kids were four times more likely to keep returning to the app. Another document said: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” These weren’t accidents. They were design decisions.

Both companies plan to appeal.

My take: I want to be clear about something before I go any further. The advocates, lawyers, and families who have fought for these verdicts are doing important and necessary work. These rulings are meaningful. The legal precedent being established here is real and it will matter for the cases ahead.

But I am not going to tell you this is accountability. Not yet. Not even close.

Meta earns $375 million in roughly 18 hours. The LA verdict was $6 million. For companies like Meta and Google, worth over a trillion dollars each, these fines do not change the calculation. The algorithm still runs the same way today as it did before either verdict. The business model is intact. The incentive to keep you and your children on these platforms as long as possible has not been touched.

Here is what actual change requires. Companies need to be forced to redesign their algorithms — not fined for the damage those algorithms cause, but legally compelled to change them. Section 230 needs reform so that platforms can be held liable for content their own recommendation systems actively push to users, especially children. And none of that happens without sustained, informed public pressure that makes the cost of the status quo higher than the cost of changing it.

You are part of that pressure. Understanding what infinite scroll actually does to a developing brain, understanding why these platforms were designed the way they were, understanding the gap between a landmark verdict and a changed business model — that knowledge is not passive. It is the foundation of the pressure that eventually forces change.

These verdicts are an important step. But the fight for actual meaningful reform is just beginning, and anyone telling you otherwise isn’t paying close enough attention to how these companies work.

I will be covering every development as this continues.

What would real reform look like to you? Reply and let me know.

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