Platform Design Litigation Yields Historic Verdicts Against Meta and Google
This Tech Litigation Roundup gathers and briefly analyzes notable lawsuits and court decisions across a variety of tech-and-law issues.
Each roundup in 2026 will dive deep into a major development with expert analysis from TJL legal fellow, Maddy Batt. This month’s focus are the historic jury verdicts in tech accountability lawsuits against Meta and Google focused on platform design.
Here is an excerpt:
Two US juries made history in March after issuing successive rulings against social media giants that had largely avoided courtroom losses. In New Mexico, a jury awarded $375 million in civil penalties against Meta for misleading the public about child sexual exploitation on its platforms in violation of state consumer protection law. The jury trial was the first brought by a state Attorney General against the social media giant. Days later, a jury in Los Angeles became the first to hold social media companies responsible for contributing to a plaintiff’s mental health harm via addictive design. The jury determined that Meta and Google-owned YouTube were liable for negligence and failure to warn related to the plaintiff’s alleged social media addiction.
The cases proceeded under two different legal theories, but both verdicts provided support for an approach that scholars and advocates have proposed as a way to overcome tech companies’ formidable legal shields: focusing on design, not content. Even as platform design lawsuits have already seen important courtroom victories, these first-of-their-kind jury verdicts were significant wins for the design approach.
Tech companies have long relied on two related defenses to avoid legal liability for their platforms: Section 230, which generally shields platforms from liability for third-party content posted on their sites, and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech. But even though social media platforms contain large amounts of protected content and speech, these lawsuits targeted harms that were based not on the content itself but on the design of the platforms containing it. The New Mexico lawsuit, for example, alleged that Instagram’s algorithms proactively recommended would-be abusers’ accounts to children on the app. The Los Angeles lawsuit highlighted features like infinite scroll, resulting in a pretrial ruling where Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl wrote, “the fact that a design feature like ‘infinite scroll’ impelled a user to continue to consume content that proved harmful does not mean that there can be no liability for harm arising from the design feature itself.” Courts–and now juries–have agreed with advocates that these design-based harms were distinguishable from content on the apps.
Continue reading March’s Roundup on Tech Policy Press.
Roundup of other tech litigation developments:
- Anthropic wins preliminary injunction against Department of Defense: Tensions between the Defense Department and Anthropic over the company’s refusal to allow use of its technology for lethal autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance led to a courtroom battle over the agency designating its former contractor a supply chain risk. The case attracted significant civil society attention, with several amicus briefs filed (Tech Justice Law submitted a brief in support of neither party). The judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing the designation from taking effect; the decision is under appeal.
- Chatbot litigation expands in scope: The growing field of chatbot litigation saw multiple firsts this month. The first lawsuit alleging harms caused by Google’s chatbot Gemini was filed. A family’s suit against OpenAI marks the first chatbot lawsuit by victims of a mass casualty event, a school shooting in Canada, where the suspect reportedly exchanged violent messages with ChatGPT. And finally, an insurance company is bringing novel claims against OpenAI after facing an allegedly frivolous suit by a woman who sought advice from ChatGPT. The company has raised claims of unauthorized practice of law, abuse of process, and tortious interference with contract.
- Meta sued over smart glasses: A class action lawsuit alleges that Meta engaged in false and misleading advertising by claiming its AI-enabled glasses are “designed for privacy” when, according to the complaint, investigative journalists found that human workers in Kenya review highly intimate footage from the glasses to train Meta’s AI models.
- Legal consequences for xAI “undressing”: A Dutch court ordered X and its AI chatbot, Grok, to stop generating and distributing AI-generated, nonconsensual sexualized imagery and child pornography. The company faces daily penalties of €100,000 per Defendant for noncompliance. New lawsuits are continuing to be filed in the US, including an action by the city of Baltimore and a class action lawsuit against xAI for licensing its LLM for use in creating AI-generated child pornography.
- Content moderation researchers allege unlawful retaliation by the US: The Coalition for Independent Technology Research sued Marco Rubio and other federal officials, arguing that the Trump Administration is violating disinformation and other platform-focused researchers’ First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, by targeting them for deportation and exclusion from the United States.
- Grammarly sued for AI “expert review” feature: A class action lawsuit alleges that Grammarly’s “expert review” feature, which presents AI-generated writing feedback as though it came from professional writers without the writers’ consent, violates the plaintiffs’ right of publicity.
- US tech regulation legal battles continue: Industry Association NetChoice filed a lawsuit to block Chicago’s tax on social media companies. Meanwhile, xAI lost its bid for a preliminary injunction against a California law requiring companies to disclose information about the data used to train their AI models, after a judge concluded that its First Amendment and Takings Clause challenges were unlikely to succeed.
- Kenya court declares mobile phone numbers part of digital identity: In a landmark ruling, a Kenyan court declared that mobile phone numbers are part of individuals’ digital identity, expanding privacy rights associated with phone numbers in the country.
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