FINALLY – Big Tech must pay up for exploiting children.
On March 25, 2026, a California jury wrapped up more than a week of deliberation to come to the landmark verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta et al. Meta was ordered to pay $4.2 million in compensatory and punitive damages, and Google must pay $1.8 million.
K.G.M., now 20 years old, proved to a jury that Meta and YouTube created addictive products that failed to protect their youngest users. These companies implemented design features like infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, and automatic video play to make the products more addictive. As a result, K.G.M.’s childhood was riddled with anxiety, body dysmorphia, and depression.
We feel very proud of this outcome as we consider the trajectory of cases against online platforms. Back in 2017 we filed the country’s first case alleging product liability claims against an online platform, Herrick v. Grindr. Back then, the case was immediately thrown out – without oral argument. Our appeals were fruitless. The defenses used by Grindr are the same the defendants in the current social media addiction cases use – that they have blanket immunity under Section 230; it’s their free speech right to allow abusive users and content on their platforms; that they are a service and not a product; that it’s the fault of the victim. Those excuses worked back in 2017. But they didn’t when we started seeing our cases against online platforms succeed like in A.M. v. Omegle and Neville v. Snap.
This win is the top of a pile built from losses. And it’s no fluke. As a society we have arrived at an inflection point where juries no longer blindly accept these companies have our best interests at heart. We’ve awoken to how greedy they are, minting money off the time and attention of the masses, deceiving us into buying things, surveilling us, inflating prices, scraping our content to train their large language models, flooding our lives with malicious AI.
Since we were founded in 2014, it’s been a core tenet of our firm that tech companies are no different from any other industry and should be held responsible for the injuries their products cause.
The K.G.M. trial was the first time a jury ruled on dangerously designed tech products but it will not be the last. Bravo to K.G.M. for taking on these tech giants, and to the legal team representing her, including Joseph van Zandt of Beasley Allen, co-counsel in our case against Duda Energy for selling suicide chemicals to vulnerable people.
