The Meta and Google guilty verdicts – what you should do now

Juries in New Mexico and Los Angeles have found Meta and Google liable for failing to protect children on social media, awarding $381 million in combined damages. With around 2,000 similar lawsuits pending, experts are comparing the moment to the 1990s Big Tobacco reckoning. Parents should review privacy settings, enable supervision tools, and talk to their kids about online safety now.

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New Mexico has become the first state in the US to win at trial against a big tech company for misleading consumers and endangering children. The jury held Meta liable for nearly $400 million in civil damages after the state Attorney General accused Facebook and Instagram's parent company of failing to protect kids from child predators.

Then, barely 24 hours later, it got worse. A separate jury in Los Angeles found both Meta and Google negligent in a social media harms trial, and ordered the companies to pay $6 million in damages - a verdict that could influence the outcome of about 2,000 pending lawsuits.

So yeah, two guilty verdicts in just two days.

This isn't a bump in the road. It’s the start of an avalanche.

The damning details

Internal documents revealed during the trial are pretty jaw-dropping. One showed that executives said "if we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." Another memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram compared to competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13.

Meta's own safety team had been flagging these and other preventable dangers for years, but they were repeatedly ignored by Zuckerberg and C-suite executives. That, more than anything, is what seemed to land with the jury.

What this could mean for social media

This is genuinely a watershed moment. It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers.

The Big Tobacco comparison keeps coming up - and it's apt. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against the world’s major cigarette manufacturers, which forced the industry to (almost) stop targeting minors.

Practically speaking, changes could be coming fast. New Mexico's Attorney General has said he'll push for real age verification, algorithm changes, and an independent monitor, creating a standard that could then be modelled elsewhere in the country. California is already circling, seeking more blood: Their Attorney General Rob Bonta has said the state looks forward to holding Meta accountable again in an upcoming August trial.

What should users do now?

Holding big tech to account is an action long overdue and these findings are a step in the right direction. But while the law takes its time getting to grips with a problem that's been obvious for years, here are some protection steps you can take right now:

If you have kids using these platforms:

• Don't wait for the law to catch up. Have open conversations about what they're seeing and who they're talking to online

  
  

• Use built-in parental supervision tools (Instagram's "Supervision" feature, for instance), though these trials have shown those tools are far from foolproof

  
  

• Consider age-appropriate alternatives - and actually enforce age limits

  
  

For everyone:

• Audit your privacy settings. Regularly. These platforms are still harvesting data regardless of verdicts

  
  

• Be sceptical of the algorithm. Jurors considered Meta's role in using algorithms to prioritise sensational or harmful content - that's still happening right now

  
  

• If you or someone you know has been harmed by these platforms, it's worth knowing that the legal avenues are opening up. Expect a slew of class action lawsuits to appear very soon. Check to see if you can enjoin with these cases when they open

  
  

Final word

The fine of $375 million is just a tiny fraction of Meta's $201 billion revenue in 2025, so financially, they'll survive. But the reputational and legal tide is turning. Meta says it will appeal these verdicts, but with more trials queued up and states emboldened, the pressure on the social media giants isn't going away. 

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