Some verdicts are in, but the jury's still out on the future of social media.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Last week in Los Angeles, a jury found meta and YouTube liable for knowingly designing addictive products that harm children.

The day before, a jury in New Mexico found meta-violated state law and misled consumers about child safety features.

These verdicts could herald a legal reckoning for social

media platforms, but there are still some big outstanding questions, says Eric Goldman, co-director

at Santa Clara University's high-tech law institute. The big takeaway is that the plaintiff's

lawyers successfully convinced the jury to buy into the plaintiff's

basic story. That might sound obvious, but it really wasn't. We weren't sure if the jury was going to

agree with the arguments of the victim. And they did. And so now that opens up the door for

what will other juries agree to and how does that

extrapolate into changes to social media. Right, because there are thousands of other pending

cases against these social media giants. What does this mean for those cases? The point of the

trial is called a bellwether trial.

It's designed to basically do some statistical sampling

of the overall corpus of cases that have already been filed

and get a sense about how the juries are responding to a representative sample.

So it's just one data point,

but it gives us a sense that that jury was buying the story.

If we get two more data sets, that becomes a lot more persuasive to both sides about the odds of success or failure.

So there also was this New Mexico jury case that found meta liable for misleading consumers about its app's guardrails.

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