Is social media not just bad, but illegally bad? Should tech companies pay for making it that way? According to two US juries — and no shortage of outside commentary — the answer to both questions is “yes.”

Earlier this week, two juries — one in New Mexico, one in Los Angeles — held Meta liable for a total of hundreds of millions of dollars for harming minors. YouTube was also found liable in Los Angeles, and both companies are appealing their losses. In one sense, the decisions were surprising. Meta and Google operate platforms for transmitting speech and are typically protected in a variety of ways by Section 230 and the First Amendment; it’s unusual for suits to clear these hurdles. In another, it feels inevitable. The web of 2026 has become almost synonymous with a few widely disliked for-profit platforms, and the harm they’ve caused is often tangible — but it’s still far from certain what this defeat will change, and what the collateral damage could be.

If these decisions survive appeal — which isn’t certain — the direct outcome would be multimillion-dollar penalties. Depending on the outcome of several more “bellwether” cases in Los Angeles, a much larger group settlement could be reached down the road. Even at this early stage, it’s a victory for a legal theory that social media platforms should be treated like defective products — a strategy designed to get around the shield of Section 230, but one that’s often failed in court. “The California case specifically is the first time social media has ever had to face the staredown and judgment of a jury for specific personal injuries,” attorney Carrie Goldberg, who pushed forward major early social media liability suits, including an unsuccessful case against Grindr, told The Verge. “It’s the dawn of a new era.”

For many activists, the overall goal is to make clear that lawsuits will keep piling up if companies don’t change their business practices. What practices? In New Mexico, a jury was swayed by arguments that Meta had made statements misleading users about the safety of its platforms. In LA, the plaintiffs successfully claimed Instagram and YouTube were designed in a way that facilitated social media addiction that harmed a teenage user. Meta and Google (and other nervous companies) could plausibly change specific features or be more cautious in their public statements and disclosures. But each case depends on a set of highly specific circumstances, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer about what needs to change.

Eric Goldman, a legal blogger and expert on Section 230, sees clear legal danger ahead for social media services. “These rulings indicate that juries are willing to impose major liability on social media providers based on claims of social media addiction,” Goldman wrote after the ruling. In an email to The Verge, he noted the issue was bigger than just juries. “Judges are certainly aware of the controversies around social media,” Goldman said. In the Los Angeles case and other upcoming bellwether trials, “the judges have not given social media defendants much benefit of the doubt, which is how the plaintiffs’ novel cases were able to reach trials in the first place.” It’s a situation, he says, that “does feel differently compared to a decade ago.”

Goldman pointed out that New York and California have also passed laws banning “addictive” social media feeds for teens — so even if an appeals court reverses the recent decisions, that won’t necessarily turn back the clock.

The best-case outcome of all this has been laid out by people like Julie Angwin, who wrote in The New York Times that companies should be pushed to change “toxic” features like infinite scrolling, beauty filters that encourage body dysmorphia, and algorithms that prioritize “shocking and crude” content. The worst-case scenario falls along the lines of a piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who argued the rulings spell disaster for smaller social networks that could be sued for letting users post and see First Amendment-protected speech under a vague standard of harm. He noted that the New Mexico case hinged partly on arguing that Meta had harmed kids by providing end-to-end encryption in private messaging, creating an incentive to discontinue a feature that protects users’ privacy — and indeed, Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month.

Blake Reid, a professor at Colorado Law, is more circumspect. “It’s hard right now to forecast what’s going to happen,” Reid told The Verge in an interview. On Bluesky, he noted that companies will likely look for “cold, calculated” ways to avoid legal liability with the minimum possible disruption, not fundamentally rethink their business models. “There are obviously harms here and it’s pretty important that the tort system clocked those harms” in the recent cases, he told The Verge. “It’s just that what comes in the wake of them is less clear to me.”

While Reid sees legal risks for smaller platforms with fewer resources in these decisions, he’s not convinced they’re more serious than the challenges new entrants already face in a hyper-consolidated online landscape built on massive amounts of data collection. “There are things that make it hard to do something really new in this space that are driven by the sort of marketplace and the surrounding policy,” he said.

Reid, Goldman, and Masnick all warn there’s a clear chance that the fallout could harm marginalized people who use social media to connect. “There will be even stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media,” Goldman told The Verge. “This hurts many subpopulations of minors, ranging from LGBTQ teens who will be isolated from communities that can help them navigate their identities to minors on the autism spectrum who can express themselves better online than they can in face-to-face conversations.”

