This week, two juries in the US ruled in two related platform cases.

The LA case (K.G.M. v. Meta) was a personal injury/product liability case, one woman suing for harm caused by addictive design. The New Mexico case (State of New Mexico v. Meta) was a consumer protection case. The state attorney general suing Meta for violating state consumer protection laws and enabling child sexual exploitation.

On Tuesday 24 March, the jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for misleading consumers about the safety of Instagram and Facebook and failing to protect children from predators on its platforms. The state’s attorney general had built his case using an undercover operation, a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl that was immediately flooded with sexual solicitations.

On Wednesday 25 March, the jury in Los Angeles found both Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in the design and operation of their platforms. They found the companies had acted with malice, oppression, or fraud. They awarded $6 million in damages with $3 million compensatory, $3 million punitive, to a 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., who testified she’d been using YouTube since she was six and Instagram since she was nine.

Two verdicts, two days, $381 million in damages.

But it’s not the money that matters. It’s the findings.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers didn’t argue about content. They argued about design, infinite scroll, auto play and push notifications, all algorithmic recommendations engineered to keep users engaged for as long as possible. Internal Meta documents shown to the jury included one memo stating the company needed to bring in tweens if it wanted to win teens. Another showed 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep returning to Instagram as to competing apps, all on a platform that required users to be at least 13.

The jury didn’t find that harmful content slipped through. They found that the platforms were built to be addictive, that the companies knew it, and that they chose profit over protection. This is the first bellwether trial of approximately 2,000 similar lawsuits. A federal trial is expected this summer. Legal experts are calling it Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment.

The design was the problem. Both juries said so.

Skipping over the pond for a while. The UK’s Online Safety Act, enforced from July 2025, requires platforms to implement “highly effective age assurance”. Photo ID, facial age estimation, credit card checks, mobile network verification. If a platform hosts content harmful to children, they must verify who’s looking at it, subject to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global turnover.

In February 2026, Keir Starmer announced a consultation on banning addictive features like infinite scroll and auto play for children. The consultation opened in March and closes in May. The same Prime Minister who told staff at a Barclays branch that digital ID would “put power back in people’s hands, cutting the faff out of rummaging through drawers for documents.” The language changes. The pattern doesn’t.

A bit further afield, from December 2025, Australian under-16s were banned outright from holding accounts on ten major platforms including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. No parental consent override. Platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million, users prove their age through facial recognition or government-issued ID. However, Oz teenagers posted videos showing they’d already bypassed the restrictions.

People can see what’s happening. Two juries just confirmed under oath that the platforms were designed to shape behaviour. That’s not a theory, it hasn’t been for some time, but now it’s a legal finding, with a price tag attached.

Both laws were introduced in the name of protecting children. Both cite the harms of social media design, the algorithms, the addictive features, the endless scroll. Australia’s own guidance specifically references “design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens.”

And neither law requires the platforms to change a single one of those design features.

The UK law tells platforms to check who’s looking. The Australian law tells platforms to check who’s logging in. The addictive architecture, the infinite scroll, the auto play, the notification loops, the algorithmic rabbit holes, stay exactly where they are.

The jury in Los Angeles found the design was the weapon. The legislation doesn’t touch the design. It builds a checkpoint around the user.

More people are noticing though. Three million people signed a petition against the UK’s digital ID scheme. VPN downloads in the UK surged so sharply after the Act’s enforcement that they topped the App Store charts.

So here’s the question: if the problem is in the machine, why is the solution pointed at you?

If you want to contain the problem, you have to look at the design, not the user.

And if the solution requires you to hand over your face, your ID, or your biometric data to verify who you are, who’s really being protected?

As I covered in my first article, who’s getting paid to mine that data, what are they doing with it, and why are you paying with your identity to keep accessing the loop that was designed to keep you scrolling in the first place?

configure YOUR system. contAIn™ the chaos. control YOUR outcome.

This article was originally published on Substack.