A landmark jury trial in Los Angeles involving Meta’s Instagram and Facebook platforms remains undecided as of late March 2026, with jurors still deliberating after closing arguments began on March 12. The case centers on claims that the platforms engineered addictive features—including infinite scroll, auto-play videos, frequent notifications, and recommendation algorithms—to exploit young users’ vulnerabilities. Plaintiff Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old California woman, alleges that compulsive use of Instagram and YouTube since childhood caused lasting harm to her mental health.
The jury’s pending verdict could establish significant legal precedent for holding social media companies accountable for designing habit-forming features that specifically target teenagers. Meanwhile, the broader landscape of social media litigation has accelerated dramatically, with a New Mexico jury delivering a major decision just this week that finds Meta liable for harming children and imposing a $375 million penalty.
Table of Contents
- What Is the California Trial Actually About?
- The New Mexico Verdict and What It Signals
- The Scale of Pending Litigation
- TikTok, Settlements, and What They Reveal
- The Evidence of Addictive Design
- What Damages Look Like in These Cases
- The Road Ahead for Social Media Litigation
What Is the California Trial Actually About?
The Los Angeles trial involves some of the most detailed allegations to date about how social media platforms deliberately engineer their products to addict young users. Meta rested its defense case on March 11, 2026, just before closing arguments began, signaling that both sides have presented their full evidence to the jury. Kaley G.M.’s legal team argues that Instagram and YouTube’s design features—particularly the “infinite scroll” mechanism that automatically loads new content as users reach the bottom of their feed, and the auto-play video feature that begins playing content without user initiation—were specifically designed to maximize engagement time regardless of harm. The platforms allegedly combined these features with algorithmic recommendation systems that learn what keeps individual users scrolling and increasingly frequent notifications to pull teenagers back into the apps repeatedly throughout the day.
For context, a teenager using Instagram since age 13 or 14 would have grown up entirely within these platforms’ current feature sets, with no memory of how social media functioned before infinite scroll became standard. The trial’s significance lies in the fact that it allows a jury to examine internal company communications, design decisions, and expert testimony about adolescent brain development. Unlike settlement negotiations, which occur behind closed doors, a trial creates a public record of what features the platforms knew about, how they were implemented, and what internal discussions occurred about their impact on young users. The jury has heard from development teams, product managers, and neuroscientists about how adolescents’ brains are particularly vulnerable to reward-based behavioral conditioning—the same mechanisms that underpin addiction to gambling or substances. If the jury rules in Kaley G.M.’s favor, it could establish a legal principle that designing features specifically to maximize habit formation constitutes negligence or fraudulent misrepresentation, even if the features themselves aren’t inherently dangerous.
The New Mexico Verdict and What It Signals
On March 25, 2026—the same week the California jury was still deliberating—a New Mexico jury returned a significant verdict against meta. The jury found the company liable for harming children’s mental health and safety, violating New Mexico state law on false advertising and unconscionable trade practices. The verdict included a $375 million penalty, one of the largest jury awards yet in social media harm litigation. Critically, the jury agreed with plaintiffs that Meta made false or misleading statements about its platforms and engaged in practices specifically targeting children’s vulnerabilities.
This verdict does not necessarily mean the California jury will reach the same conclusion, but it demonstrates that mainstream juries—not just legal experts or activists—are finding persuasive evidence that social media companies have crossed an ethical and legal line. The New Mexico decision is particularly notable because it represents the first major jury verdict (rather than a settlement) specifically on the question of whether social media platforms harm children. Meta has already announced it disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal, signaling that the company intends to fight these cases aggressively rather than concede. This means even if plaintiffs win at trial, years of appellate litigation could follow before any judgment becomes final. However, the accumulation of verdicts and settlements creates legal and reputational pressure: each new case that goes to trial increases the likelihood that some jury somewhere will agree with the plaintiff’s allegations, and each verdict makes it harder for Meta to claim that concerns about social media harm are speculative or unfounded.
The Scale of Pending Litigation
The California and New Mexico cases are part of a far larger litigation ecosystem. The Adolescent Social Media Addiction multidistrict litigation (MDL)—a federal consolidation of cases overseen by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California—includes 2,407 pending claims as of March 2026. This MDL consolidates cases against Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, meaning that litigation developments in one case can affect the strategy and evidence in hundreds of others. A single significant ruling or settlement can shift the entire landscape for remaining claimants.
The MDL structure exists precisely because individual cases involving the same defendants and similar allegations are more efficiently litigated together, and because consolidation prevents the risk that some plaintiffs receive substantial awards while others receive nothing for essentially the same injury. Beyond the federal MDL, 40 or more state attorneys general have filed separate lawsuits against Meta, investigating similar claims from a consumer protection perspective. Unlike individual plaintiffs seeking compensation for personal harm, state AGs bring enforcement actions that can result in injunctions requiring the company to change how it operates, not just pay damages. A state AG victory could force Meta to remove certain features, change its algorithm, implement age verification, or redesign notification systems—changes that affect all users, not just those harmed in the particular state. The sheer number of parallel legal actions creates a kind of pressure chamber: even if Meta wins some cases, losing others becomes increasingly costly and embarrassing, and the cumulative effect of litigation expenses and negative publicity can eventually push settlement.
