Internet law professor breaks down the Meta/YouTube addiction verdict and what comes next

Summary

A jury in California state court has found Meta and YouTube liable for social media addiction, awarding $6 million in damages to the first plaintiff in a bellwether trial — less than plaintiffs requested, more than defendants had hoped, and potentially the opening data point in a liability wave that could reach the tens of billions.

Eric Goldman, a professor of internet law at Santa Clara University School of Law with over 30 years in the field, puts the verdict in its structural context. The California state case involves hundreds of individual plaintiffs joined together but not certified as a class action, meaning each plaintiff must make their own case. A parallel federal multidistrict litigation in Northern California carries thousands of plaintiffs, including school districts and Native American tribes. State attorneys general have filed separately across the country. Goldman describes the aggregate as "litigation mania."

The bellwether mechanics

The California court selected three plaintiffs for bellwether trials — test cases designed to give both sides a read on how juries value these claims before a broader settlement is negotiated. The first jury found for the plaintiff and awarded $6 million. Two more trials are pending. Goldman notes that if $6 million is applied across the roughly 3,000 plaintiffs already in the queue, the exposure approaches $20 billion. Meta and Alphabet can absorb that; TikTok and Snap may not be able to.

The number could grow further. There is no screening process to become a plaintiff — individuals self-select — and Goldman expects additional waves of claimants encouraged by the verdict. The final settlement value will depend heavily on what the next two bellwether trials return, which could be zero liability or significantly higher damages.

Settlement is structurally complicated

Because these are not class actions, defendants cannot settle against all potential plaintiffs in one agreement. They can only resolve claims from those who have already signed up. Any deal would leave an open-ended tail of future claimants, making it difficult to price a comprehensive settlement. Goldman expects appeals to be filed immediately and pursued as high as the Supreme Court will take them, unless a settlement intervenes.

Regulatory outlook

Goldman sees federal legislation providing a safe harbor for platforms as theoretically possible but nowhere near the current political agenda. In the absence of federal action, platforms face an expanding patchwork of state laws already targeting specific product features — infinite scroll, autoplay, like buttons, like counts. Texas attempted a mandatory addiction warning label; that law has reportedly been enjoined on constitutional grounds. Goldman is skeptical warning labels will survive First Amendment scrutiny or resolve the underlying harm claims.

The deeper risk Goldman flags is not the loss of any individual feature. It is whether some platforms exit the market entirely, erect barriers that restrict user access, or narrow the scope of social media conversations to reduce liability exposure. The current form of social media, he argues, should not be assumed to persist.

The tobacco analogy doesn't hold

Goldman pushes back on the cigarette comparison. Tobacco carries no health benefits — the harm calculus is one-directional. Social media is genuinely mixed: communities that depend on it for connection and information have real stakes in this litigation without any representation in it. That mixed-use profile, Goldman argues, makes social media harder to regulate through mass tort litigation than a purely harmful product, and he says there is no strong historical precedent for mass tort litigation successfully targeting a technology with both significant benefits and meaningful harms. Compounding the difference: the alleged harms are mediated through people communicating with each other, a dynamic with First Amendment dimensions that no physical product analogy captures cleanly.