Jury selection has begun in what is being billed as a landmark bellwether trial in Los Angeles, where a 19-year-old plaintiff known as K.G.M. has sued Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance, accusing Instagram, YouTube and TikTok of deliberately designing their platforms to addict children and wreck lives. This case is being watched across the country because its outcome could open the floodgates to thousands of copycat suits and reshape how Americans use technology.
The plaintiffs’ narrative is dramatic: years of scrolling, algorithms tuned to keep kids hooked, and mental-health crises blamed on apps. Already, Snapchat settled and reports say TikTok reached an agreement to exit the first trial, moves that look less like admissions of guilt and more like legal firms buying peace to avoid a precedent.
The judge in Los Angeles, Carolyn B. Kuhl, has let key parts of the case proceed, and even Mark Zuckerberg has been slated to testify — a spectacle that would thrill the media and plaintiffs’ lawyers but should worry anyone who values free enterprise. Courts are not the place to rewrite technology policy, and yet this courtroom drama has been transformed into a proxy political fight over speech, innovation, and who gets to run the internet.
Conservative legal voices are right to be skeptical about the plaintiffs’ ability to prove causation; as Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley bluntly noted, establishing that social-media design features directly caused psychiatric injury will be very difficult. This is not just legal hair-splitting — it’s a reminder that correlation is not causation, and that turning every unhappy outcome into a corporate crime risks turning juries into legislatures.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers are openly borrowing the tobacco playbook, hoping emotional testimony and complex science will convince jurors to rewrite the rules rather than ask families to take responsibility. If courts start treating platform design choices as equivalent to manufacturing a harmful product, we’ll see a chilling avalanche of liability that will scare off investors and crush innovation while doing nothing to teach parents how to protect their children.
No one with a heart denies that children and teenagers face real challenges online, and commonsense reforms — parental controls, school-based digital literacy, and enforcement of existing laws — are the right conservative solutions. Blaming successful American companies through mass torts is a cheap shortcut for politicians and trial lawyers who want headlines, not honest policy fixes.
Hardworking Americans should be wary of a legal campaign that seeks to punish innovation instead of empowering families. We must defend free speech, insist on personal responsibility, and push for targeted reforms that hold bad actors accountable without destroying the digital economy that fuels so many jobs and opportunities in this country.