TikTok, Settlements, and What They Reveal
Notably, TikTok reached a confidential last-minute settlement just before California jury selection was supposed to begin, removing one defendant from at least some of the pending cases. The settlement details remain private, which is typical in negotiated resolutions but limits what the public can learn about the company’s internal practices or liability calculations. The fact that TikTok settled before trial suggests the company believed the risk of an adverse jury verdict was significant enough to justify paying substantial settlement funds rather than defending itself. For the approximately 1,000 coordinated cases involving TikTok that remain pending in the MDL, the company’s settlement does not automatically resolve them, though it may serve as a basis for settlement discussions in other claims.
When companies settle cases rather than fighting them to verdict, they almost never admit wrongdoing—settlements typically include a “no liability” clause in which the company denies the allegations but agrees to pay in exchange for dismissal of the suit. This means that even a well-funded settlement does not establish that the company did anything wrong in a legal sense, though the willingness to pay suggests the company’s lawyers assessed the trial risk as unacceptable. For plaintiffs, this creates a difficult choice: a small to moderate settlement offer that resolves their case quickly and provides immediate compensation, or the risk of proceeding to trial where they might win a much larger verdict but could also lose entirely and recover nothing. Kaley G.M. and her legal team chose the trial path, betting that a jury would find Meta’s conduct sufficiently egregious to award substantial damages.
The Evidence of Addictive Design
The core of these lawsuits rests on detailed allegations about how social media platforms deliberately engineer features to maximize engagement and usage time. Expert testimony in the California trial has focused on how the “infinite scroll” feature eliminates the natural stopping point that existed when feeds had to be loaded page-by-page. Instead of a user scrolling through a set number of posts and reaching the bottom of the feed, triggering a decision to close the app, infinite scroll continuously loads new content, making it extremely difficult to stop. Similarly, auto-play video features mean that users who watch one short video are automatically shown another without clicking anything, eliminating friction and the moment of conscious choice. Notifications are timed algorithmically to maximize the likelihood that a user will re-open the app at moments when they are likely to engage most intensely.
The companies’ internal communications, when they have been disclosed in litigation, reveal that designers knew these features were engagement-maximizing and that young users were particularly susceptible. What remains legally contested is whether knowing that a feature will increase usage constitutes fraud, negligence, or a violation of consumer protection law, or whether companies have a right to design products that maximize engagement without incurring liability for the consequences. Plaintiffs argue that targeting minors—whose brains are still developing and who cannot be assumed to make fully informed decisions—with deliberately habit-forming design crosses an ethical and legal line. Meta’s position, reflected in its defense strategy, is that users choose to use the platforms, that the features are not themselves dangerous, and that any mental health issues stem from other causes. A jury’s assessment of which argument is more persuasive could reshape how social media companies are allowed to operate.
What Damages Look Like in These Cases
When juries award damages in social media harm cases, they must determine what harm actually occurred and what dollar amount is appropriate. In Kaley G.M.’s case, damages could include compensation for medical treatment (therapy, psychiatry), lost earning potential or educational opportunities if her mental health issues prevented her from working or succeeding in school, pain and suffering, and potentially punitive damages meant to punish Meta for particularly egregious conduct. The New Mexico verdict’s $375 million award suggests the jury believed serious, widespread harm had occurred. That figure could be broken down as individual compensation to affected users, punitive damages to deter future similar conduct, or some combination.
If the California jury awards a similarly substantial verdict, it would likely trigger a rush of settlement negotiations in the remaining pending cases, as other defendants would reassess their trial risk based on this new data point. However, large verdicts can also be reduced on appeal, sometimes dramatically. Courts sometimes reduce awards they believe are excessive, and appellate judges may apply a different legal standard than the jury did. Meta’s announced plan to appeal the New Mexico verdict means that even if the $375 million award stands, additional years will pass before that money might actually be paid. For plaintiffs still waiting for resolution, this reality can be frustrating: a victory at trial is necessary but not sufficient to ensure compensation.
The Road Ahead for Social Media Litigation
As of March 2026, the regulatory and legal landscape for social media companies is clearly shifting. Litigation alone is pushing companies to acknowledge that adolescent mental health impacts are a serious concern, and congressional interest in federal social media regulation is high. The cumulative effect of lawsuits, settlements, state AG actions, and public pressure is creating an environment in which continued operation of platforms in their current form may become legally untenable. Even if Meta wins some cases, the cost of defending hundreds of lawsuits and the reputational damage of jury verdicts finding the company liable for harming children are substantial.
The California jury’s decision, whenever it comes, will likely not be the final word in this area of law. Rather, it will be one data point in a broader trend toward holding social media companies accountable for the effects of their design choices. Whether future accountability takes the form of jury verdicts, settlements, regulatory action, or legislative change remains to be seen. What is clear is that the assumption that social media companies bear no responsibility for the consequences of how they engineer their products is rapidly eroding.
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