In a span of less than 24 hours, juries returned historic verdicts in a pair of high-profile

lawsuits accusing big tech companies of putting children and teens in harm's away on their

social media platforms. Today in California, a jury found YouTube and Meta, the parent company

of Instagram and Facebook, liable for designing their platforms to be

addictive for children and teens, despite knowing it could harm their mental health.

All told, the companies would pay $6 million in damages.

And yesterday in New Mexico, a juror ordered META to pay $375 million after it said the social media giant

concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Jacob Ward is a tech writer. He is also host of the podcast and newsletter Rip Current.

Jake, you noted that meta has now been found liable

under two different legal theories, theories of this case.

What does that mean?

What is, what implications does that have?

So we're looking here first at New Mexico, which returned its verdict yesterday, and that case is about sexual exploitation as made possible by the platform.

And as a result, under a sort of unfair practices statute, that's basically saying that the platform facilitated something dangerous.

That's very different from what we saw in Los Angeles.

And I would argue the Los Angeles verdict is the much, much bigger one when it comes

to the precedent that it sets.

Because what that is saying is that it is the design of the platform, not the

stuff we post on it, not even the way the algorithm moves content around. It is the way that

like buttons and the way that people are bucketed together by interest. There's some stuff in the

design of it, the jury in Los Angeles determined. And that is an enormous deal. I mean,

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