Hi, I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, here to deliver a little rough justice. This is my third video on the KGM vs. Meta case And in this short, I'm going to talk about how the plaintiff won. What changed everything? In the last video, we talked about how many plaintiffs had lost their cases against social media for injuries suffered due to injurious content that caused people to feel bad, kill themselves, and such. What changed everything? Because Meta and the other social media entities won all of those primarily due to Section 230 immunity, but also due to things like blaming innocent children for lying about their age to get onto a platform.

Well, the plaintiff in this case, the Lanier firm, presented a theory that these platforms were defective under California product liability law. And the claim was that social media platforms are not neutral tools. They have been engineered to deliberately capture attention, reinforce usage, and increase dependency. The evidence showed that they incorporated things like infinite scrolling so there would be no natural exit point and using dopamine triggering reward systems by having intermittent enforcement unpredictable the type that is more more addictive and having algorithmic escalation of stimulus routing people into negative but sticky content.

The legal test is -- what would a consumer expect? Would a consumer expect to have their children become addicted to a product because that product was designed to be addicted? Did the risks outweigh the utility of it? The evidence showed that internal corporate documents tied engagement metrics to emotional vulnerability and made youth-specific usage analyses. The plaintiffs avoided Section 230 by not talking about what users say and focusing on the intentional exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the human psyche, particularly in children. The bottom line? The key to victory wasn't new law, it was using existing law correctly. Defective product, not injurious speech. As usual, the law is a vocabulary test. And that's rough justice.