Social Media Lawsuit: How Kaley Won $6M From Meta and Google

On March 25, 2026, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million to a young woman identified as Kaley, the first time a jury has held social media companies financially liable for designing platforms that harmed a child’s mental health. It is the outcome at the center of what is now the leading social media lawsuit against Meta and Google, and it opens the door for roughly 2,500 similar cases lined up behind it in California alone.¹

Meta was assigned 70 percent of the award, or $4.2 million. Google’s YouTube was assigned 30 percent, or $1.8 million. Compensatory and punitive damages split the total evenly at $3 million each.²

Who Kaley Is and What She Alleged

Kaley, identified in court records as K.G.M., was 20 at the time of trial. She testified that she started using YouTube at six on an iPod Touch and had uploaded about 200 videos by age ten. She began using Instagram at nine and kept using it, without her mother’s knowledge, until at least age thirteen.³

By her teens, she testified, the apps had become a “daily obsession.” She could not set limits, stayed up late scrolling, and snuck onto devices during class. She described depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. Instagram’s “beauty filters,” she said, reinforced her belief that she was unattractive, and low engagement on her posts made her feel “not worthy.”¹ She also admitted creating multiple accounts and using bots to inflate her like counts.³

Why This Case Wasn’t Blocked by Section 230

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for content posted by their users. Kaley’s legal team, led by Mark Lanier and Rachel Lanier of the Lanier Law Firm, worked around that shield by suing over how the products were built rather than what appeared on them. The theory was California product liability: the platforms are defective products, and features like infinite scroll, autoplay, appearance-altering filters, and like counts were engineered to maximize engagement in ways that harm children.²

Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, who presided over the coordinated proceeding known as JCCP 5255 in Los Angeles Superior Court, drew that line explicitly before trial. A platform could not be sued for allowing certain posts, she wrote, but it could be held liable “for harm caused by a feature or activity that was part of the design or operation” of the platform if a jury found that design negligent and a “substantial factor” in causing injury.⁴ She instructed the jury repeatedly not to consider content, only design.⁵

Two other defendants, TikTok and Snapchat, were originally named. Snapchat settled the week of January 19, 2026. TikTok settled hours before opening statements. Both settlements were confidential.⁶⁷

What the Jury Heard

The seven-week trial started February 10, 2026. Mark Zuckerberg testified live on February 18, spending more than five hours on the stand. It was his first time addressing child safety in a trial.⁸ Lanier walked him through internal Meta documents, including a 2015 estimate that more than four million Instagram users were under 13, roughly 30 percent of American 10-to-12-year-olds.⁹ He was also shown internal targets to push daily Instagram engagement time to 40 minutes in 2023 and 46 minutes by 2026.¹⁰

Zuckerberg said the company had once given teams engagement-time goals but had shifted focus to “utility and value.” Asked how a nine-year-old could be expected to read Instagram’s fine print, he answered: “I don’t see why this is so complicated.”⁸

The document trail did much of the work. A 2017 Zuckerberg email named teens as Meta’s top priority and said they “must be locked in” to the company’s family of apps. Employees wrote internally that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to,” and one researcher wrote: “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug.”⁷ In 2018, Meta researchers proposed auditing autoplay, endless feeds, and like-count notifications to see whether they produced “feelings of being manipulated” and “feelings of dependence.” The audit never happened; internal documents cited concern about potential “loss of engagement.”¹¹

Google’s internal files followed a similar pattern. A 2020 document laid out plans to keep kids engaged “for life,” even after the company’s own research flagged “habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use” among young users. Researchers warned that pushing YouTube Shorts at teens led to “prolonged unintentional use.” The company proceeded with the rollout.⁷

Meta and Google argued there is no scientific proof social media causes mental health problems and pointed to other factors in Kaley’s life, including medical records indicating emotional and physical abuse at home and the absence of any note from her therapist tying her problems to social media use. Meta suggested the platforms may have been a “healthy outlet.”¹²¹³ Google separately argued that YouTube is “a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”¹⁴

What the Jury Decided

The 12-member jury deliberated more than 40 hours across eight days. Under California civil rules, nine of the 12 had to agree on each claim. They reached a majority on all seven claims against each company.²

The jury found that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design and operation of their platforms and that this negligence was a “substantial factor” in causing Kaley’s harm. It found both companies failed to adequately warn minors of the dangers of the platforms. And it found that both acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” which is what opened the door to punitive damages.²

The award:

Compensatory damages: $3 million
Punitive damages: $3 million
Meta’s share (70%): $4.2 million
Google’s share (30%): $1.8 million

The dollar figure is modest for a mass tort. The precedent is not. A jury looked at how these platforms are built and concluded the design itself was defective and harmful.¹⁵

The Appeal and Where Things Stand

Both companies immediately said they would fight the verdict. Meta said it would “continue to defend ourselves vigorously” and remained “confident in our record of protecting teens online.” Google said the case “misunderstands YouTube.”¹⁴

On June 9, 2026, Judge Kuhl denied post-trial motions to overturn the verdict or grant a new trial. She ruled the punitive damages were “supported by substantial evidence” and again rejected Section 230, First Amendment, and causation arguments. “There was substantial evidence,” she wrote, “that Plaintiff was harmed by the design features of Instagram, regardless of any of the content found on that platform.”⁵ Both companies have said they intend to appeal.¹³

Why This Verdict Matters for Other Cases

Kaley’s case was the first bellwether in JCCP 5255, chosen from roughly 2,500 plaintiffs consolidated in Southern California. Eight more trials are being prepared. The next is scheduled for July 27, 2026, involving a plaintiff identified as R.K.C., with Meta as the defendant.¹

Running alongside the state proceeding is a federal multidistrict litigation, In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation (MDL 3047), before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. It covers nearly 800 personal injury plaintiffs and more than 1,100 public entities, including school districts, cities, counties, tribes, and state attorneys general.¹¹⁶ More than 1,200 other school district cases remain pending. The Tucson Unified School District’s case is set as the next federal bellwether in January 2027.¹⁷

The Kaley verdict does not automatically bind any of these later cases. What it does is show that the design-defect theory can survive Section 230 in front of a judge and persuade a jury on the merits. That is the question every plaintiff, defendant, and settlement negotiator in the pipeline has been waiting to answer, and it now has an answer, at least until an appellate court weighs in.

1
Courthouse News Service. Meta and Google Hit With $6 Million Verdict for Social Media Harms to Young Woman
2
ABC7 New York. Social Media Addiction Trial Jury Finds Instagram YouTube Liable
3
CNN. Social Media Addiction Trial Plaintiff Testimony
4
Panish Law. Judge Permits Plaintiffs Experts to Testify in Social Media Addiction Cases
5
CNBC. Google and Meta Denied New Trial in Youth Social Media Addiction Case
6
NPR. Social Media Kids Addiction Mental Health Trial
7
Ars Technica. TikTok Settles Hours Before Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial Starts
8
The Guardian. Mark Zuckerberg Meta Trial Testimony
9
CNN. Meta Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Social Media Addiction Trial
10
CNBC. Meta Mark Zuckerberg Social Media Safety Trial
11
CNN. Facebook Researchers Study Addictive Features
12
NPR. Meta YouTube Social Media Trial Verdict
13
The Conversation. Meta and Google Just Lost a Landmark Social Media Addiction Case
14
BBC. Meta and YouTube Social Media Trial Verdict
15
New York Times. Social Media Trial Verdict
16
Straits Times. Social Media Companies Pay $34 Million to Settle a US School Districts Lawsuit
17
EdSource. Meta Resolves Lawsuit With School District Over Student Mental Health Impact