YouTube has appealed the verdict of a landmark social media addiction lawsuit in Los Angeles, seeking to challenge the jury’s determination that the company designed its platform to hook young users without concern for their well-being.
Lawyers representing YouTube filed a notice of appeal Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, less than a week after Meta, which was also a defendant in the case, filed its own notice of appeal. The lawyers are expected to provide their arguments related to the appeal in later court filings.
The case centered on a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child and that it worsened her mental health struggles. The jury found that negligence by both Google-owned YouTube and Meta was a substantial factor in causing harm to the young woman, identified in court only by her initials, KGM, and her first name, Kaley.
The jury awarded her $3 million in damages and recommended an additional $3 million in punitive damages. Her lead attorney, Mark Lanier, said in a statement last week following Meta’s appeal that Kaley’s legal team is expecting the appellate court to “continue the careful application of the law to this case, affirming the verdict of the trial court.”
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement last week that YouTube was planning to appeal and that “these are standard motions for this case to move forward.”
Meta and Google had each filed post-trial motions seeking a new trial. The trial judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl, denied those motions in early June.
One of YouTube’s core arguments during the five-week trial was that its platform, which offers video sharing and streaming, is not a social media platform.
Lawyers for both YouTube and Meta also consistently posed questions throughout the trial about whether the evidence and arguments encroached on legal protections for tech companies around content posted by third parties. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields these companies from legal responsibility for such content. The plaintiff’s lawyers instead focused on the design features like autoplay functions that they argued could lead to more long-lasting, less intentional use of the platforms.
Kaley’s case was a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, and the verdict could influence the outcome of thousands of similar lawsuits accusing social media companies of deliberately causing harm. TikTok and Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. were also initially named as defendants in the case, but each settled for undisclosed sums before the trial began.
