Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For

First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritizing growth metrics over user safety. If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we’ve been critical of the company for years. Mark Zuckerberg deserves zero benefit of the doubt.

So when a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million on Tuesday for “enabling child exploitation” on its platforms, and a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that supposedly harmed a young user on Wednesday, awarding $6 million in total damages, the reaction from a lot of people was essentially: good, screw ’em, they deserve it.

And on a visceral, emotional level? Sure. Meta deserves to feel bad. Zuckerberg deserves to feel bad.

But if you care about the internet — if you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things — these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you. Because the legal theories that were used to nail Meta this week don’t stay neatly confined to companies you don’t like. They will be weaponized against everyone. And they will functionally destroy Section 230 as a meaningful protection, not by repealing it, but by making it irrelevant.

Let me explain.

The “Design” Theory That Ate Section 230

For years, Section 230 has served as the legal backbone of the internet. If you’re a regular Techdirt reader, you know this. But in case you’re not familiar, here’s the short version: it says that if a user posts something on a website, the website can’t be sued for that user’s content. The person who created the content is liable for it, not the platform that hosted it. That’s it. That’s the core of it. It serves one key purpose: put the liability on the party who actually does the violative action. It applies to every website and every user of every website, from Meta down to the smallest forum or blog with a comments section or person who retweets or sends an email.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers have been trying to get around Section 230 for years, and these two cases represent them finally finding a formula that works: don’t sue over the content on the platform. Sue over the design of the platform itself. Argue that features like infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and notification systems are “product design” choices that are addictive and harmful, separate and apart from whatever content flows through them.

The trial judge in the California case bought this argument, ruling that because the claims were about “product design and other non-speech issues,” Section 230 didn’t apply. The New Mexico court reached a similar conclusion. Both cases then went to trial.

This distinction — between “design” and “content” — sounds reasonable for about three seconds. Then you realize it falls apart completely.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?

Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The “addictive design” does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.

As Eric Goldman pointed out in his response to the verdicts:

The lower court rejected Section 230’s application to large parts of the plaintiffs’ case, holding that the claims sought to impose liability on how social media services configured their offerings and not third-party content. But social media’s offerings consist of third-party content, and the configurations were publishers’ editorial decisions about how to present it. So the line between first-party “design” choices and publication decisions about third-party content seems illusory to me.

If every editorial decision about how to present third-party content is now a “design choice” subject to product liability, Section 230 protects effectively nothing. Every website makes decisions about how to display user content. Every search engine ranks results. Every email provider filters spam. Every forum has a sorting algorithm, even if it’s just “newest first.” All of those are “design choices” that could, theoretically, be blamed for some downstream harm.

The whole point of Section 230 was to keep platforms from being held liable for harms that flow from user-generated content. The “design” theory accomplishes exactly what 230 was meant to prevent — it just uses different words to get there.

Bad defendants make bad law. Meta is unsympathetic. It’s understandable why they get so much hate. It’s understandable why people (including those on juries) are willing to accept legal theories against them that would be obviously problematic if applied to anyone else. But legal precedent doesn’t care about your feelings toward the defendant. What works against Meta works against everyone.

The Return Of Stratton Oakmont

If this all sounds familiar, it should. This is almost exactly the legal landscape that existed before Section 230 was passed in 1996, and the reason Congress felt it needed to act.

In the early 1990s, Prodigy ran an online service with message boards and made the decision to moderate them to create a more “family-friendly” environment. In the resulting lawsuit, Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, the court ruled that because Prodigy had made editorial choices about what to allow, it was acting as a publisher and could therefore be held liable for everything users posted that it failed to catch.

The perverse incentive was obvious: moderate, and you’re on the hook for everything you miss. Don’t moderate at all, and you’re safer. Congress recognized that this was insane — it punished companies for trying to do the right thing — and passed Section 230 to fix it. The law explicitly said that platforms could moderate content without being treated as the publisher or speaker of that content. And, as multiple courts rightly decided, this was designed to apply to all publisher activity of a platform — every editorial decision, every way to display content. The whole point was to allow online services and users to feel free to make decisions regarding other people’s content, including how to display it, without facing liability for that content.

