After a grueling seven weeks of court proceedings and more than 40 hours of tense deliberations across nine days in one of the country’s most closely-watched civil trials, jurors handed down a landmark decision in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, finding Instagram and YouTube responsible for the suffering of a Chico woman who charged the platforms were built to addict young users. .

Kaley G.M., the 20-year-old plaintiff, arrived in court just before 10 a.m. wearing the same rose-colored maxi dress she’d donned to testify in February. She remained stoic as the verdict, the $3 million damages award and the decision warranting punitive damages were read out. A companion fought back tears, her chin quivering. Several observers wept silently despite Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s repeated warning not to respond.

“We need to have no reaction to the jury’s verdict — no crying out, no reactions, no disturbance,” Kuhl warned. “If there is we will have to have you removed from the courtroom, and we sure don’t want to have to do that.”

Attorneys for Snapchat and TikTok also appeared in court Wednesday morning to hear the decision. The two platforms settled with Kaley out of court for undisclosed sums before the trial.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company Meta said.

The verdict arrived less than 24 hours after a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for $375 million in damages related to Atty. Gen. Raúl Torres’ claim it turned Instagram into a “breeding ground” for child predators — a decision the platform has vowed to appeal.

The Los Angeles jury took much longer to deliberate. On Friday, jurors preempted their pizza lunch break to ask Kuhl whether all of them should weigh in on damages, or only those who’d agreed on liability. On Monday they told Kuhl they were struggling to agree about one of the defendants.

Kuhl told the jury to keep trying.

Kaley said she first got hooked on YouTube and Instagram in grade school. Jurors were charged with determining whether the companies acted negligently in designing their products and failed to warn her of the dangers.

Their verdict will echo through of thousands of other pending lawsuits, reshaping the legal landscape for some of the world’s most powerful companies. Experts say the payout will likely set the bar for future awards.

It comes on the heels of a Delaware court decision clearing Meta’s insurers of responsibility for damages incurred from “several thousand lawsuits regarding the harm its platforms allegedly cause children” — a ruling that could leave it and other tech titans on the hook for untold future millions.

Until this trial, which began in late January, no suit seeking to hold tech titans responsible for harms to children had ever reached a jury. Many more are now set to follow.

Kaley’s test case was chosen from among scores of suits currently consolidated in California state court. Hundreds more are moving together through the federal system, where the first trial is set for June in San Francisco.

Collectively, the suits seek to prove that harm flowed not from user content but from the design and operation of the platforms themselves.

That’s a critical legal distinction, experts say. Social media companies have so far been protected by a powerful 1996 law called Section 230, which has shielded the apps from responsibility for what happens to children who use it.

Lawyers for Meta and Google argued Kaley’s struggles were the result of her fractious home life and fallout from the COVID pandemic, not social media.

Phyllis Jones (R), attorney for Meta, leaves the Los Angeles Superior Court on March 12, 2026.

(Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

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“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and an expert on the 1st Amendment, which also protects the platforms. “All media tries to keep people on [their platform] and coming back.”

Others say social media’s algorithmic ability to capture, cultivate and control attention makes it fundamentally different from teen-friendly romantasy novels, Marvel movies or first-person shooter games.

“These are truly hard and heart breaking cases,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State College of Law. “[They] represent a clash between free speech values and the real harms caused by protecting those companies that engage in free speech amplification for profit.”

“Letting jurors sort all of this out without more guidance is tempting but also risky,” he said.

As deliberations that began March 13 wore on, jurors signaled similar skepticism, asking to see internal Meta documents, and reviewing testimony from a defense expert “in regards to her professional integrity; being the only doctor stating social media was not a contributing factor to KGM’s mental health.”

They appeared to agree on Meta’s culpability by Friday, but labored through Tuesday to hash out a decision for Google, delivering their verdict just after 10 a.m. Wednesday.

“Today, a jury saw the truth and held Meta and Google accountable for designing products that addict and harm children,” said Lexi Hazam, court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the related federal action. “This verdict sends an unmistakable message that no company is above accountability.”

The outcome will likely transform the already heated debate over social media addiction as a concept, what role apps may play in engineering it, and whether individuals like Kaley can prove they’re afflicted.

The platforms’ attorneys sought to cast doubt on the ailment — emphasizing that there is no formal diagnosis for social media addiction — while also arguing that Kaley had never been treated for it.

“Substitute the words ‘YouTube’ for the word methamphetamine,” attorney Luis Li urged the jury during closing arguments Thursday. “Ask yourselves with your lifetime of experience whether anybody suffering from addiction could say, ‘Yeah, I just kind of lost interest.’”

“She was sitting there for hours without being on her phone,” said Meta attorney Paul W. Schmidt.

YouTube’s team also sought to distance the video-sharing app from Instagram and other social media platforms, saying its functions are fundamentally different.

Kaley’s team called it “a gateway” to her social media addiction.

“YouTube wasn’t a gateway to anything,” Li said. “YouTube was a toy that a child liked and then put down.”

