{"id":399762,"date":"2026-07-15T20:09:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T20:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399762\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T20:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T20:09:09","slug":"youtube-joins-meta-in-appealing-jury-verdict-nbc-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399762\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube joins Meta in appealing jury verdict \u2013 NBC Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

YouTube has appealed the verdict of a\u00a0landmark social media addiction lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0in Los Angeles, seeking to challenge the jury\u2019s determination that the company designed its platform to hook young users without concern for their well-being.<\/p>\n

Lawyers representing YouTube filed a notice of appeal Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, less than a week after Meta, which was also a defendant in the case,\u00a0filed its own notice of appeal<\/a>. The lawyers are expected to provide their arguments related to the appeal in later court filings.<\/p>\n

The case centered on a 20-year-old woman who said she became\u00a0addicted to social media as a child<\/a>\u00a0and that it worsened her mental health struggles. The jury found that negligence by both Google-owned YouTube and Meta was a substantial factor in causing harm to the young woman, identified in court only by her initials, KGM, and her first name, Kaley.<\/p>\n

The jury awarded her $3 million in damages and recommended an additional $3 million in punitive damages. Her lead attorney, Mark Lanier, said in a statement last week following Meta’s appeal that Kaley’s legal team is expecting the appellate court to \u201ccontinue the careful application of the law to this case, affirming the verdict of the trial court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Casta\u00f1eda, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement last week that YouTube was planning to appeal and that \u201cthese are standard motions for this case to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta and Google had each filed post-trial motions seeking a new trial. The trial judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl, denied those motions in early June.<\/p>\n

One of YouTube’s core arguments during the five-week trial was that its platform, which offers video sharing and streaming, is not a social media platform.<\/p>\n

Lawyers for both YouTube and Meta also consistently posed questions throughout the trial about whether the evidence and arguments encroached on legal protections for tech companies around content posted by third parties.\u00a0Section 230<\/a>\u00a0of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields these companies from legal responsibility for such content. The plaintiff’s lawyers instead focused on the design features like autoplay functions that they argued could lead to more long-lasting, less intentional use of the platforms.<\/p>\n

Kaley\u2019s case was a\u00a0first-of-its-kind lawsuit<\/a>, and the verdict could influence the outcome of thousands of similar lawsuits accusing social media companies of\u00a0deliberately causing harm<\/a>. TikTok and Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. were also initially named as defendants in the case, but each\u00a0settled for undisclosed sums<\/a>\u00a0before the trial began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YouTube has appealed the verdict of a\u00a0landmark social media addiction lawsuit\u00a0in Los Angeles, seeking to challenge the jury\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[55270,3552,48,52,51,1016,47,50,49,2278],"class_list":["post-399762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-california-laws","tag-crime-and-courts","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lawsuits","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}