The McCoy Social Media Lawsuit: Verdict, Damages, and Section 230

On March 25, 2026, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old California woman known in court as K.G.M., finding Meta and Google’s YouTube liable for designing addictive platform features that harmed her mental health as a teenager. The KGM social media lawsuit verdict was the first in the country to hold social media companies responsible for the design of their products under a product-liability and negligence theory, and it has since survived every post-trial challenge the defendants raised.¹

Who Kaley Is and What She Alleged

K.G.M., publicly identified as Kaley, lives in Chico, California. She started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, and she said neither platform put up a meaningful barrier to check her age.² Her lawyers argued the apps were “defective products” built to hook developing brains through infinite scrolling, autoplay video, constant notifications, and beauty filters that warped her sense of her own appearance.³

Kaley told the jury she felt she “wanted to be on it all the time” and pulled away from her family. Records introduced at trial showed she once spent 16 hours on Instagram in a single day.² She said the platforms contributed to her depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia during adolescence. Meta’s defense pointed to family problems, including allegations of emotional and physical abuse that Kaley denied, and argued those were the real source of her mental health struggles.⁴

Kaley’s case was one of three bellwether cases picked from JCCP 5255, a coordinated proceeding in Los Angeles Superior Court that pulls together hundreds of similar claims. Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl presided.⁵ The suit originally named four defendants. Snap settled on January 20, 2026, and TikTok settled on January 27, hours before jury selection was set to begin; neither disclosed terms. That left Meta and YouTube in the courtroom when trial opened on February 9, 2026.⁶

How the Jury Ruled and Divided the Damages

Ten of twelve jurors sided with Kaley, finding both Meta and YouTube negligent for knowingly building addictive and harmful features.¹ The jury also found both companies had acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” which unlocked a second phase on punitive damages.⁵

The total came to $6 million: $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. The jury assigned 70 percent of the fault to Meta, putting it on the hook for $4.2 million, and 30 percent to Google, which owed $1.8 million.⁷

What Convinced the Jury

Mark Zuckerberg took the stand on February 18, 2026, his first appearance before a civil jury. Plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier confronted him with a 2018 internal document that read, “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” and a 2015 email estimating that about 30 percent of 10- to 12-year-olds were already using Instagram. Zuckerberg said he did not remember the context of the older email.⁸

Asked about beauty filters that plaintiffs tied to body dysmorphia, Zuckerberg defended them as self-expression and called removing them “paternalistic.” He acknowledged that many users under 13 lie about their age and that enforcement is “very difficult,” but said age verification should sit with mobile operating system providers like Apple and Google. Told that outside experts had concluded the platforms harm teenage girls, he said there was “not enough causal evidence.”⁹

Jurors also heard from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Meta’s global head of safety Antigone Davis, engineers, and whistleblowers. Mosseri conceded that a teenager who spends most of the day on Instagram was “problematic” but denied it was addiction.²

The plaintiffs put a stack of internal Meta communications in front of the jury. One email showed Zuckerberg had named locking teens into Meta’s apps as a top 2017 priority. Employees wrote that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to,” and one wrote, “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” comparing the platforms to “pushers.” A 2018 document included an internal admission that “internal data shows that Facebook use is correlated with lower well-being.”¹⁰

The defense pushed back on causation, calling a former therapist who had treated Kaley and who linked her anxiety and depression to bullying and emotional abuse. Meta and YouTube also emphasized safety features they had rolled out for minors, including muted nighttime notifications and restrictions on adult content, and both denied designing the products to be addictive.⁴

Why Section 230 Didn’t Block the Case

For years, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has shielded platforms from liability over what users post. This case moved forward because it drew a line between content and conduct. When a claim goes after the posts users write, Section 230 usually applies. When a claim goes after the platform’s own design choices — the algorithms, the infinite scroll, the notification engine — courts have increasingly treated those as ordinary product-liability and negligence claims.¹¹

In the parallel federal proceeding, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had already ruled in November 2023 that Section 230 does not give blanket immunity when claims rest on independent design choices. Defective design, failure to warn, weak age verification, and thin parental controls were all cleared to go forward.¹¹ Judge Kuhl applied the same framework in Kaley’s trial.

Judge Kuhl Upholds the Verdict

Meta and Google both asked the court to throw out the verdict or order a new trial. Their main argument was that the trial evidence really focused on the content users saw, not on platform features, and should therefore be protected under the First Amendment and Section 230.¹²

On June 10, 2026, Judge Kuhl denied every motion. She ruled the evidence at trial did target platform features rather than content. She found sufficient evidence that Instagram’s design was a “substantial factor” in Kaley’s harms and that Meta had failed to warn minor users. She kept the punitive damages, citing “substantial evidence” that Meta operated Instagram with “willful and conscious disregard for the rights and safety of its minor users.” She wrote that there was “substantial evidence suggesting that YouTube prioritized its own profits over the safety concerns of its minor users.”¹³

What the Verdict Sets Up Next

Kaley’s case is one strand in one of the largest coordinated litigations in the country. More than 10,000 personal injury claims are pending nationwide, along with roughly 1,200 lawsuits filed by school districts.⁴ They sit on two main tracks:

Federal MDL 3047, with about 2,664 cases consolidated before Judge Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, covering both individual injury claims and school district suits.¹⁴
California JCCP 5255 in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Kaley’s bellwether was tried and more bellwethers are expected.¹⁵

A 33-state coalition of attorneys general, including New York’s Letitia James, also sued Meta in October 2023, with an advisory jury trial on those claims planned for August 2026.¹⁶

The first federal bellwether, brought by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, never reached a jury. The district had sought more than $60 million to fund a 15-year student mental health program. YouTube, Snap, and TikTok settled the week before the June 15, 2026 trial date, and Meta followed on May 21, 2026. Terms were not disclosed, though local reporting estimated the combined total at about $27 million.¹⁷ Plaintiffs’ attorneys stressed the deal covered only Breathitt County; more than 1,200 school district cases remained active.¹⁸ Jury selection for the next federal bellwether round is set for February 3, 2027, involving Tucson Unified School District in Arizona and Charleston County School District in South Carolina.¹⁶

A separate blow to Meta landed one day before Kaley’s verdict. On March 24, 2026, a New Mexico state jury found Meta had violated that state’s Unfair Practices Act by misleading consumers about platform safety and enabling child sexual exploitation, and imposed $375 million in civil penalties. Meta said it disagreed and would appeal.¹⁹ Legal observers have compared the arc of this litigation to the tobacco cases of the 1990s and expect years of trials, appeals, and settlements to follow.²⁰

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