Jurors disagreed, ultimately holding the platform liable, though they split the liability 70-30, weighting heavily to Meta.

Lanier leaned on his down-home Texas folksiness throughout the trial, telling the jury what was on his heart and scribbling with grease pencil on his demonstrative aids. In his direct addresses to the jury, he used a set of wooden baby blocks, stacks of paper, even a hammer and a crate of eggs.

During the punitive phase of the trial late Wednesday morning, he brought out a glass jar filled with 415 peanut M&Ms to represent the $415 billion dollars of stockholder’s equity Google’s parent company Alphabet was valued at in December.

“What are you going to fine them for this?” he probed. “Are you going to fine them a billion?” He plucked a green M&M from the top of the pile. “Two billion?” He pulled out another. “You know a pack of M&Ms has 18 M&Ms in it? You fine them a billion, and they’re not going to notice.”

“The last thing in the world they want you to do is talk about how many M&Ms they’ve got,” the lawyer said, urging jurors to “talk to Meta in Meta money”. “The last thing in the world they want you to do is focus on what it takes to hold them accountable for what they’ve done.”

Conversely, the tech teams relied on slick digital presentations to review evidence and illustrate their arguments.

“Focus on those facts that are at issue in this case,” Schmit urged the jury during closings. “Not lawyer arguments, not props like a glass of water or a jar of M&Ms, But actual proof in evidence.”

During the punitive phase of the trial, he sought to emphasize that “there wasn’t an intention to do harm” to children, and that it had worked diligently to make its products safer.

The case was the first to get Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the witness stand, where he defended Instagram’s safety record and lamented the difficulty of keeping youngsters off the app.

It also made public tens of thousands of pages of internal documents — documents Lanier argued showed the companies intentionally targeted children, and engineered their products to keep them on the platforms longer.

“These are internal documents that you’re uniquely seeing because you’re the jury that got to sit on this case,” Lanier told the jury during closing arguments on Thursday. “It’s given you exposure that the world hasn’t had.”

Those previously undisclosed materials likely proved critical to the jury’s ultimate verdict, experts said.

“Internal emails here were key — they painted a picture of indifference at Meta,” said Joseph McNally, former Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California and an expert in “technology-related harm.”

The tech titans have already vowed to appeal both the California and New Mexico verdicts, all-but ensuring the issue is ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, experts said.

OpenAI plans to shut down its Sora text-to-video tool, a stunning move that comes three months after Walt Disney Co. pledged to invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company and allow the use of dozens of beloved characters.

The San Francisco-based company did not disclose why it was shutting down the tool or the timeline for its phaseout. In a post Tuesday on the Sora account on X, the company said it knew the news was “disappointing.”

“To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the post said.

Open AI’s pivot comes as the company was engaged in discussions with Disney to formalize their arrangement — but no deal had been reached, according to a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment.

Although Disney had pledged to make the huge investment, the company had not yet made any payments to OpenAI, this person said. OpenAI had not paid any fees to license Disney characters.

A Disney spokesperson said in a statement that the company respected OpenAI’s decision to shift its priorities away from video generation.

“We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators,” the spokesperson said.

The emergence of Sora had roiled Hollywood, particularly as AI and compensation for actors’ likeness and voice became a central issue in the 2023 strike.

Performers guild SAG-AFTRA had said at the time of the Disney-OpenAI announcement that it would “closely monitor the deal and its implementation to ensure compliance with our contracts and with applicable laws protecting image, voice, and likeness.”

OpenAI first previewed Sora in 2024, and the realism of the tool’s AI-generated videos grabbed audiences at a time when competing video generation apps struggled.

The text-to-video platform enabled users to create short videos with different styles, voices and dedicated features such as “storyboard,” which enabled users to weave together prompts to make longer videos with consistent characters — something that wasn’t possible before.

In September, OpenAI launched Sora as a dedicated app to create and share AI-generated videos with friends, which many viewed as a social networking app modeled after TikTok.

The app’s remix feature enabled users to superimpose the likeness of their friends or celebrities into existing AI-generated video or create new ones. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, encouraged users to slap his likeness onto AI-generated scenes and other pop-culture videos.

The lax approach to copyright allowed the re-creation of dead celebrities and copyrighted characters from titles including WWE and South Park, which OpenAI said it would allow on its platform unless the celebrities opt out.

Despite hitting 1 million downloads in a week, the app lost its sheen, as regular users found little everyday use for a dedicated AI video app. As legal challenges mounted, Sora also strengthened its copyright guardrails and “content violation” warnings became a routine part of denying user requests.

But the AI space has become increasingly crowded. OpenAI’s smaller rival Anthropic has gained ground by offering its AI coding services to enterprises rather than just to consumers. Its Claude tool has become especially popular for coding tasks.

Since Sora’s release, competitors such as Google Veo and Bytedance’s Seedance also have rushed into the AI video generation market.

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.