Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, is pushing back against a groundbreaking jury verdict in Los Angeles that held it responsible for creating social media platforms designed to get young users hooked, with little regard for their mental well-being.
Attorneys for Meta filed a notice of appeal Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The specific legal arguments supporting the appeal will be laid out in future court filings.
At the heart of the case was a 20-year-old woman — identified in court only by her initials, KGM, and her first name, Kaley — who testified that she became addicted to social media during her childhood and that the experience made her mental health struggles worse. The jury determined that negligence by both Meta and Google-owned YouTube, which was also named as a defendant, played a substantial role in causing her harm.
The jury awarded Kaley $3 million in damages and recommended an additional $3 million in punitive damages. Her lead attorney, Mark Lanier, released a statement Friday saying the legal team expects the appellate court to “continue the careful application of the law to this case, affirming the verdict of the trial court.”
Filing a notice of appeal kicks off what can be a long legal process. A Meta spokesperson repeated a statement Friday that was first issued when the jury returned its verdict in March, saying that teen mental health is “profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement Friday that YouTube also intends to appeal, adding that “these are standard motions for this case to move forward.”
Both Meta and Google had previously filed post-trial motions asking the judge to overturn the jury’s verdict — a routine legal move by defense attorneys — and requested a new trial. Trial Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl rejected those motions in early June.
Technology companies like Meta and YouTube typically enjoy legal protections from liability over content posted by outside users, thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. To work around those protections, attorneys for Kaley focused their arguments on the platforms’ design features, such as “infinite scroll” — the never-ending nature of social media feeds — and autoplay functions.
Throughout the five-week trial, the question of whether those arguments crossed into content-related territory was the subject of frequent objections from the defense.
The verdict arrived at a particularly difficult moment for Meta legally. Just one day before the California jury reached its decision, a jury in New Mexico also found that Meta’s platforms harm children’s mental health and safety. That New Mexico jury, siding with state prosecutors who brought the case, ordered a penalty of $375 million. Meta has said it disagrees with that verdict and plans to appeal it as well.
“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement issued around the time of both verdicts and again on Friday.
Kaley’s lawsuit was the first of its kind, and the outcome could shape the results of thousands of similar cases filed against social media companies for allegedly causing deliberate harm. TikTok and Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, were initially named as defendants in the case as well, but both reached undisclosed settlement agreements before the trial got underway.
