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The Case That Just Changed Everything: Who Is KGM and What Happened?
On March 25, 2026, a California jury delivered a verdict that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and into every parent’s group chat in America. A Los Angeles jury found Meta (the parent company of Instagram) and Google (the parent company of YouTube) negligent in the design of their platforms — and ordered them to pay a young woman named Kaley, identified in court documents as KGM, $6 million in damages.
Kaley, now 20 years old and from Chico, California, filed her lawsuit in 2023 at age 17. She alleged that the companies had engineered their sites to make their users engage compulsively using techniques such as infinite scrolling — causing her to suffer from anxiety, body dysmorphia, and depression. Wikipedia Her lawyers called the platform design a “digital casino.” By the time the case went to trial, Kaley testified that she had been on social media “all day long” as a child.
The jury concluded that Meta and Google should pay the woman $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta on the hook for 70% of that amount. NPR That breaks down to Meta paying $4.2 million and Google paying $1.8 million. TikTok and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, were originally named as defendants but settled ahead of trial, leaving Meta and Google-owned YouTube as the remaining companies in the case. Fox Business
This case represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers. NPR It is what lawyers call a bellwether trial — one of the first selected from approximately 1,600 to 2,000 similar lawsuits, chosen to test how juries respond to this new legal theory. The outcome doesn’t automatically decide those other cases, but it signals loudly that the era of Big Tech immunity may be ending.
GOD in the Bible shows his love and care for children:
Matthew 18 ” 5“And anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me. 6But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
We have all known for over a decade that these types of platforms are addictive and can be harmful for our children ‘s mental health and now we are seeing it play out, It just took a while for those legal theories to develop. ”
Caroline Polisi CBS legal analyst
This subject is very personal to me. Allow me to speak freely
Parents are Responsible for the Mental and Emotional Well being of their Children:
As a parent, you are responsible for your children; that just really makes me angry. You aren’t parenting properly; you’re not spending time with your children. You’re not thinking about their mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. You are not considering their future financial ability to find a job and be a productive member of society .
As a parent you don’t notice the changes in your child when they are neglected. Parents must adapt and change before it is too late.
Hooked at 6, on Instagram by 9: But Where Were Her Parents?
Let me say what the courtroom — and the CBS News segments covering this case — have been reluctant to say plainly.
Kaley said she began using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, and allegedly developed compulsive use patterns, including up to 16 hours in a single day on Instagram. The Conversation Instagram’s own minimum age requirement is 13. YouTube’s is also 13. She was years below both platforms’ stated minimums.
The question that must be asked — before we get to what Meta knew, before we get to Zuckerberg on the witness stand, before we get to the $6 million verdict — is: Where were her parents?
I am not asking this to dismiss Kaley’s suffering. Her pain is real. Her case is compelling. But as a father who told my wife when my son was three days old not to sit him in front of the television because it would overstimulate his developing brain — and who was later vindicated when that exact guidance appeared on the evening news — I know that parental awareness matters. Parental presence matters.
A six-year-old does not download YouTube on her own. A nine-year-old does not create an Instagram account in a vacuum. Someone handed that child a device and walked away.
I was recently inside a restaurant picking up food when a woman walked in with a two- or three-year-old girl. The whole place smiled at the little one. Within moments, the child asked for her mother’s phone. The mother loudly announced to a stranger nearby that her daughter was “addicted to it” — and laughed. As if this were a quirky personality trait rather than a warning sign. She was either unaware of what she was doing to that child’s brain, or she knew and did not care. I am not sure which scenario frightens me more.
What the Tech Companies Actually Did — And What the Internal Documents Revealed
Now, to be clear: Meta and Google are not innocent. The courtroom evidence makes that undeniable.
