What jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube mean for tech companies’ accountability

Two landmark US jury verdicts in March 2026 against social media giants could pave the way to accountability for tech harms that had previously avoided legal scrutiny by juries. In a first-of-its-kind trial in New Mexico, a jury awarded USD375m in civil penalties against Meta for misrepresenting child safety on its platforms in violation of state consumer protection law. The same week, a jury in Los Angeles became the first to hold social media companies liable on negligence and failure-to-warn grounds for developing addictive platforms that harmed a plaintiff’s mental health. The two cases proceeded under different legal theories, but both validated an approach that scholars and advocates have proposed as a way to overcome tech companies' formidable legal shields under U.S. law: focusing on how platforms are designed, not the content they host.

In the US, tech companies have long relied on two related defenses to avoid legal liability for their platforms. These defenses are Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which generally shields platforms from liability for third-party content posted on their sites, and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech. Platforms’ successful advocacy for expansive interpretations of these principles of US law created an accountability challenge for companies with global reach: the same jurisdiction where the companies are headquartered made it uniquely difficult to sue them.

These lawsuits overcame that challenge by targeting harms that were based not on platform content but on platform design. The New Mexico lawsuit, for example, alleged that Meta’s Instagram algorithms proactively recommended would-be abusers' accounts to children on the app. The Los Angeles lawsuit highlighted features like infinite scroll, resulting in a pretrial ruling where Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl wrote, “the fact that a design feature like ‘infinite scroll’ impelled a user to continue to consume content that proved harmful does not mean that there can be no liability for harm arising from the design feature itself." 

The success of these design-focused lawsuits indicates that tech companies can be held accountable in their home courts. The significance is most obvious for the massive number of directly analogous social media cases that are currently pending or yet to be filed. The Los Angeles state court trial was the first of thousands of social media addiction lawsuits pending in the same coordinated proceeding. A federal multi-district litigation already saw its first bellwether case settled under the newfound leverage provided by the verdicts. And many more plaintiffs could still file cases. Meanwhile, the New Mexico consumer protection case was the first to go to trial of dozens of lawsuits by state attorneys general pending against tech companies under state consumer protection laws, and all 50 states have consumer protection statutes prohibiting deceptive practices.

All of this active and potential litigation exposes defendants to billions of dollars of liability, which could meaningfully change incentives for tech companies and result in significant changes to their business practices. The impact of such changes would extend beyond social media addiction and child online safety. Algorithms designed to keep people engaged can contribute to extremism by targeting users with increasingly-radicalizing content and atrocity crimes by amplifying incitements to violence that garner more views because of their shocking nature. Engagement-maximizing algorithms also promote misinformation and ideological polarization. If companies’ financial exposure leads them to stop designing addictive platforms, it could create downstream positive impacts for human rights and democracy beyond individual users’ mental health.

The trials’ outcomes may also reflect expanding opportunities to litigate other harms related to the product design of other emerging technologies. Tech Justice Law, for example, has filed lawsuits against AI companies for harms caused by chatbot design, including suicides, AI delusional disorder, and a fatal overdose, as well as a consumer protection lawsuit that alleges Meta profiteers from scam advertising it allows to flourish on its platforms. And even where tech companies are still successfully invoking their classic liability shields, there are indications that U.S judges’ perspectives are starting to shift. When a panel of appeals court judges dismissed a suit against Meta for Facebook’s alleged role in fueling anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar on Section 230 grounds, all three judges expressed that the binding case law that forced them to dismiss the lawsuit had created an improperly broad interpretation of the defense. Two called to initiate a procedure that would allow Section 230 interpretation to be brought back within the scope of the law’s intended meaning; if that happened, tech companies’ formidable legal defenses would be further weakened.

After years of tech industry wins in US courts, the Los Angeles and New Mexico verdicts represent a powerful shift. Design-focused legal theories have created new possibilities for accountability in Big Tech’s home jurisdiction.

Madeline Batt is a Legal Fellow working to counter the human rights impacts of Big Tech exploitation at pioneering litigation and advocacy organization Tech Justice Law.