Kaley MG v. Meta -- $6,000,000 Social Media Verdict

[admin]

Hi, I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, and I'm here to dispense a little rough justice about a case called Kaley vs. Meta. This case just happened down in LA Superior Court, and it wasn't just another lawsuit against Big Tech. It's a structural shift in American tort law.

In Los Angeles, in the coordinated proceedings often referred to as KGM vs. Metta et al., a jury found liability against Metta and YouTube for harm to a minor. The claims were not about speech. They were about product design. Plaintiff alleged platforms were engineered to maximize engagement, exploit neurological reward systems, and prolong use among minors.

Key features cited: Infinite scroll. Variable reward loops. Algorithmic reinforcement.

For years, social media companies relied on Section 230 to shield them from liability for user-generated content. Somebody kills themselves. Well, was nasty words by third parties that were posted there. Section 230 immunity, no problem. But...

Here in this case, the plaintiffs did not attack the content. They attacked the machine that delivers it, the algorithms, and the jury found foreseeable harm. The social media companies anticipated this. They knew what they were doing. They knew they were manipulating children. They did it on purpose in order to make money. And because of that, punitive damages were awarded. One individual child suffering psychological harm received an award of $3 million for psychological injuries caused by the deliberate deployment of algorithms to exploit that child to continue using Facebook, regardless of the injury that Facebook knew it was going to have on those children.

Deliberately they inflicted themselves on that vulnerable audience and literally took over their minds to make them click monkeys driving profit machines. This verdict was long deserved. It is not a one-off. It is the beginning of a tidal wave of liability that we may all hope will engulf social media companies, and lead to their ultimate demise and the destruction of these abusers. Thank you and good night. That's rough justice.

[admin]

Hi folks, I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, and I'm here to dispense a little rough justice. Again, talking about the Kaley versus Meta case. Just turned out badly -- $6 million total verdict against Meta for psychologically poisoning a child.

But this win was a long time coming. For years, Meta and other platforms, they weren't just winning lawsuits. They perfected a defense model and it was a winner. The playbook was centered on Section 230 immunity, First Amendment protection, and the inability of plaintiffs to establish what we call proximate causation, a connection between the bad conduct of meta and the injuries suffered by the plaintiff.

So there was an important case called Zeran versus America Online, and that established that platforms under Section 230 were not liable for third-party speech. So if a bunch of other school kids tortured a child into hanging themselves, that wasn't the responsibility of the platform that just allowed for those people to engage in their wrongful speech, but they were not responsible for the fact that it caused that injury.

What did the plaintiffs do wrong? They were arguing the content was injurious. The courts responded, that's protected speech and immunized essentially under section 230. Cases were dismissed one after the other. But finally, you know, the plaintiffs' lawyers figured out how to get around it. There were some other defense tactics. Minors disqualified from making claims because they lied about their age to get on the platform. They claimed that there was no duty to monitor this conduct. So for years, cases died long before trial, often without discovery.

Ultimately plaintiffs adapt, but now they no longer will be arguing that content is harmful. They'll know to follow what the Lanier firm did in this case, which is to argue the product is defective. The product was designed to addict children. It's designed to exploit feeble minds in general and youthful minds are among the feeblest. But looking ahead, elders, disabled people, victims of scams will also make claims as well. Plaintiffs learned because they adapted and they won because they learned.

[admin]

Hi, I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, here to deliver a little rough justice. This is my third video on the KGM vs. Meta case And in this short, I'm going to talk about how the plaintiff won. What changed everything? In the last video, we talked about how many plaintiffs had lost their cases against social media for injuries suffered due to injurious content that caused people to feel bad, kill themselves, and such. What changed everything? Because Meta and the other social media entities won all of those primarily due to Section 230 immunity, but also due to things like blaming innocent children for lying about their age to get onto a platform.

Well, the plaintiff in this case, the Lanier firm, presented a theory that these platforms were defective under California product liability law. And the claim was that social media platforms are not neutral tools. They have been engineered to deliberately capture attention, reinforce usage, and increase dependency. The evidence showed that they incorporated things like infinite scrolling so there would be no natural exit point and using dopamine triggering reward systems by having intermittent enforcement unpredictable the type that is more more addictive and having algorithmic escalation of stimulus routing people into negative but sticky content.

