Tech Platforms Face a Choice: Congressional Regulation or Devastating Lawsuits

Less than two weeks ago, a Los Angeles jury handed the social media industry a verdict it cannot ignore. On March 25, after roughly four weeks of testimony and closing arguments that concluded March 13, the jury in KGM v. Meta & YouTube found Instagram and YouTube liable for the psychological harm their platforms caused a young user. It was the first state bellwether trial in the sprawling social media addiction litigation to reach a verdict, and it arrived precisely as Congress advances the most aggressive restrictions on platform design in the internet's history.

The trial, which commenced February 10 following jury selection that began January 27, placed a concrete question before jurors that legislatures are now wrestling with in parallel: do Instagram's algorithmic feed, its variable-reward notification systems, and YouTube's autoplay function constitute product design defects that predictably harm adolescent users? The jury's answer placed the industry's regulatory calculus in a fundamentally different position.

"The platforms should be absolutely begging Congress to regulate them, because the alternative is they get sued into oblivion by a bunch of law firms," one technology policy expert observed as the litigation has accelerated.

That warning has material weight. MDL 3047, the federal multidistrict litigation consolidated before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, already had 620 pending cases as of November 2024 and has continued to grow. Judge Rogers selected six school district bellwether cases, drawn from Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Arizona, for federal trials expected in late 2026. The industry is not facing a single lawsuit. It is facing a sustained legal campaign across multiple jurisdictions with no clear endpoint.

The specific product mechanics at the center of both the litigation and proposed legislation are precisely named. Snapchat's "Snapstreak" feature, which pressures users to exchange daily messages or lose a running count, is named in the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act as exploiting "the science of addiction," alongside infinite scroll, which eliminates natural stopping points by endlessly loading new content, and autoplay video.

Congress has two instruments moving on parallel tracks. The Kids Off Social Media Act, S.278 in the 119th Congress, would ban platforms from knowingly allowing children under 13 to create or maintain accounts, require deletion of existing child accounts and their associated personal data, and prohibit the use of automated systems to recommend or promote content based on personal data for any user under 17. The FTC would enforce the provisions, and states could bring independent civil actions on behalf of their residents. The Senate Commerce Committee cleared the bill on February 5, 2025. The SMART Act would go further, requiring platforms to include natural stopping points in their interfaces and give users in-app tools to track and cap their time across all devices.

Section 230, the federal statute that long shielded platforms from content-related liability, has begun to erode in this context. Judge Rogers ruled in 2024 that addiction-by-design allegations target platform architecture rather than user-generated content, meaning Section 230 does not fully apply. In January 2026, a federal appeals panel reviewing the question appeared skeptical of social media companies' efforts to cut off addiction lawsuits at an early stage.

What compliance with either legislative track would require, in concrete terms, is a redesign of the features that currently maximize time-on-platform: dismantling streak mechanics, interrupting infinite scroll with hard stops, defaulting algorithmic feeds to chronological order for users under 17, and providing users meaningful control over recommendation systems. These are not cosmetic changes. They are the engagement architecture on which advertising revenue depends.

The KGM verdict demonstrated that juries are willing to find Instagram and YouTube liable when that architecture causes harm. The six federal bellwether trials arriving later this year will determine whether March 25 was an outlier or the opening round of litigation that, at scale, would cost the industry far more than any congressional fine schedule.