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Courts & Liability

For decades, tobacco companies were protected by the argument that they sold a legal product. Liability came when courts accepted that the product was designed to be addictive and the companies knew. That argument is now being made against social media platforms, and the first two juries to hear it accepted it, in verdicts that are not yet final.

How to read this page. Tap any underlined word to see the precise legal term and a short definition. Expand any "Deeper" box for the evidence and contested points. The main text works on its own — you can skip both and still get the whole argument.

The legal theory

Section 230 protects platforms from liability for user-generated content. But some design choices — what parental controls exist, how a user's age is checked, how hard it is to delete an account, whether users were warned of what the company knew — are not content. They are engineering decisions. Courts are now finding that platforms can be held liable for a defective design, even where they cannot be held liable for harmful content. Where the feed's own features fall — the infinite scroll, autoplay, the recommendation algorithm, the timing of notifications — is the line still being drawn: the federal judge in the main US litigation held those claims barred in 2023, while the Third Circuit let a suit over TikTok's recommendations go ahead in 2024.

The wave of lawsuits

• October 2022. Dozens of personal-injury suits over young people's use of social media were pooled into multidistrict litigation (MDL 3047) in the Northern District of California. Suits by school districts were added later, and by September 2026 3,383 lawsuits had been filed in it.
• October 2023. More than 40 US states sued Meta over harm to children and teens: 33 of them together, in the same federal court as the MDL, and eight in their own state courts.
• 14 November 2023. The federal judge overseeing the MDL ruled that Section 230 and the First Amendment do not shield platforms from claims about some of their own design choices — failure to warn, and features such as missing parental controls, weak age checks and barriers to deleting an account — while the claims against the endless feed, the recommendation algorithms and the timing of notifications were held barred.
• 27 August 2024. The Third Circuit found that TikTok must face a lawsuit after its algorithm exposed a 10-year-old to a dangerous challenge resulting in her death.
• 26 August 2026. The states' case did not reach a verdict: days into the trial, Meta settled with 51 US attorneys general (47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands) — a minimum of $12.1 billion and up to $17.1 billion over ten years, and, for under-18s, a default daily limit of two hours, a block between midnight and 6 am, no visible like counts and no cosmetic filters, checked by an independent auditor. The court entered the consent judgment the same day; Meta denied the allegations and admitted no liability.
• 1 September 2026. The families' and school districts' own cases are not part of that settlement: 3,208 lawsuits were pending in the consolidated proceedings.

March 2026: the first verdicts

Juries in New Mexico and California delivered landmark verdicts: against Meta in New Mexico, and against Meta and Google's YouTube in Los Angeles. In New Mexico, a jury found Meta violated consumer protection laws by misleading users about the safety of its platforms — awarding $375 million in civil penalties. In California, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million to a plaintiff who testified that she had become addicted to social media as a child, finding that both companies acted with malice, oppression or fraud. Meta, which owns Instagram, was found 70% responsible; YouTube 30%.

Neither verdict is final. In Los Angeles, the trial judge refused in June 2026 to overturn the verdict or order a new trial; Meta and YouTube then filed appeals in July. In New Mexico, the judge ordered Meta in August 2026 to pay a further $567 million into a fund for treatment and prevention, bringing the judgment to $942 million. Meta has said it will appeal, and has asked the court to pause payment while it does.

The tobacco comparison

The tobacco analogy is instructive and limited. In the 1990s the tobacco industry was forced, through state lawsuits and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, to answer for four things — and in 2006 a US federal court found the companies liable for a scheme to defraud smokers and potential smokers on exactly those points. The plaintiffs allege all four against the platforms:

• Knowing. Tobacco knew its product was addictive; the Haugen documents show internal knowledge of harm.
• Concealing. Tobacco hid that knowledge; here, the states allege that Meta continued “to conceal and downplay its platforms’ adverse effects”.
• Engineering. Tobacco engineered its product to increase addictiveness; here, features are engineered to maximise engagement.
• Targeting the young. Tobacco targeted young people; here, the states allege “a business model focused on maximizing young users’ time on its platforms”.

Where it breaks down: cigarettes cause physical addiction through a well-understood chemical mechanism. Whether social media design causes psychological harm, and how far, is contested: the link is well documented as a correlation, the pathway is more complex, and individual variation is large. The analogy illuminates the litigation strategy; it does not describe an identical mechanism.

How we know — why the design theory works where content claims fail +

For two decades, suits against platforms died on Section 230: the harm was traced to user content, and platforms aren't liable for that. The litigation now succeeding reframes the target. It does not ask the jury to find a post unlawful; it asks whether the company's own product decisions — engagement-maximising features, notification timing, recommendation of harmful material to minors — were negligent or defective, and whether the company knew. Content is the user's; design is the company's. That reframing is what the March 2026 verdicts accepted, and what the November 2023 MDL ruling accepted in part: it let the claims about parental controls, age checks, account deletion and failure to warn go forward, and held those against the endless feed, the recommendation algorithms and notification timing barred.

What the verdicts do and don't establish. They are first-instance jury findings — powerful signals, but both are being appealed, so they are not yet settled appellate law. And note the framing discipline: outside the courtroom this site avoids calling users "addicted", because that wording shifts responsibility onto the user and is contested science. Inside the litigation, "addiction" is the plaintiffs' legal claim and the language of the verdicts, so we report it as such — the term belongs to the case, not to our description of users.

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