If platforms like Instagram are inherently damaging and directly comparable to gambling or cigarettes, comparisons frequently made by critics, being kicked off would be no great loss. But even research that suggests social media can be harmful for adolescents has associated moderate use with better well-being. Conversely, harmful online content like harassment and eating disorder communities still flourished before recommendation-driven, hyper-optimized modern social media; tinkering with specific algorithmic formulas could have a positive impact, but it’s possible it won’t provide a deep or lasting fix. The appeal of punishing Meta is obvious — what it will mean for everyone else is much less clear.

Two juries are currently deliberating a series of cases that could either usher in a legal reckoning for Meta, or maintain the status quo in an uphill battle to impose changes or penalties on tech platforms in court.

Yesterday, a New Mexico jury heard closing arguments in a trial where Meta is accused of  facilitating child predators on its platforms — allegations the company vehemently denies. And as soon as today, a Los Angeles jury is tentatively expected to reach a verdict in a separate case, which concerns whether Meta and Google should be held liable for making defective products that addicted a young woman. Verdicts against the company could result in damages and civil penalties that could exceed $2 billion dollars. Perhaps more significantly, such an outcome could also invite more legal action after years of failed or stalled attempts to sue tech companies over alleged harm. 

It’s already just the tip of the iceberg for Meta, as well as many other tech platforms, that are set to face several more trials this year. Meta’s products, Facebook and Instagram, have often been at the forefront of criticism over the tech industry’s alleged failure to protect kids online, fueled by leaks from former employees like Frances Haugen. Meta, meanwhile, argues that harming users is not good for business.

“While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments, we’re focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told The Verge in a prior statement. He also said the company “strongly disagree[s]” with allegations in the separate set of lawsuits playing out in California, and “are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” The jury in Los Angeles has been deliberating for just over a week, following a five-week-long trial.

During closing arguments in New Mexico on Monday, Linda Singer, an attorney representing the state, told the jury that Meta has failed to install adequate protections for young people on its services, and misled the public about the safety of its products. Throughout the six-week trial, the state presented evidence from Meta’s own internal discussions and state investigators’ undercover operations. “Meta chooses how to design its algorithm,” Singer said. “When you’re optimizing for a metric, the algorithm takes all of that data to get better. Right now, it’s getting better given that goal of showing engaging content. But Meta could choose to program its algorithm to get better at safety, to get better at integrity, to get better at things that keep kids safe.” While Meta has promoted numerous additional child safety features over the years, Singer compared them to “adding a filter to a cigarette. It doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the product or make it safe.”

Both juries in New Mexico and California heard similar evidence — including testimony from a set of former Meta employees — about internal concerns over the platform’s guardrails, discussions about getting users onto Meta platforms young, and harms it was allegedly aware of but didn’t take sufficient action to address. Singer said Meta ignored clear signals of kids under 13 on its platform, even though it said they weren’t allowed on. One elementary school principal wrote to Instagram head Adam Mosseri that almost all her kids were on the app, she said.

New Mexico attorneys also presented evidence from their own law enforcement investigations that led to the arrest of three suspected child predators. Investigators used decoy accounts that claimed to be minors to lure suspects, and found they were flooded with new friend requests and sexual chats from adults, even when the decoy account repeatedly claimed to be a minor in messages. The state said three suspects’ accounts weren’t shut down until after New Mexico announced their arrests, even though Meta’s own systems had allegedly flagged policy violations repeatedly.

In the company’s own closing arguments, Meta attorney Kevin Huff argued that Meta had clearly disclosed the limits of its safety systems and taken action whenever possible, while the state had focused on a “small amount of bad content” and “cherry-picked” statements. “We believe the evidence has shown that Meta works incredibly hard to protect users including teens,” Huff said. He also argued that the state’s investigators used “hacked and stolen accounts” and real people’s images nonconsensually to lure predators, arguing they were “not trying to replicate a true teen experience.”  

Singer disputed the claims. “I want to be as plain as I can possibly be on this point. This is not a hacked account, this is not an image of an actual adult. It’s an age-regressed image of Mr. Kitch,” Singer said, referring to a New Mexico investigator. Another image used in a decoy account, she said, was AI-generated. “After all of the evidence you’ve heard about the way that Meta put kids in harm’s way, after the fact that they failed to detect that his 13-year-old account is being chatted with by sex offenders, Meta had the audacity to question whether he placed someone in danger. When the scale of what Meta has done here is astonishing and absolutely contrary to what it has said.” 

