Juries in two separate trials have concluded that Meta has fallen short in their promise to protect kids online, with guilty verdicts issued in both New Mexico and Los Angeles this spring. And, In the case of the New Mexico trial, the CCS-affiliated Cybersafety Research Center and CCS Co-director Damon McCoy provided critical research-based evidence to ensure the verdict was grounded in solid data.
In the Los Angeles trial, which concluded on March 25, 2026, the jurors found Meta and YouTube liable for “deliberately designing addictive products that hooked a young user and led to her being harmed,” and awarded the plaintiff $6 million (The Guardian, March 25, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/mar/25/jury-verdict-us-first-social-media-addiction-trial-meta-youtube). Meanwhile, as posted on MS NOW on March 24, in a separate action brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, a jury awarded $375 million following an undercover operation in which a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl was “simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers. In both cases, the opinion of the juries was that Meta was misleading users about the safety of their platforms.
McCoy, who is also a co-founder of the Center (formerly known as Cybersecurity for Democracy), and Arturo Bejar, a Fellow of the research institution and a former executive at Meta, were both key witnesses in the New Mexico case. And, during the trial, references were made to an earlier study of Instagram that had been penned by Bejar, McCoy, and C4D Co-Director Laura Edelson (see https://mollyrosefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Teen-Accounts-Broken-Promises-How-Instagram-is-failing-to-protect-minors.pdf).
More recently the newly christened Center released a report entitled “Broken, Buried, or Missing: Anatomies of Failure (and Success) of Social Media Child Safety Features,” which is the first independent audit of advertised child safety tools from four major platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.