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The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without the social media she became addicted to.

“I can’t, it’s too hard to be without it,” Kaley, now 20, told a jury at Los Angeles’ superior court. This week, five men and seven women handed down a verdict on the design of two of the world’s most popular apps that vindicated Kaley’s position.

The ruling sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and sparked hope among families and child safety campaigners that change may finally be coming to social media. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google’s YouTube were found liable for deliberately designing addictive products used by Kaley and millions of other young people.

It was one case centred on the suffering of one young person who became depressed at 10 and self-harmed, but Kaley, referred to by her first name or the initials KGM in order to protect her privacy, was the figurehead for a much bigger fight.

“We wanted them to feel it,” one of the jurors explained to reporters. “We wanted them to realise this was unacceptable.”

“The era of big tech invincibility is over,” said the Tech Oversight Project, a Washington DC watchdog that styles itself as a David to Silicon Valley’s Goliath. Even Prince Harry weighed in: “The truth has been heard and precedent has been set.” The share prices of Meta and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, sank.

The verdict was the second blow in a week for big tech after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m (£282m) by a New Mexico court. A jury found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms. These had features that “enabled paedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation” and were intentionally designed to get young people addicted to them, said the state’s department of justice.

At $6m, the damages in the California suit were relatively small, but the consequences of the double verdicts will be much greater. It was a week in which a years-long campaign to shift the balance of power between big tech and children finally seemed to gain momentum.

Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, testing if their platforms were designed to be addictive. If they lose, the damages could be crippling.

Internationally, governments are starting to curb big tech’s grip on children’s attention. From this weekend, the Indonesian government is following Australia in mandating the deactivation of “high-risk” social media accounts belonging to children under 16. This month Brazil enacted an online safety law to protect children against compulsive use, and in the UK the prime minister, Keir Starmer, responded to the LA verdict saying: “We need to do more to protect children.” He cited a potential UK social media ban for under-16s and curbs on addictive features, such as infinite scrolling – the apparently bottomless supply of new material when a user reaches the end of their feed – and autoplay videos.

The geopolitics of tech

The trials’ verdicts have also coincided with a shift in the geopolitics of tech. A fear of upsetting Donald Trump, held by countries otherwise keen to tighten the leash over social media, seems to be subsiding. Leading figures on the conservative right of the US president’s Republican party are now among some of the most vocal in demanding protections for children.

“For a long time governments deferred to the EU and to the United States to set internet policy,” said Matt Kaufman, the head of safety at Roblox, a gaming and messaging platform affected by the Indonesia ban. “Now everybody else is catching up and saying: ‘We want to do things that are right for our country.’”

It all means optimism is starting to grow among safety campaigners. Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered British teenager Brianna Ghey, who sees many similarities between Kaley’s story and Brianna’s, is hopeful that change is coming.

“Finally, I think this is going to create a shift,” she told the Guardian after this week’s verdicts.

Ghey’s daughter was killed in 2023 and she believes social media addiction contributed to her daughter’s mental health issues, leading to her taking risks with her personal safety. Brianna, who was transgender, became isolated like Kaley through heavy use of social media, and suffered from anxiety and body dysmorphia.

However, a long legal struggle may still lie ahead as tech companies fight back. Meta, a $1.4tn company, said “we respectfully disagree” with the jury decision and will appeal. “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app,” it said. Google said it would also appeal, adding that the case “misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site”. The matter could ultimately head to the supreme court.

It was also clear this week that the tech barons retain plenty of political clout. On the same day as the LA verdict, Trump appointed Zuckerberg and the former Google boss Sergey Brin, who remains on the board of the company, to his science and technology council.

Legal focus on platform, not content

Nevertheless, the LA case is being considered so important because it advances a new legal theory: that a software product such as a social media app can be defective and cause personal injury.

Until now, tech platforms have been protected by section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which absolves companies of liability for content posted. But the LA verdict found liability with the platform itself, not the content.

“This is essentially a call to arms to plaintiff lawyers, that they’ve been successful at least once in getting a multimillion-dollar verdict against tech,” said Jessica Nall, a partner at the San Francisco law firm Withers, who represents tech executives.

The message is: “Let’s go for more.”

Campaigners are talking about a “big tobacco moment” – a parallel to the wave of lawsuits that forced the US cigarette industry to overhaul marketing practices and strike a multibillion-dollar settlement with US states.

Arturo Béjar, a Meta whistleblower and witness at the New Mexico and California trials, said he hoped Meta would redesign its products, looking again at features like infinite scrolling and “like” buttons.

“I think that one of the most important aspects of these trials is all of the internal documentation that is seeing the light of day, about just how much Meta knew about these harms and misled parents and regulators about it,” said the former senior engineer at Meta. “I hope that galvanises regulators across the world to do what’s needed to make these products demonstrably safe.”

In the UK, the verdicts reinforced a growing expectation of a ban on under-16s accessing social media. One tech lobbyist said the industry was “aware we are moving towards a ban” and could “swallow it”, in part because they did not make much money from children’s accounts. Inside Whitehall, people compare the moment to the ban on indoor smoking nearly 20 years ago, suggesting people will wonder why it didn’t come sooner.

On Tuesday, the rationale for change was brought into sharp focus at Cadbury Heath primary school in Bristol. The online safety minister, Kanishka Narayan, met a class of 10- and 11-year-olds, all of whom used social media.

“Four hours and then it’s [like] where’s all that time gone?” said one boy about his YouTube habit. “It’s just gone, scrolling all the time.”

“It gets addictive,” said another. “When you’re on screens for a long time you just can’t get to sleep and then you’re up to two or three in the morning and then you’ve got school the next day.”

And yet doubt remains about how “addictive” social media actually is.

Defining social media addiction

“Although we have a wealth of data on children’s screen time and online behaviour, we still know far too little about how these habits affect children’s health, wellbeing and cognitive abilities,” said Chi Onwurah, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, which launched an inquiry this week into neuroscience and digital childhoods.

Limited trials of a social media ban are only just getting under way in the UK and Mark Griffiths, professor emeritus of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University, said: “Very few individuals are genuinely addicted to social media.

“Social media companies have incorporated structural characteristics that were designed to keep people on platforms for as long as possible,” he said. “These features do not affect people equally, but for those who are vulnerable or susceptible, they play a role in the development of problematic use.”

During the California trial, Instagram’s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, said social media was not “clinically addictive”.

This could seem like splitting hairs to families who have suffered the worst consequences of social media harms.

Kaley’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, said features such as notifications and “likes”, autoplay and infinite scroll amounted to “the engineering of addiction”. “These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great,” he said. “But you invite them in and they take over.”

Ian Russell has been campaigning for online safety ever since his teenage daughter Molly Russell died from what a coroner concluded was an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and “the negative effects of online content”. Russell said “nothing has materially changed” at the heart of tech companies in the last nine years. He is sceptical about a social media ban, arguing it could lessen the pressure on tech firms to fix their products.

“We now need political will from governments to turn these landmark rulings into a fundamental shift in the business models and features that drive harmful content and keep our children hooked on social media,” he said.

Testifying during the LA trial, Zuckerberg admitted “a reasonable company should try to help the people that use its services”.

Béjar said this week was a moment for the world to enforce that principle.

“It’s now the world’s move,” he said. “The world needs to demonstrate that, based on all of this knowledge, it can effectively regulate these companies.”