And a critical but often overlooked function of Section 230 is that it provides a procedural shield: it lets platforms get baseless lawsuits dismissed early, before the ruinous costs of discovery and trial.

These two verdicts effectively bring us back to Stratton Oakmont territory through the back door. By recharacterizing platform liability as “product design” liability rather than content liability, plaintiffs’ lawyers have found a way to nullify Section 230 without anyone having to vote to repeal it. Every design decision — moderation algorithms, recommendation systems, notification settings, even the order in which posts appear — can now be characterized by some lawyer as a “defective product” rather than an editorial choice about third-party content.

Except this time, instead of people being horrified by the implications, they’re cheering.

The Trial Is the Punishment

The dollar amounts in these cases tell an interesting story if you pay attention. The California jury awarded $6 million total — $4.2 million from Meta, $1.8 million from YouTube. For companies that bring in tens of billions in quarterly revenue, that’s effectively nothing. It’s not even a slap on the wrist. Meta will barely notice.

But that’s exactly the problem. The real cost here is the process. The California trial lasted six weeks. The New Mexico trial lasted nearly seven. Both involved extensive discovery, depositions of top executives including Zuckerberg himself, production of enormous volumes of internal documents, and armies of lawyers on both sides.

Meta can afford that. Google can afford that. You know who can’t? Basically everyone else who runs a platform where users post things.

And this is already happening. TikTok and Snap were also named as defendants in the California case. They both settled before trial — not because they necessarily thought they’d lose on the merits, but because the cost of fighting through a multi-week jury trial can be staggering. If companies the size of TikTok and Snap can’t stomach the expense, imagine what this means for mid-size platforms, small forums, or individual website operators.

The California case is just the first of multiple “bellwether” trials scheduled in the near future. Hundreds of federal cases are lined up behind those. There are over 1,600 plaintiffs in the consolidated California litigation alone. As Goldman noted:

Together, these rulings indicate that juries are willing to impose major liability on social media providers based on claims of social media addiction. That liability exposure jeopardizes the entire social media industry. There are thousands of other plaintiffs with pending claims; and with potentially millions of dollars at stake for each victim, many more will emerge. The total amount of damages at issue could be many tens of billions of dollars.

This is the Stratton Oakmont problem all over again, but worse. At least in 1995, only companies that moderated faced liability. Now, any company that makes any “design choice” about how to present user content — which is to say, literally every platform on the internet — is potentially on the hook if any harm comes to any user which some lawyer can claim was because they used that service. The lawsuit becomes a weapon regardless of outcome, because the cost of defending yourself is ruinous for anyone who isn’t a trillion-dollar company.

The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads

If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in practice.

One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm.

The state is now seeking court-mandated changes including “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.”

Yes, the end result of the New Mexico ruling might be that Meta is ordered to make everyone’s communications less secure. That should be terrifying to everyone. Even those cheering on the verdict.

End-to-end encryption protects billions of people from surveillance, data breaches, authoritarian governments, stalkers, and domestic abusers. It’s one of the most important privacy and security tools ordinary people have. Every major security expert and civil liberties organization in the world has argued for stronger encryption, not weaker.

But under the “design liability” theory, implementing encryption becomes evidence of negligence, because a small number of bad actors also use encrypted communications. The logic applies to literally every communication tool ever invented. Predators also use the postal service, telephones, and in-person conversation. The encryption itself harms no one. Like infinite scroll and autoplay, it is inert without the choices of bad actors — choices made by people, not by the platform’s design.

The incentive this creates goes far beyond encryption, and it’s bad. If any product improvement that protects the majority of users can be held against you because a tiny fraction of bad actors exploit it, companies will simply stop making those improvements. Why add encryption if it becomes Exhibit A in a future lawsuit? Why implement any privacy-protective feature if a plaintiff’s lawyer will characterize it as “shielding bad actors”?

And it gets worse. Some of the most damaging evidence in both trials came from internal company documents where employees raised concerns about safety risks and discussed tradeoffs. These were played up in the media (and the courtroom) as “smoking guns.” But that means no company is going to allow anyone to raise concerns ever again. That’s very, very bad.