KGM’s legal team showed the jury internal documents from Meta in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives described the company’s efforts to attract and keep kids and teens on its platforms. One document said: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” Another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram, compared with competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old. NPR
Internal memos outlined Meta’s strategies to target kids ages 6–10, tweens ages 10–13, and teens 13 and up. Meta estimated the lifetime value of a 13-year-old at roughly $270 per teen, driven by the fact that younger users have much higher long-term retention than older users. WKBW
Whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked internal Facebook research in 2021, had already shown the world what was happening behind closed doors. Haugen’s leaked internal research documents showed that employees were aware girls reported their eating disorders worsening after using Instagram. The 19th News
Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar also testified that both Mosseri and Zuckerberg failed to act when he personally notified them of harm to teens — on body image, mental health, and exposure to predators. SheKnows
When Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took the stand, he compared Instagram addiction to binge-watching Netflix, in a courtroom filled with families who lost children to Instagram. He testified that he earns approximately $10 million per year, much of it tied to performance indicators like stock price. The jury got to weigh his claim that teen safety was more important than growth against internal documents where his own employees described the platform as “a drug” and themselves as “basically pushers.” SheKnows
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself took the stand — his first jury testimony on child safety — and was questioned about his decision to retain beauty filters despite internal research flagging their impact on young girls’ body image. The Conversation
The companies’ defense centered on two arguments. First, that Kaley’s turbulent home life — including her parents’ divorce — was the real cause of her mental health struggles. Second, that their platforms are shielded by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. By focusing on how the companies built their platforms — arguing that features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, autoplaying videos, and beauty filters made the apps equivalent to a “digital casino” — the plaintiffs pursued a design defect case that was able to get around the high bar set by Section 230. NPR
The Danger of Screen Time Has Never Been a Secret
It is one thing to not understand the danger of excessive screen use for young children. But the general knowledge that too much screen time harms developing children has been public for over a decade.
On average, children aged 8 to 18 in the United States spend 7.5 hours a day watching or using screens. AACAP More than half of parents — 54% — have felt their child is addicted to screens. Other top concerns include reduced attention spans, disrupted sleep, behavioral issues, lower levels of physical activity, and weakened social skills. Yet 49% of parents rely on screen time every day to help manage their parenting responsibilities. Lurie Children’s
I understand hardship. I understand exhaustion. But there is a difference between using a screen as an occasional tool and handing a toddler a smartphone as a permanent pacifier. I noticed years before any courtroom talked about this. Children with too much screen time exhibit a consistent cluster of symptoms: fidgety behavior, poor attention spans, explosive anger, singular fixation on getting back to the screen, and creeping isolation from the real world. I believe these symptoms can morph into far more dangerous patterns in adulthood.
What Parents Can Actually Do — Right Now, Without Waiting for a Verdict
CBS legal analyst Caroline Polisi said something revealing in the coverage of this case. She admitted that even she, as an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex, finds it hard to resist the endless scroll — and she used that to advocate for legislative intervention. But she missed the most important implication of her own confession: if you as a grown adult struggle to put the phone down, your child has no chance unless you protect them.
Here is what the research, the pediatricians, and plain common sense tell us parents can and must do:
Set hard limits early and hold them. For children ages 2–5, limit non-educational screen time to about one hour per weekday and three hours on weekend days. AACAP Build the habit before they ever ask for a phone.
No devices in bedrooms. Period. A child should never be permitted to take a digital device to their room where it can be used unsupervised. This rule is fundamental for preventing late-night use, exposure to inappropriate content, and ensuring adequate sleep. Children of the Digital Age
Create a central charging station. Designating a central charging point in the home for all devices can prevent the “zombie family” experience — where everyone sits in the same room, yet is isolated with their face buried in a device. Children of the Digital Age
Enforce device-free zones and mealtimes. The dinner table is sacred. The two hours before bed should be screen-free. The blue light emitted by screens interferes with the body’s production of melatonin, a sleep hormone — and adequate sleep is necessary for teens’ physical and cognitive development. Atrius Health
Model the behavior you want to see. Children will rarely heed advice from a parent who spends all their own time with their face buried in a device. Children of the Digital Age If you want your child to put down the phone, you have to be able to put down yours.
