Historic Ruling Against Meta and YouTube

The largest players in the tobacco industry have denied or downplayed the harmfulness of cigarettes for decades, until a series of lawsuits forced them to drastically change their stance. More precisely, the turning point occurred in 1998 when giants like Philip Morris USA and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company signed a settlement worth $206 billion with 46 U.S. states. In addition to agreeing to cover the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses with this amount, many marketing restrictions were introduced, including advertising with animated characters.

This historic milestone irresistibly reminds us of the latest ruling against Meta and YouTube. After years of discussions, studies, internal documents, and increasingly vocal dissatisfaction, a ruling was reached declaring that YouTube and Meta are responsible for intentionally creating addiction and harming the mental health of a young woman.

The twenty-year-old American who filed the lawsuit (TikTok and Snapchat settled with her out of court) is entitled to $3 million in damages from Meta and YouTube. According to the ruling, Meta bears seventy percent of the responsibility, while YouTube bears thirty. Although spokespeople for both platforms expressed dissatisfaction and announced an appeal, this is indeed a historic precedent. Finally, it is now black and white: social networks are not benign platforms designed for networking, but products designed to create addiction.

They Hit Where It Hurts

If legal experts cited by foreign media are to be believed, this is just the beginning. Of course, one ruling will not change the industry overnight, but a series of them could indeed do so. Unfortunately for platform owners, there are already over 1,600 lawsuits in progress involving hundreds of families, school districts…

The plaintiffs’ thesis that the platforms are designed to create addiction has not only been confirmed by the U.S. court but also by some state regulators. Australia has banned social media for those under sixteen, and similar moves are being considered by Spain, Denmark, Malaysia, and Austria; in the U.S., discussions are already underway about warnings on social media similar to those on cigarette packages.

If these trends are any indication, it is no longer a question of whether change will happen, but how quickly and how serious it will be, and whether the platform model itself will survive. According to The Drum, the aforementioned ruling strikes where it hurts the most, at the very design of the product. A jury in Los Angeles concluded that Meta and YouTube are not responsible for the content but for the way their platforms are designed. The legal team of the plaintiff decided not to deal with the content, i.e., the posts that pushed their client into mental health issues, but to directly target the design of the platform. They focused on features that push for infinite scrolling, videos that autoplay, algorithmic recommendations designed to keep users on the page as long as possible, and persistent notifications that bring them back to it. The importance of this ruling lies in the fact that the court has for the first time clearly linked engagement-boosting mechanics with addiction and mental health, declaring the product design culpable. With its decision, the jury clearly indicated that the entire system needs to change.

Indirect Culprits

The system not only created addictive behavior but also thrived on it. In other words, brands pay for this, and they measure the success of their investment by the amount of time users spend on a particular profile or post, how many times they returned to the content, how long or how often they interacted with it… They did not take into account the product design and algorithm but rather whether their post or ad was next to harmful or inappropriate content.

Marketing expert Margo Waldrop, in an article in The Drum, problematized the ruling in the context of brands, stating that if the core mechanics of the platform are risky, then it is clear, black and white, that brands are financing systems that shape and encourage addictive behavior in users. So far, there have been no changes in the way campaigns are launched and measured, platforms are not changing their features, and brands are not massively withdrawing from platforms due to the inconvenient ruling, but it will certainly increase pressure on advertisers and raise questions about the use of new technologies like artificial intelligence. As stated in The Drum, recent court cases do not speak of the past of social media but serve as a warning on how to deal with the next wave of technology. And, what is truly frightening, if effective protective barriers around social media have not been established after nearly two decades of existence, what kind of damage will artificial intelligence, which spreads even faster and embeds itself deeper into people’s lives, cause? Or, as Waldrop concludes, if these systems continue to appear in court as evidence rather than innovations, the industry may have to face a harsher reality: that the metrics it optimized are not indicators of success but become arguments against it.

Alternative Channels

Although responsibility cannot be directly placed on the shoulders of brands, they will bear the consequences in the long run and, like the platforms, will have to find other ways to reach their audience. What this will look like can be roughly inferred from the reactions to the ban on using social platforms for those under sixteen. Recently, Marketing Week wrote that while young people may not have significant purchasing power, they have something much more important – cultural influence.

They are the audience that creates trends, ignites content, and pushes it into the mainstream. Although this ban has only recently arrived, the market is slowly adapting, and, as Marketing Week writes, brands are shifting their attention to alternative channels like Discord, WhatsApp, Roblox, video games, and music ecosystems. The space is thus fragmenting, measurement is becoming increasingly difficult, and, in fact, a new phase of digital advertising is beginning. The last decade defined growth and engagement, while the next one will likely define setting boundaries. How much attention is okay? How much retention is too much? Where does manipulation begin, and who is responsible for it? The ruling against Meta and YouTube answered the last question and announced the beginning of the first major transformation of social platforms. For this reason, we will not be wrong to call it historic, just like the one at the beginning of the story.