In a sane legal environment, you want companies to have these internal debates. You want engineers and safety teams to flag potential risks, wrestle with difficult tradeoffs, and document their reasoning. But when those good-faith deliberations become plaintiff’s exhibits presented to a jury as proof that “they knew and did it anyway,” the rational corporate response is to stop putting anything in writing. Stop doing risk assessments. Stop asking hard questions internally.

The lesson every general counsel in Silicon Valley is learning right now: ignorance is safer than inquiry. That makes everyone less safe, not more.

The Causation Problem

We also need to talk about the actual evidence of harm in these cases, because it’s thinner than most people realize.

The California plaintiff, known as KGM, testified that she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, and that her social media use caused depression, self-harm, body dysmorphic disorder, and social phobia. Those are real and serious harms that genuinely happened to a real person, and no one should minimize her suffering.

But as Goldman noted:

KGM’s life was full of trauma. The social media defendants argued that the harms she suffered were due to that trauma and not her social media usage. (Indeed, there was some evidence that social media helped KGM cope with her trauma). It is highly likely that most or all of the other plaintiffs in the social media addiction cases have sources of trauma in their lives that might negate the responsibility of social media.

The jury was asked whether the companies’ negligence was “a substantial factor” in causing harm. Not the factor. Not the primary factor. A substantial factor.

This standard is doing enormous work here, and nobody in the coverage seems to be paying attention to it. In most product liability cases, causation is relatively straightforward: the car’s brakes failed, the car crashed, the plaintiff was injured. You can trace a mechanical chain of events. There needs to be a clear causal chain between the product and the harm.

But what’s the equivalent chain here? The plaintiff scrolled Instagram, saw content that made her feel bad about her body, developed body dysmorphic disorder? Which content? Which scroll session? How do you isolate the “design” from the specific posts she saw, the comments she read, the accounts she followed?

With a standard that loose, applied to a teenager with multiple documented sources of trauma in her life, how do you disentangle what was caused by social media and what was caused by everything else? The honest answer is: you can’t. And neither could the jury, not with any scientific rigor. They made a judgment call based on vibes and sympathy — which is what juries do, but it’s a terrifying foundation for reshaping internet law.

The research on social media’s causal relationship to teen mental health problems is incredibly weak. Over and over and over again researchers have tried to find a causal link. And failed. Every time.

Lots of people (including related to both these cases) keep comparing social media to things like cigarettes or lead paint. But, as we’ve discussed, that’s a horrible comparison. Cigarettes cause cancer regardless of what else is happening in a smoker’s life. Lead paint causes neurological damage regardless of a child’s home environment. Social media is not like that. The relationship between social media use and mental health outcomes is complex, highly individual, and mediated by dozens of confounding factors that researchers are still trying to untangle.

And, also, neither cigarettes nor lead paint are speech. The issues involving social media are all about speech. And yes, speech can be powerful. It can both delight and offend. It can make people feel wonderful or horrible. But we protect speech, in part, because it’s so powerful.

But a jury doesn’t need to untangle those factors. A jury just needs to feel that a sympathetic plaintiff was harmed and that a deeply unsympathetic defendant probably had something to do with it. And when the defendant is Mark Zuckerberg, that’s a very easy emotional call to make. Which is exactly why this is so dangerous as precedent. If “a substantial factor” is the standard, and the defendant’s internal documents showing employees discussing concerns about safety count as proof of wrongdoing, then essentially any plaintiff who used social media and experienced mental health difficulties has a viable lawsuit. Multiply that by every teenager in America and you start to see the scale of the problem.

Then recognize that this applies to everything on the internet, not just the companies you hate. A Discord server for a gaming community uses a bot to surface active conversations — design choice. A small forum for chronic illness patients sends email notifications when someone replies to your post — design choice. A blog lets readers comment on articles and notifies writers when they do — design choice. A local news site has a comments section that displays newest-first — design choice. Every one of these could theoretically be characterized as “features that increase engagement” and therefore potential vectors of liability.

And the claims of “addiction” are even worse. As we’ve discussed, studies show very little support for the idea that “social media addiction” is a real thing, but many people believe it is. But it’s not difficult for a lawyer to turn anything that makes people want to use a service more into a claimed “addictive” feature. Oh, that forum has added gifs? That makes people use it more! Sue!

