Caroline Hyde

Meta having its worst day since the end of October, October of 2025 last year.

The morning started with Mag7 under pressure because of the belief by the market that the war in Iran will be prolonged.

But there was a big piece of news.

in the last 24 hours, a jury verdict, finding Meta and Google liable for harming a young social media user with products that the court decided were deliberately or negligently designed to be addictive.

This was the first social media addiction trial.

Let's bring in Bloomberg's legal reporter, Madeleine Meckelberg, who was in the courtroom for that verdict.

And let's start with the very basics, the jury decision.

what that decision was based on, predicated on, and we'll go from there.

Madeline.

They heard from people including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri.

But these cases, as you mentioned, are about this claim, this central idea that these companies knowingly and intentionally designed their platforms to be addictive and should have known that they would cause harm to young users.

That's why you've heard this case be referred to as a landmark case, because this really is a novel legal theory.

As you know, these companies have been shielded from immunity from suits alleging harm by users due to content on their platform.

But this is about the design.

So jurors heard a lot about the algorithm itself, and then they heard a lot about features that these companies use to...

that they had experts come in to say are designed to be addictive.

They called it addiction by design.

That's being peppered with notifications, that endless scroll, being able to pick up your phone and scroll through the social media feeds and not really reach an end of content.

It's about videos that automatically play once you finish watching one.

And so they say that all these features cumulatively are designed to hook you and keep you on the platform as long as possible, and that children are particularly susceptible to those kind of features.