This article is co-authored by partner Drew LaFramboise and JGL law clerk Luke Bella.
For those growing up in the era of social media, having a social media presence is seen as a necessity from a young age. In 2026, more than 95% of kids aged 13-17 have social media accounts. One-third of kids aged 13-17 report using social media almost constantly. Despite most social media apps having policies that users must be at least thirteen years old to join, up to 2/3 of kids aged 11 and 12 years old have social media accounts. Though social media can help users stay in touch with friends and find community, there is significant evidence that excessive use, particularly among adolescents, is closely linked with negative mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety. For attorneys, this begs the question: Can social media companies be held liable for these harms?
According to the jury in the landmark case of K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., the answer is yes. K.G.M. v. Meta was the first case to reach trial in which a plaintiff alleged that a social media company should face tort liability for harm caused to an adolescent user’s mental health from its intentionally addictive features. The plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman from Chico, California, claimed that her compulsive use of Instagram and YouTube from a young age led to severe mental health harms like depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and body dysmorphia. The defendants in this case were Meta, the owner of Instagram, and Google, the owner of YouTube. On March 25, 2026, the jury found for the plaintiff, resulting in a $6 million verdict, including $4 million in punitive damages.
The Plaintiff’s Theories of Liability
The plaintiff in K.G.M. v. Meta made three central allegations:
- The defendants negligently designed addictive features such as algorithmically personalized feeds, infinite scrolling, push notifications, and engagement tools like public “likes” of posts to maximize compulsive use, while knowing the risks that these posed for minors.
- Despite internal awareness of the potential harms from defendants’ design choices, the platforms failed to adequately warn users, particularly minor users, about these harms.
- Meta and Google knowingly targeted minor users while fully aware that their systems were designed to exploit adolescent psychological vulnerabilities to keep them engaged.
The plaintiff made a number of key arguments, including:
- Meta and Google intentionally targeted adolescent users and made decisions that prioritized profits over user safety, evidenced by internal documents and whistleblower testimony.
- The designs of the platforms—rather than the specific content therein—were predatory and unsafe.
- The harms caused by the defendants were foreseeable from their intentionally addictive features, with the plaintiff comparing the techniques used by the platforms to those used by slot machine designers and the tobacco industry.
Litigation Impact
For attorneys, K.G.M. v. Meta provides several important lessons for successfully pursuing tort claims against tech and social media platforms. The plaintiff’s focus on intentional design decisions from developers being the root cause of her injuries, instead of scrutinizing the content allowed on the sites themselves, created a path around Section 230 immunity, which historically insulates social media companies from civil liability for third-party speech published on their platforms. Likewise, attorneys should focus on developers’ intentional design decisions made despite known risks to adolescent users. Attorneys should follow the K.G.M. plaintiff’s strategy of focusing on social media companies’ internal knowledge of mental health risks to users, including companies’ intentional decisions to make design choices meant to foster addiction.
This bellwether case will likely give more negotiating power to plaintiffs during settlement discussions in the many similar cases currently pending in courts around the country. The groundwork laid by K.G.M. v. Meta should give practitioners a pathway to successfully prosecuting these cases, as more and more users continue to suffer the effects of significant social media use from a young age.