One key hurdle for plaintiffs in each of these cases is overcoming the fact that Meta is protected by Section 230 for liability over third-party content. Singer clarified early in her presentation that “when I say harmful content, I’m not talking about the nature of the content. I’m talking about Meta’s misrepresentations about what it knew about the harmful content that was present and recommended on its platforms.” Huff, conversely, drew the jury’s attention to Section 230 multiple times and said the state’s claim of misrepresentation “doesn’t even get out of the starting gate.”

Singer urged the jury to award the maximum amount in civil penalties if they decide that Meta willfully misled the public about safety and engaged in “unconscionable trade practices” under New Mexico law. If the jury agrees that all teen users in New Mexico were not properly informed of Meta’s risks and award the maximum of $5,000 apiece, that sum could total more than $2 billion.

Meta’s attorney, Huff, argued the state had presented “zero evidence” that teens were using Instagram because they weren’t informed of the risks and said the calculation of users under 18 was “based on a fake number that doesn’t represent the number of teens in the state.” (The state’s attorney said the count was drawn from Meta’s own numbers.) “There is no evidence that anyone ever saw any of the 42 misstatements” attributed to Meta among New Mexico’s teen user base, Huff argued — and therefore, no reason to grant a penalty for it at all.

Billionaire Elon Musk — who’s long used his X (formerly Twitter) platform to stoke anger at immigrants and support antisemitic conspiracy theories — has spent the past day spreading and praising claims that “White people are on the verge of extinction,” Somali immigrants have “no right to be in America,” and nonprofits who support them are committing “treason and should be met with force.”

Musk quoted or reposted numerous statements from other accounts, peppering his reposts with approving commentary like “true” and “simply a fact.” A number were related to the Trump administration’s ongoing investigation of alleged public assistance program fraud in Minnesota, where many defendants are part of Minnesota’s sizable Somali American community. He reposted commentary about a case involving a Somali immigrant who was convicted earlier this year of sexually assaulting a child, as well as other cases in which immigrants committed crimes.

The accounts included UK far-right figure Tommy Robinson, who Musk reinstated on X after he was banned from the platform for “hateful conduct” in 2018. “NGO’s in Minnesota are getting paid $2,375 for every Somali immigrant they bring into the United States,” Robinson’s post said, apparently referring to a one-time federal resettlement fund payment meant for “basic needs” like food and furnishing. “This is treason and should be met with force.” Another repost from an account with 1.2 million followers, Wall Street Apes, asserted that “overall Somalis have no right to be in America, especially North Dakota and Minnesota. They don’t integrate into our societies. They carry over their clan mentalities.” (The post was quoting a video by another influencer, who said his truck had been rear-ended by an immigrant.)

Musk, who has 14 (known) children, offered his own more substantive statement about white birthrates. “​​If current trends continue, Whites will go from being a small minority of world population today to virtually extinct!” he wrote on December 2nd. He also repeated his long-running assertion that immigration is a plot to put Democrats in power, a belief linked with his long-running support of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that immigrants are being “imported” by liberals (and particularly Jews) to displace white Americans. “The far left imported voters to gain power and it worked,” he wrote, quoting a post that falsely claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “wasn’t even elected by Americans.”

Musk’s posts also emphasized his alignment with President Donald Trump — who has feuded with Musk repeatedly despite their close collaboration in the past year. Musk reposted a December 2nd video of Trump saying “I like Elon a lot” and “I think we get along well,” as well as a video of White House adviser Stephen Miller. Earlier this week, Trump said that immigrants from Somalia “contribute nothing” and that “I don’t want them in our country.”

Years ago, Musk’s statements would likely have raised alarm among advertisers on the platform he has owned since 2022. IBM and Apple, among others, pulled ads from the platform in 2023 after Musk praised a far-right poster’s call for white pride and agreed with antisemitic, anti-immigrant statements. But Musk responded with a campaign of legal harassment, and Trump administration officials worked conditions discouraging dropping ads from platforms like X into a major ad company merger proposal. Earlier this year, one ad consulting firm CEO told The Wall Street Journal that brands were “afraid of the legal and political ramifications” of not advertising on X.