Two recent lawsuits are reigniting the conversation regarding social media’s responsibility — and culpability — for user safety, as juries delivered multimillion verdicts against Meta. A New Mexico jury found that Meta’s practices systematically misled and endangered children, while a California jury found that social media design features can contribute to individual harm, together marking a shift toward the tech giant.

The legal strategies diverged from earlier cases, now focusing Meta as a company offering a faulty or unsafe product and de-emphazing it as a platform hosting speech. In siding with plaintiffs, the juries’ decisions also reflect a mounting sentiment of concern among Americans — especially parents and young people — about time spent on social media. 

As NPR noted in its reporting on the trial in California,  the claims centered on design features like recommendation systems, autoplay, and other mechanics intended to keep users engaged, creating a product structure that makes certain patterns of use and overuse more likely — and harder to interrupt.

Thousands of pending cases could soon add to these precedents and further expose how these platforms operate as we continue to grapple with their complex effects on daily life. 

Beyond the courtroom, these cases mark a shift in how the mental health community better communicates and contends with addiction in the 21st century:

Policy experts can focus on feature-level protections in emerging technology, especially for young people.
Policymakers and advocates can target product design, bringing tech policy closer to how we already approach consumer safety in industries like food, drugs, and automobiles, offering greater agility when confronting massive systems. Mental health organizations like The Kennedy Forum acknowledge that social media and other technology is complex, and it isn’t always feasible to pursue all-or-nothing solutions. Rather, these cases demonstrate how to compellingly make the case for improvements that can guard against compulsive use, from age-specific design standards, default safeguards, and limitations on manipulative engagement tactics. 

State AGs have more latitude to work within this “faulty mechanism” framework.
By framing social media platforms as products with potentially defective or harmful design features, state attorneys general are no longer constrained to arguments about speech or content moderation alone. Instead, they can pursue cases under consumer protection, product liability, and public health frameworks, areas where states traditionally hold strong enforcement power. As we’ve seen with issues like mental health parity, states often serve as safeguards and battlegrounds, shaping policy on issues that take longer to advance at the federal level

This signals a broader shift in how — and when — addiction is addressed.
Significantly, these cases offer mental health advocates a powerful way of reframing addiction for more people. For many years, addiction was predominantly associated with substance use, which has long been judged more negatively than other mental health conditions as an individual failure of willpower. Juries showed that reframing addiction as a symptom of a system aligns with decades of research in behavioral science and public health, and offers a key narrative touchpoint about the nature of addiction itself. This reframing will be key — not just as a storytelling shift, but as a policy one — as we confront the next wave of addiction-related harms like online gambling and AI dependence. Advocates and policymakers can better identify risky design features and address them before they become ubiquitous — and harder to unwind. 

For organizations like The Kennedy Forum, this moment presents a clear call to action: to advance policies that prioritize mental health in product design, support accountability frameworks that address systemic drivers of harm, and elevate a more accurate public understanding of addiction in the modern era. By bridging mental health expertise with policy and legal momentum, there is a chance not only to respond to today’s challenges — but to prevent the next generation of harms before they take hold.

Stay connected with our work to learn more about the emerging issues in mental health.