Social media's day of reckoning has arrived. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube face their first-ever product liability trial starting Tuesday in Los Angeles, where a now-19-year-old plaintiff will argue that these platforms knowingly designed addictive features that damaged her mental health. It's a historic moment - social media companies have never before had to stand trial and defend their product design decisions in front of a jury. The case kicks off a wave of bellwether trials that could reshape the entire industry and reveal what executives knew about the harms their platforms caused to kids.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is heading to court. Starting Tuesday, he and other top social media executives will take the witness stand in Los Angeles to defend their companies against claims they built products that deliberately hooked teenagers and damaged their mental health. It's a moment the tech industry hoped would never come.
The first case involves an unnamed 19-year-old identified as K.G.M., who says she developed an addiction to Meta, TikTok, and YouTube that triggered severe mental health issues. Snap settled with the plaintiff just last week, but the three remaining defendants are pushing forward to trial. The case will unfold over at least six weeks in front of Judge Carolyn Kuhl in California state court.
What makes this historic isn't just the high-profile defendants - it's that social media companies are facing a jury at all. "When we started doing this work, it was a given that we could not even get past a motion to dismiss," Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center representing K.G.M., said at a recent briefing. "The simple fact that a social media company is going to have to stand trial before a jury and account for its design decisions is unprecedented in American jurisprudence."
The cases managed to overcome Section 230 objections, the legal shield that typically protects online platforms from liability over user-generated content. By framing claims around product design rather than content moderation, plaintiffs found a crack in Big Tech's legal armor.
