Are Your Choices a Crime Scene?
Two juries — one in Los Angeles, one in Santa Fe — will decide whether social media companies can be held liable for shaping behavior. If they say yes, it changes what "harm" means in this country.
Last night, as we waited for word on a verdict, I was asked on NewsNation about the lawsuit being weighed in the jury room in a Los Angeles courthouse. Specifically, I was asked why the jury had been in deliberations for over a week. As I told anchor Elizabeth Vargas, it’s because they’re having to weigh whether to change something fundamental to the American tradition of justice: the assumption that we are entirely responsible for our own choices.
The jury’s deliberations are the end of a whirlwind of horrific recollections, painful accusations, and gimmicky exhibits — including blocks that spelled “ABC” for “Addicting the Brains of Children”, and a child’s Instagram timeline unfurled as a 35-foot-long scroll. The jurors are now discussing whether Meta and YouTube purposefully made their product addictive even as they knew it could cause harm — a knowledge spelled out in page after page of internal research and private company communications, as I’ve detailed here.
Separately on Monday in Santa Fe, closing arguments wrapped in a case that accuses Meta of making sexual exploitation possible online. Prosecutors told jurors that Meta had repeatedly failed to act honestly or protect young people in the state, and asked the jury to award more than $2 billion in damages. That jury has now begun deliberations. I interviewed Raúl Torrez, the state attorney general who brought the case in 2023, as the trial began.
The stakes here are enormous — not just for Meta and YouTube, for whom damages levied in either of these cases could become the per-user cost applied in hundreds of other actions, potentially a crippling amount of money, but for the American system of justice.
Why? Because fundamentally these cases — the first of more than 1,600 in the pipeline against the biggest social media platforms — ask whether the United States is ready to add a new category of harm to the list of things against which the law can and should protect us.
