Source: Do Back-to-Back Courtroom Losses Herald Meta’s ‘Big Tobacco’ Moment? Publisher: The Wall Street Journal | Author: Erin Mulvaney, Meghan Bobrowsky and Erich Schwartzel Published: March 25, 2026 | Archived: March 26, 2026

LOS ANGELES—For Meta Platforms META -6.82%decrease; red down pointing triangle, which made $60 billion in profit last year, getting hit with legal damages of a few million dollars is ordinarily a nonevent.

But back-to-back jury verdicts holding the company liable for harms to young people could open the way to a flood of litigation that could force it—and other social-media giants—to make significant changes to the way they design and deliver their products.

That is the view of some legal experts, but also the stated position of Meta itself, which argued heading into the trials in California and New Mexico that for juries to endorse the theory of the cases against them would challenge their ability to keep serving products used daily by billions of people.

The judgments for the plaintiffs threaten to undermine long-held protections that have shielded internet companies for decades. They suggest future juries might be receptive to a product-liability argument against social media, which forms the basis of thousands of similar lawsuits waiting to be heard. And they encourage new plaintiffs to come forward, raising the prospect of mass litigation that could stretch for years and lead to settlements or changes in the industry, akin to the legal campaign against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta exposed minors to harmful content, including online solicitation, sexually explicit content and human trafficking under consumer-protection laws. Within 24 hours, a Los Angeles jury issued a verdict in a similar case, saying Meta and YouTube contributed to mental-health issues of a 20-year-old woman, Kaley G.M., because of the addictive nature of its products.

The California case was the first trial of thousands of consolidated lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. More trials are scheduled for this year. TikTok and Snap settled the first case but are on the hook for the others.

Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the verdicts reflect an expansive view on tech companies’ liability for their products.

“What is new is the addiction element,” he said. “That could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction, there is something very abstract about it.”

The ruling in the Los Angeles bellwether case could have significant ramifications for Meta and a swath of other internet platforms. The tech giants have long argued that they couldn’t be held liable for the third-party content posted to their platforms, citing Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That measure is credited in part with fueling the growth of social-media companies.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Los Angeles case sidestepped Section 230 by arguing that the way the platforms themselves were designed was harmful and intentionally so. The success of that argument is now sending shock waves through the tech world.

“This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, AI and beyond that,” said Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives. “The floodgates are already open.” 

Meta said it would continue to fight and focus on the evidence in each case, and noted that the damages awarded in the New Mexico case were far less than the plaintiffs had sought. The plaintiffs had sought nearly $2 billion and were awarded $375 million. In the Los Angeles case, the plaintiff was awarded $6 million. Mark Lanier, the plaintiff’s lawyer, said he purposefully didn’t ask for a specific amount of damages.

“Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app,” a Meta spokeswoman said after Wednesday’s verdict. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”

A spokesman for Alphabet’s GOOGL -2.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle Google, which owns YouTube, said it would appeal and disagrees with the verdict in the California case.

Ahead of the trials, Meta argued for the lawsuits to be thrown out and said that many of the design features at issue, such as instant notification and infinite scroll, were “inescapably linked” to the content shown to users. This could prompt a flood of litigation, it warned, causing the company to change how its products deliver information, to avoid liability. Meta also said the cases erode Section 230 and First Amendment protections. 

In a briefing with reporters after the verdict in Los Angeles, Meta said it has been invested in identifying solutions to help teens for over a decade and that it has built tools and resources to give teens a safer, positive experience. Those include teen accounts with heightened protections on messaging and content access. Hundreds of millions of teens have teen accounts, which were introduced in 2024, Meta said.

In remarks ahead of jury deliberation over punitive damages, Luis Li, the lead trial lawyer representing YouTube, said the platform has instituted features to interrupt long sessions and give parents an indication of how much time their children are spending on their phones. 

“They’re not perfect,” he said, adding, “you can’t walk into someone’s phone and turn on all of these features.” 

The seven-week trial was emotional at times. Parents, some of whom blamed social media for their children’s suicide or drug overdoses, entered a lottery system each day for seats. Sometimes there were tears during testimony. 

Two jurors interviewed after the verdict said the eight days of deliberation were filled with questions about culpability and what signal they wanted their decisions to send to Meta and YouTube. They had to weigh conflicting expert testimony and research about the harms of social media to young people.

One juror, Victoria, who only gave her first name to protect her anonymity, said Zuckerberg’s answers on the stand came across as inconsistent. “That didn’t sit well with us,” she said. She said he seemed unprepared, a position she said was surprising for “the guru” whose products were at the center of this case. 

Victoria said she wasn’t a regular user of social media before the trial. She planned to stay off it.

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Erin Mulvaney is a national legal affairs reporter with The Wall Street Journal. She covers the legal industry and litigation affecting business and the economy nationwide. She writes about high-profile trials, lawsuits that explore novel questions, and cases that reveal legal tensions for companies, including about mass torts, technology, labor, and antitrust.

She previously worked for Bloomberg Industry Group and American Lawyer Media in Washington, specializing in the gig economy, civil rights, and discrimination law. A Texas-native, she wrote about real estate for the Houston Chronicle and state politics for the Dallas Morning News. She has a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Meghan Bobrowsky is a technology reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, where she covers the tech giant Meta and social media at large. Since joining the Journal in 2021, Meghan has reported on Elon Musk’s bid and subsequent takeover of Twitter, the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the rise and fall of the self-driving car company Cruise.

In 2022, Meghan and two of her colleagues won a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing for their reporting on Meta’s metaverse ambitions and missteps. In 2024, Meghan and a team of Journal reporters won awards from the New York Press Club and the National Press Club for their coverage of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank.

Meghan previously worked at the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee. She grew up in Davis, Calif., and graduated from Scripps College with a bachelor’s degree in politics.

Erich Schwartzel is an enterprise reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles.

Erich pursues stories across a wide variety of topics. He specializes in deeply reported narratives at the intersections of business, politics and culture. His work frequently appears in WSJ. Magazine, and he is a regular host and interviewer at the Journal’s events and conferences. He joined the Journal in 2013.

Erich’s first book, “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy,” detailed the growing influence of China on the American entertainment industry. “Red Carpet” was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, called a “page-turner” by Foreign Affairs, and named one of the best books ever written about Hollywood by Esquire. His next book, to be published by Knopf, is a biography of the “Star Wars” franchise.

Before joining the Journal, Erich covered energy and the environment for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where his work won the Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Reporting. He grew up in Latrobe, Penn., and got his start in journalism writing the police blotter for his local paper.