How a Social Media Trial Verdict Threatens Big Tech: Explainer

A flood of lawsuits filed in recent years against social media giants claim that by engineering their platforms to be hard to resist, the companies are causing serious harm to young users. In the first case to go to trial, a jury on March 25 found Meta Platforms Inc. and Google negligent in the design and operation of their platforms – a landmark verdict.

The trial, which was held in Los Angeles, centered on a 20-year-old woman who said her nonstop use for more than a decade of sites including Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube caused her to suffer ...