Price of endless scrolling
ByteDance and Snap Inc. settled early on, leaving only Meta and YouTube to proceed to trial.
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ByteDance and Snap Inc. settled early on, leaving only Meta and YouTube to proceed to trial.
Every generation, it seems, has had one thing its parents worried about. For Gen X, it was too many hours in front of cable television. For Millennials, it was the untamed frontier of the early internet. For Gen Z, it is the endless algorithmic feed. American law finally caught up with that worry when the Los Angeles County Superior Court decided the landmark case of K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., ultimately holding social media platforms accountable.
At the center of the case is plaintiff Kaley Glenn-Mills (K.G.M.), now a 20-year-old woman from Chico, California, who sued defendants Meta Platforms Inc. (Instagram), Snap Inc. (Snapchat), ByteDance (TikTok) and YouTube on several counts: defective design, negligence, failure to warn, and fraudulent concealment and misrepresentation.
Plaintiff alleged that these platforms’ features — like infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation engines, constant notifications and beauty filters — caused her to use them compulsively, leaving her anxious, depressed, body-dysmorphic and suicidal. At the height of her use, she spent upward of 16 hours on Instagram alone. She stayed online even through cyberbullying and hid her addiction from her parents for fear they would confiscate her phone.
ByteDance and Snap Inc. settled early on, leaving only Meta and YouTube to proceed to trial.
At trial, plaintiff’s counsel likened the platforms to a lion stalking the weakest in a herd of gazelles, arguing that the companies had knowingly exploited adolescent psychology for engagement and profit. Meta countered by attributing plaintiff’s struggles to factors other than its platform. YouTube argued that it lacked the typical features of social media that make a platform addictive in the first place.
The jury was unmoved. On 25 March 2026, it found both companies liable for negligently designing their platforms and failing to adequately warn users of known dangers, thus causing substantial harm to the plaintiff. Defendants were ordered to pay a total of USD 6 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Meta was assigned 70 percent of the liability, while YouTube was assigned 30 percent.
The verdict is significant less for its amount than for the theory espoused by the jury: that a platform’s design choices, not merely the content users post on it, can give rise to negligence in the manner of a defective product. This design-defect theory, largely untested before a jury until now, treats a newsfeed less as a neutral conduit for speech and more as a manufactured product whose engineering choices carry legal consequences.
This ruling signals a shift: Courts are now willing to ask not only what children encountered online, but why the platform was engineered to keep them looking in the first place. For the thousands of plaintiffs still awaiting trial across America, the K.G.M. case offers early proof that a jury can be persuaded that addictive design is not simply a business strategy, but a legal wrong with a price attached.
At trial, the platforms were accused of preying on kids like lions on gazelles, and they were made to pay for it. That travels: Filipinos already rank among the world’s heaviest social media users, and our teens scroll through platforms a California jury just held liable. The Philippines has no K.G.M. yet, but it may soon face the same question: not what the child saw, but why the feed wouldn’t let her stop watching.
For more of Dean Nilo Divina’s legal tidbits, please visit www.divinalaw.com. For comments and questions, please send an email to cad@divinalaw.com.