Replace screens with bodies in motion. Take walks. Go outside. Play sports. Enroll your children in activities that demand presence — martial arts, swimming, music, art. Research indicates that periods of reduced technology access lead to children reading more, playing more, interacting with each other more, and communicating more effectively. Such breaks can even help children better cope with stressful situations independently and reduce social anxiety. Children of the Digital Age
The Media’s Missing Parent: A Troubling Absence
Here is what troubled me deeply about the CBS News coverage of this case. In a 17-minute segment, the crucial role of parents was never emphasized. Not once.
The reporter asked what it will take for lawmakers to step in with regulation — given that children average more than 7 hours on screens a day, that there is a mental health crisis, and that there is a loneliness epidemic. That is a legitimate question. But framing the entire problem around what government and corporations must do subtly places parents completely off the hook.
Caroline and the reporter made it sound as though parents have little to no power to stop their children from being addicted to screens. But that is simply not true — and it is a dangerous message to broadcast to millions of viewers. Yes, lawmakers can help. Yes, these verdicts matter. Yes, the design choices Meta and Google made were predatory and wrong. But government regulation is like putting gum on a crack in a dam. The main answer — the first answer, the most powerful answer — is parents who are present, protective, and willing to sacrifice their own convenience for their children’s futures.
The parents are just as absent from this news coverage as they are from their children’s daily lives across this nation.
The Fight Is Not Over: Appeals, the Supreme Court, and What Comes Next
This verdict is historic — but it is one step in a much longer battle.
Both Meta and Google have announced they will appeal. Peter Ormerod, an associate professor of law at Villanova University, called the verdict “a momentous development” but noted it’s just “one step in a much longer saga” and that he doesn’t expect to see large changes to the platforms immediately. ABC7
Sarah Kreps, a professor and director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, made the analogy many observers are reaching for: “I think the reason why they would be concerned, and I’ve seen this analogy with the tobacco lawsuits, is that once you have this type of verdict in one case, it just opens the floodgates for so many more.” ABC7
The legal battlefield is enormous. The day before the KGM verdict, a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company misled users about the safety of its platforms and enabled child sexual exploitation. Al Jazeera There are now approximately 2,000 similar lawsuits pending nationwide. A federal trial is set for this summer consolidating school district and parent claims. And more than 40 state attorneys general have filed suits against Meta for contributing to the youth mental health crisis.
A recent independent evaluation of Instagram’s Teen Accounts tested 47 of 53 listed safety features and found that 64% were either no longer available or ineffective. Only 17% worked as described. SheKnows That is not a safety system. That is a press release dressed up as a product.
The Supreme Court looms as a possible destination. If appeals courts split on whether the design-defect theory is blocked by Section 230, this will almost certainly reach the nation’s highest court. At stake is not just money — it is whether the fundamental architecture of social media platforms can be treated as a defective product, the same way a car with faulty brakes or a toy with a choking hazard can be.
A Note to the Church and Christian Parents
I want to speak to something that rarely gets said in these conversations, and it needs to be said clearly.
The body of Christ is not exempt from this crisis. Christian parents are not getting a passing grade on this. We sit in Sunday morning services and talk about protecting our children from the culture — and then we hand them the culture’s most addictive device and tell them to figure it out.
We speak of raising children “in the way they should go,” and then we allow them to spend hours absorbing content from strangers on the internet — content that shapes their understanding of beauty, worth, sexuality, and success. We talk about the fruit of the Spirit and then watch our children grow anxious, isolated, angry, and image-obsessed.
This is not a secular problem that somehow skips over church families. The data does not support that hope. The loneliness epidemic, the body dysmorphia, the anxiety — these are not confined to households that do not pray. They are present wherever parents are checked out, wherever convenience is prioritized over presence, wherever the phone is handed over to buy silence.
The family is the first institution God established. It is the first line of defense. Courts and Congress can draw boundaries around what these companies do. But only a parent — only a father, only a mother — can shape who a child becomes on the inside.
That work cannot be outsourced to a platform. And it cannot wait for a verdict.
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