The legal test is -- what would a consumer expect? Would a consumer expect to have their children become addicted to a product because that product was designed to be addicted? Did the risks outweigh the utility of it? The evidence showed that internal corporate documents tied engagement metrics to emotional vulnerability and made youth-specific usage analyses. The plaintiffs avoided Section 230 by not talking about what users say and focusing on the intentional exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the human psyche, particularly in children. The bottom line? The key to victory wasn't new law, it was using existing law correctly. Defective product, not injurious speech. As usual, the law is a vocabulary test. And that's rough justice.

[admin]

In KMG v. Meta, the vulnerable plaintiff was a child. In future litigation, vulnerable plaintiffs of all types will allege that their vulnerabilities were anticipated and exploited by social media platforms, leading to the defrauding of elders in romance and finance scams, the deaths of the mentally infirm from suicide and other lethal seductions, and injuries due to exploitation or failure to accommodate disabilities.

Hi folks, I'm Charles Carreon, PunkLawyer, here to speak with you a little bit more about the KGM versus Meta case, and I've explained how the plaintiff avoided section 230 immunity, got past that defense, got past some causation defenses by showing that children did in fact suffer injury due to the intentionally engineered addictive features of the Facebook and other platforms, YouTube in particular. And so you had children, corporate knowledge, and intent to injure them -- that ignited not only a $3 million compensatory verdict, but a $3 million dollar punitive verdict that was due to fraud and oppression on behalf of the defendants.

Now, If there's anything we know about law, it's that it tends to expand and liability theories tend to expand beyond their initial scope. I would suggest that while the case is currently focused on minors, that we will see similar theories applied to elder abuse, algorithms that facilitate fraud, and romance scams that have sucked so much money out of the pockets of our elders, and these fraud networks that find that they work their way very easily into the algorithms of the social media platforms and gain credibility and access to vulnerable victims that way. People with mental health disabilities of various sorts are being injured by algorithms that reinforce depressing content, self-harm communities, people who are being induced to commit suicide, and there may also be an avenue of lawsuits for disabled people, for platforms that fail to anticipate known vulnerabilities that make people more likely to suffer harm due to addictive social media.

The key argument here is that the platforms have the data. They know who's vulnerable. They are taking advantage of these vulnerabilities deliberately. And while there may certainly be defenses asserted in that you don't want to get in the free will of people and you don't want to infringe their free speech and their access to free speech, nevertheless, when this harm is predictable and the injury is foreseeable, I think there is an avenue of liability there and wise attorneys will be pursuing it on behalf of their clients. And that's a little rough justice for you.

[admin]

When a jury convicts a corporation injuring children on purpose for profit, Congress sometimes acts. But if so, will the Social Media giants manage to pull the "preemption" trick, and convince Congress to erect a federal umbrella of protection to replace what's been lost with the demise of Section 230 immunity? Let us pray otherwise.

I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, and this is my fifth video about the KGM versus Medi-case, the big verdict in Los Angeles for Meta and YouTube causing injury to a minor due to the addictive algorithms that sucked her into all kind of bad psychological conditions. Now, what comes after lawsuits is usually a social reckoning. At the point when a jury and the judicial system establish that a wrong has been committed, oftentimes Congress has stepped up to address the problem and thus we will begin to hear that dreaded word, regulation. What's regulation likely to look like Assuming that Congress does in fact find its ass with both hands and do something for the nation's citizens instead of the citizens of other countries in the Middle East

So yeah, we've got state pressure coming from attorney generals. We have lawsuits at the state level and we have state level legislative proposals.
There's enough bad stuff happening to kids that legislators in state houses around the country are beginning to come up with ideas for how to regulate social media. And of course, everybody's heard about how in Australia now, you think you have to be 18 to access social media. Future legislation in this country might include things like duty of care standards for minors, establishing that social media companies have a duty to address the needs of minors and incorporate restrictions like eliminate that infinite scroll and reduce / limit push notifications, have some transparency requirements and independent audits of social media entities so that they don't just skirt laws like they've been skirting all this time the law intended to regulate youth access to their product.

The critical issue is will the social media giants manage to turn federal law into a protective umbrella through preemption and obtain a limitation on what states can do to protect their people? Let us hope not, as that is a big, big problem. What we need to do is keep state remedies available and get some reasonable national control over it through federal law. But even if Congress acts, these lawsuits aren't going away. And you may have such a lawsuit because hundreds of millions of people have been injured by this conduct. And if you do, maybe we should talk.