What the Verdict Against Meta and Google Says About the Way We Live Now

Kaley’s case was selected as a “bellwether”—a test case to go to trial first and show how a jury would react to the claims—from more than a thousand lawsuits filed against social-media companies by individuals and school districts in California, which were consolidated into a single proceeding before a California judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl. She allowed the design claim to go to trial, meaning that the jury would decide, based on the evidence, whether the design features were addictive, whether the companies were negligent in designing them, and whether that addiction had caused harm to Kaley. As Kuhl explained it, “the allegedly addictive features of defendants’ platforms (such as endless scroll) cannot be analogized to how a publisher chooses to make a compilation of information, but rather are based on harm allegedly caused by design features that affect how plaintiffs interact with the platforms regardless of the nature of the third-party content viewed.” Thousands…