Meta lost two landmark trials in 48 hours. On Monday, a New Mexico jury hit them with $375 million for enabling child predators. On Tuesday, an LA jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for engineering addiction into products used by children. $6 million in damages.

New Mexico: the predator case

New Mexico sued Meta in 2023 after investigators posed as kids under 14 on Facebook and Instagram. The accounts received sexually explicit material and were contacted by adults. The jury found Meta liable on all counts.75,000 violations at $5,000 apiece: $375 million

Internal documents were damning. Employees discussed how encrypting Messenger would gut their ability to report child sexual abuse material to law enforcement. They were disclosing 7.5 friggin million such reports a year. They knew. They shipped it anyway.

First time a US state has beaten Meta in court over child safety. The same case moves to phase two in May, where a judge decides whether to force platform changes: age verification, algorithm modifications, independent monitor. The outcome could be worse than a fine. A judge telling them what to build.

Los Angeles: the addiction case

The plaintiff started YouTube at 6, Instagram at 9. Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts. She's 20 now. $3 million compensatory, $3 million punitive. Meta pays 70%, YouTube 30%.

The legal play: don't sue over content, sue over design. Infinite scroll, autoplay, anxiety-tuned notifications, variable-reward algorithms. A digital casino for kids. Section 230 normally shields platforms from liability over what users post, but by framing this as defective product design, they sidestepped it entirely.

Discovery surfaced internal memos that read like confessions. "If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." An Instagram employee wrote "We're basically pushers." Meta's own research showed 11-year-olds were four times more likely to keep returning to Instagram than competing apps. Minimum account age is 13. Zuckerberg said his words were taken out of context. The jury disagreed.

YouTube argued it's a streaming platform, not social media. We're TV, not Instagram. The jury still pinned 30% on them.

TikTok and Snapchat already settled before it got this far

Both companies will appeal.

Why it matters:
This is the first bellwether in what could become one of the largest mass torts in U.S. history: 10,000+ individual cases, 800 school district claims pending. Every legal team now has the discovery documents and a winning playbook.

People keep comparing this to tobacco in the 90s. I think that's fair, with one difference. When the tobacco documents came out, people were shocked. When the Meta documents come out, nobody is. We all kind of knew. Now it's just on the record.

"Meta Logo" by Musicalartist071, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.