Yes, some of these may sound crazy, but lawyers are going to start suing everyone, and the sites you like are going to be doing everything they can to appease them, which will involve making services way worse.

Who’s Not in the Room

There’s also something that got zero attention in either trial: the people for whom social media is genuinely, meaningfully beneficial.

Goldman’s observation on this deserves to be read carefully:

Due to the legal pressure from the jury verdicts and the enacted and pending legislation, the social media industry faces existential legal liability and inevitably will need to reconfigure their core offerings if they can’t get broad-based relief on appeal. While any reconfiguration of social media offerings may help some victims, the changes will almost certainly harm many other communities that rely upon and derive important benefits from social media today. Those other communities didn’t have any voice in the trial; and their voices are at risk of being silenced on social media as well.

LGBTQ+ teenagers in hostile communities who find support and connection online. People with rare diseases who find communities of fellow patients. Activists in authoritarian countries who use social media to organize. Artists and creators who built careers on these platforms. People with disabilities who rely on social media as their primary social outlet. None of them were in that courtroom. None of them had a voice in the proceedings that will reshape the platforms they depend on.

When platforms are forced to “reconfigure their core offerings” to reduce liability — which could mean anything from removing algorithmic recommendations to eliminating features that enable connection and discovery — the costs won’t fall evenly. Meta and Google will survive. They’ll make their products blander, less useful, and more locked down. It’s the users who relied on those features who will pay the price.

Bad Defendants Make Bad Law

Both Meta and YouTube have said they will appeal, and they have plausible grounds. The product liability theory applied to what are fundamentally speech platforms raises serious First Amendment questions. The Section 230 issue — whether “design choices” about presenting third-party content are really just editorial decisions that 230 was designed to protect — will almost certainly get a serious look from appellate courts. The causation questions are genuinely unresolved.

But appeals take years. In the meantime, every plaintiffs’ attorney in America now has a proven template for suing any social media platform. The bellwether structure means more trials are already scheduled — the next California state court one is in July, with a similar federal case starting in June. The litigation flood has started, and 230’s procedural protection — the ability to get these cases dismissed before they become multi-million-dollar ordeals — has already been neutralized.

Goldman is right to frame this as existential:

There are thousands of other plaintiffs with pending claims; and with potentially millions of dollars at stake for each victim, many more will emerge. The total amount of damages at issue could be many tens of billions of dollars.

None of this means the harms kids face don’t deserve serious attention. They do. There are ways to address legitimate concerns about teen mental health that don’t require treating every editorial decision about third-party content as a defective product — but they involve hard, unglamorous work, like actually funding mental health care for young people.

But suing Meta is more fun!

Meta can absorb tens of billions. But this legal theory doesn’t apply only to Meta. It applies to every platform that makes “design choices” about how to present content — which again, is every platform. The next wave of lawsuits won’t just target trillion-dollar companies. They’ll target anyone with a recommendation algorithm, a notification system, or an infinite scroll feature, which in 2025 is basically everyone.

We got Section 230 because Congress looked at the Stratton Oakmont decision and realized the legal system had created a set of incentives that would destroy the open internet. The incentive now is arguably worse: not just “don’t moderate” but “don’t build anything that makes user-generated content engaging, discoverable, or easy to access, because if someone is harmed by that content, the way you presented it makes you liable.”

I get why people are cheering. Meta is a bad company that has made bad choices and treated its users badly. Zuckerberg has earned most of the contempt coming his way. Kids have been genuinely harmed, and the instinct to want someone powerful to be held accountable is about as human as it gets.

But bad defendants make bad law. And the law being made here — that platforms are liable for the “design” of how they present the third-party content that is their entire reason for existing — will not stay confined to companies you don’t like. It will be used against every website, every app, every platform, every small operator who ever made a choice about how to display user-generated content. It will make Section 230 a dead letter without anyone having to vote to repeal it. It will create a legal environment where only the largest companies can afford to operate, because only they can absorb the cost of endless litigation.

What you won’t get out of this is anything approaching “accountability.” You’ll get overly lawyered-up systems that prevent you from doing useful things online, and eventually the end of the open internet — cheered on by people who think they’re punishing a bully but are actually handing the bully’s biggest competitors a death sentence.