US social media case puts onus on Big Tech; will NZ change its approach?
Tuesday, 31 March 2026
Dr Cassandra Mudgway is senior lecturer above the bar in the faculty of law at the University of Canterbury.
OPINION: A California jury has delivered a verdict that may reshape how we think about responsibility for online harm.
Meta (Instagram) and Google (YouTube) have been found liable for negligence in the design of their platforms, following a lawsuit brought by a young woman who began using these services as a child. She was awarded US$3 million (NZ$5.2m) in damages, with a further $3M in punitive damages after the jury found particularly egregious conduct.
At the heart of the case are the following legal claims: that these companies owed a duty of care to a child user, breached that duty through the way their platforms were designed, and that this breach was a substantial factor in causing her harm. That harm included compulsive use, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.
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The jury accepted that platform features such as an infinite scroll, autoplay, and persistent notifications could amount to a design defect. In product liability terms, this means a product that is unreasonably dangerous when used as intended. Internal company documents were central to that finding. Evidence suggested awareness of the risks these features posed, including their potential to drive compulsive use among vulnerable young users. That knowledge helped justify an award of punitive damages, signalling conduct that went beyond mere oversight.
The case also marks an important development in how courts are navigating provisions in the law which shields platforms from liability for user-generated content.
Here, the court drew a distinction between the content users post and the systems that deliver it. By focusing on design choices rather than individual posts, the claim was able to proceed where many others have failed.
This is unlikely to remain an isolated case. It is one of more than 20 trials currently moving through the US courts, many brought by families who link social media use to serious harm, including eating disorders and suicide.
TikTok and Snap have already settled related claims before trial. In a separate recent case, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading conduct relating to child safety, resulting in a US$375 million penalty.
Alongside these addiction-focused claims, a growing number of lawsuits are targeting failures to implement adequate safeguards against emerging harms, including proceedings against xAI over its Grok chatbot, which enabled the creation of non-consensual sexualised deepfakes of women and children, and actions by both private plaintiffs and public authorities alleging deceptive design and inadequate guardrails.
The emerging litigation shows how the legal focus is shifting toward the architecture of platforms and the incentives that shape it, rather than the content hosted on the platforms.
For New Zealand, this raises pressing questions. While this decision has no direct legal effect here, and US law does not apply in New Zealand courts, its reasoning could be influential in shaping how similar claims and regulatory approaches are understood.
Our current legal framework remains centred on harmful content and individual acts. For example, the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 provides mechanisms to address abusive posts and messages after the fact, but it offers little in the way of oversight of platform design, algorithmic amplification, or the cumulative effects of prolonged use.
A claim of this kind would face challenges in New Zealand courts. Establishing a duty of care between a global platform and a child user is not straightforward. Causation presents further complexity, particularly where mental health outcomes have multiple contributing factors. New Zealand does not have the litigation history in negligence cases like the US and courts are also unlikely to award punitive damages.
Even so, the US verdict demonstrates that courts overseas are willing to engage with these questions where there is evidence of deliberate design and corporate awareness.
The more immediate issue is regulatory. Other jurisdictions like the UK, Australia and the European Union have begun to impose proactive obligations on platforms to identify and mitigate risks. These approaches recognise that harm can arise from the structure and operation of digital environments, not only from individual pieces of content.
New Zealand has yet to take that step. The result is a system that responds to harm once it has occurred, while leaving the underlying conditions largely untouched.
This case underscores the limits of that approach. When intentional design choices shape widespread user behaviour, accountability cannot rest solely on individual users.
The California verdict will be appealed, and its broader influence will depend on how subsequent cases unfold. Even so, it signals a shift in how responsibility is being allocated in the digital age.
The question for New Zealand is whether our legal and regulatory settings are equipped to respond to that shift, or whether they will continue to lag behind it.