Nassim Khadem

It's the first time a jury's found that social media apps have actually been designed to exploit, you know, developing brains of kids and teenagers that were deliberately built to be addictive and that the company's executives knew this and that they failed to protect their youngest users.

There's also this really interesting law that has allowed them to avoid legal liability over the content that appears on their sites for a long time.

It's a federal law known as Section 230.

And it says that tech companies are basically not legally responsible for what their users post.

And that to date has made it very hard to bring cases over social media harms to trial.

But in this Los Angeles case, the lawyers took a very different approach by focusing on how the tech giants actually built their platforms that, you know, features like the infinite scroll, features like constant notifications, autoplaying videos, things like that, basically made it too hard for these young users to put them down.

I mean, absolutely, Carrington.

The outcome of this case, it's also important to remember, could actually influence other cases against these social media giants.

So this was actually a trial test case that

It's tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits brought by parents and school districts that want to also argue these are defective products.

They're designed to hook a whole generation of young people.

And as you know, the case has invited comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against big companies.

tobacco, which really forced the industry to stop targeting miners with advertising.

So it's obviously going to, not just from a monetary perspective, but also from a reputational perspective, really cause these companies to stop and rethink their approach.

While the platform requires users to be 13 years old, what came out in court was fascinating.

Both Zuckerberg and other executives were describing their efforts to basically attract and keep

kids on the platforms.

One of the documents said, you know, if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens, according to the legal team.

Another memo showed 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram compared with competing apps.

So, you know, this argument that, oh, but we've always said they need to be 13 years old just doesn't stack up when this is what the company internally is doing to try and attract young people