Meta was finally held accountable for harming teens. Now what? Amanda Silberling 12:32 PM PDT · March 31, 2026 Meta lost a lawsuit against the state of New Mexico last week, marking the first time that the company has been held liable by the court system for endangering child safety. This was a landmark decision on its own — but the next day, Meta lost another case when a jury in Los Angeles found that the company knowingly designed its apps to be addictive to children and teens, therefore endangering the mental health of the plaintiff, a 20-year-old known as K.G.M.
These precedents open the floodgates for a wave of lawsuits concerning Meta’s intentional pursuit of teen users, despite its knowledge that its apps can have negative mental impacts on teens. Thousands of cases like K.G.M.’s are pending, while 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta that are similar to New Mexico’s case.
While social media platforms are legally protected so that they cannot be held responsible for what users post on their platforms, this time, it wasn’t the content on these platforms that was on trial. It was the design features themselves, like endless scroll and round-the-clock notifications.
“They took the model that was used against the tobacco industry many years ago, and instead of focusing on things like content, they focused on these addictive features — how the platform is designed, and issues with the design, which is different than content, where you have this First Amendment argument,” Allison Fitzpatrick, a digital media lawyer and partner at Davis+Gilbert, told TechCrunch. “It turned out to at least be, in these two cases, a winning argument.”
The jury in the New Mexico case, after a six-week trial, found Meta liable for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act, ordering the company to pay the maximum $5,000 per violation, totaling a $375 million fine. The Los Angeles case, which found Meta 70% liable and YouTube 30% liable for plaintiff K.G.M.’s distress, will fine the companies a combined $6 million. (Snap and TikTok settled the case before trial.)
“That’s nothing to the Metas of the world,” Fitzpatrick said. “But when you take that $6 million and you multiply it by all of the cases that they have against them, that becomes a huge number.”
“We respectfully disagree with these verdicts and will appeal,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risks leaving the many, broader issues teens face today unaddressed and overlooks the fact that many teens rely on digital communities to connect and find belonging.”
Techcrunch event Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $400. Save up to $300 or 30% to TechCrunch Founder Summit 1,000+ founders and investors come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Offer ends March 13. San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 REGISTER NOW Over the course of litigation, new internal documents from Meta were revealed, displaying a pattern of inaction regarding its platforms’ known negative impact on minors, as well as a concentrated attempt to boost teen time spent on its apps, even during school or via “finstas,” which are “fake Instagram” accounts that teens make specifically to hide from parents or teachers.
One document showed a report with the results of a study from 2019, in which Meta conducted 24 in-person, one-on-one interviews with people whose usage of the product had been flagged as problematic — a designation that applies to an estimated 12.5% of users.
“The best external research indicates that Facebook’s impact on people’s well-being is negative,” the report says.
Multiple documents referenced statements from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri about prioritizing teen time engagement. Zuckerberg even comments that in order for Facebook Live to succeed with teens, his “guess is we’ll need to be very good at not notifying parents / teachers.”
In other documents, Meta employees spoke flippantly about the company’s goals for increasing teen user retention.
“We learned one of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone in the middle of Chemistry
,” one employee wrote in an email to Meta CPO Chris Cox.“No one wakes up thinking they want to maximize the number of times they open Instagram that day,” Meta VP of Product Max Eulenstein wrote in an internal email in January 2021. “But that’s exactly what our product teams are trying to do.”
A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that many of the newly released documents are from nearly 10 years ago but that the company is listening to parents, experts, and law enforcement about how the platform can improve.
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