Friday, March 27, 2026
We Refused to Seat Two Election Deniers. A Judge Tried to Punish Us for It.
We Refused to Seat Two Election Deniers. A Judge Tried to Punish Us for It.
By Dana Barrett and Mo Ivory
“Ms. Barrett, a Democrat, is a Fulton County, Ga., commissioner. Ms. Ivory, a Democrat, is a former Fulton County commissioner. They wrote from Atlanta.
Every official responsible for the conduct of this fall’s midterms faces a simple test: Will you defend the lawful and fair administration of elections? Or will you stand aside while President Trump and his loyalists cast doubt on the results of past elections in an effort to cast doubt on future ones?
Last year, we confronted this question directly. As members of the Fulton County, Ga., Board of Commissioners, we voted against seating two nominees to the county elections board who are among those who have cynically helped to perpetuate the delusion that Georgia’s 2020 presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The county G.O.P. sued us, and a judge held us in contempt, ruling that we were required to vote for these nominees. A week ago, we won our case on appeal.
Despite the favorable outcome, this episode should serve as a warning to all Americans. The right of every citizen to have his or her votes counted accurately and election results respected is the only way our system works. Yet too many Republicans remain committed to the thoroughly bogus idea that Mr. Trump’s loss was really a win.
Here’s how we got here: The rules for choosing our county’s five-member elections board state that the county commission “shall” appoint two members nominated by the party receiving the most votes in the preceding election for Georgia’s state legislature and two members nominated by the party receiving the second largest number of votes. The fifth member is chosen by the county commissioners and becomes the chair.
Fulton County, home to almost all of Atlanta, is majority Democratic. In a two-party system, that means typically the board will consist of three Democrats and two Republicans, which is as it should be: Ensuring that the minority party is represented on the board is the fair thing to do.
But the rules don’t say the commissioners must seat any nominee whom either party submits.
In August, David Emerson, a senior Superior Court judge, ordered that because the rules say “shall be appointed,” we were bound to vote for whomever each party nominated. If that were the case, however, then taking a vote would be purely performative.
In order to conduct fair elections, the county elections board must have members who are willing to accept the basic proposition of any democracy: that in a given election, their party can lose. Neither Republican nominee meets that most basic of criteria.
One is Julie Adams, a member of the elections board who was nominated for reappointment. She is affiliated with the so-called Election Integrity Network. That organization is run by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on the January 2021 phone call during which he pressured Georgia state officials to “find” additional votes that might reverse his 2020 loss. This January, Ms. Adams released a statement praising the F.B.I.’s current sham investigation of the 2020 election results.
The other Republican nominee is Jason Frazier, who made a name for himself by challenging the voter registrations of about 10,000 Georgians. He also reportedlyhelped develop EagleAI, a tool designed to facilitate voter registration challenges.
Neither nominee is suitable — not because they are Republicans, but because they are unfit to oversee voting in our county. They, of course, have a right to their views. But their public statements and actions demonstrate that they have made common cause with Mr. Trump’s efforts at undermining the electoral process.
After we voted no, the Fulton County Republican Party sued us, apparently with the backing of the Republican National Committee. Judge Emerson eventually hit the county commission with a $10,000-a-day fine, which was stayed pending our appeal.
A similar fight arose when the county commission rejected Mr. Frazier in 2023. The local G.O.P. essentially acknowledged our right to reject him by replacing Mr. Frazier with a different nominee. Now Republicans insist we have to rubber-stamp anyone they pick.
In its ruling last week, the Court of Appeals of Georgia reached the only logical conclusion: By voting no, we were simply exercising our “constitutional prerogative” and our “judgment” on behalf of the people who elected us. The appeals court also noted that the trial court had “abused” its discretion by holding us in civil contempt.
It would be easy to think that our case amounts to a local interparty squabble, worsened by a heavy-handed judge. But the stakes are much higher: The president’s approval rating is underwater. He has openly called for Republican-controlled states to conduct mid-decade gerrymanders. Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for federalizing elections, in contravention of the Constitution. At his urging, congressional Republicans are pushing the SAVE America Act, a bill transparently aimed at voter suppression. On Monday, several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism about Mississippi’s law regarding mail-in ballots. Earlier this year, the F.B.I. seized documents from a Fulton County election office.
This is not a drill.
It’s why we’ve insisted that the Fulton County Republican Party nominate individuals who meet the minimal standard. And it’s why we’re raising the alarm beyond Georgia.
To secure the franchise, everyone in our body politic has a vital role to play: Demand that your elected representatives support fair elections. Vote regardless of the potential obstacles. Our republican form of government — our freedom — will survive only if we, the people, defend it.“
Florida’s Immigration Crackdown Is Showing Cracks: ‘We’re Hurting People’
Florida’s Immigration Crackdown Is Showing Cracks: ‘We’re Hurting People’
"Some conservative sheriffs have raised concerns about the aggressive enforcement tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has embraced.
By Patricia Mazzei and Eric Adelson
Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami, Fort Myers and Ochopee, Fla., and Eric Adelson from Orlando, Fla.
A year after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pledged to make his state one of the toughest in the nation on immigration enforcement, he has largely succeeded: More immigration arrests were made in Florida in 2025 than any state but Texas, and there have been few signs of the crackdown easing.
Yet the enforcement machine that the Republican governor hastily built to support the federal crackdown he welcomed is starting to show cracks, weighed down by a crush of detainees crowding some jails and a set of growing concerns, even among some law enforcement officials, about aggressive enforcement tactics in a midterm election year.
At a meeting of the State Immigration Enforcement Council last week, several Republican sheriffs expressed concern about unauthorized immigrants who have not committed any crimes being detained and deported.
“There are those here that are working hard,” said Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, the chairman of the new council, which advises the governor and cabinet members on immigration enforcement. “They have kids in college or in school. They’re going to church on Sunday. They’re not violating the law, and they’re living the American dream.”
The comments from the elected sheriffs signaled a shift in tone among a small but influential group of Florida Republicans who have helped carry out President Trump’s and Mr. DeSantis’s immigration policies.
“It’s too wide a net,” Chief Ciro M. Dominguez of the Naples Police Department, another member of the council, said during its quarterly meeting on March 16. “And we’re hurting people who are not the target of this.”
Elsewhere in the country, immigration arrests have fallen as federal law enforcement agencies have moved away from militarized raids that have resulted in violent clashes with protesters, including the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January.
House Republicans acknowledged at a meeting in Doral, Fla., this month that the immigration crackdown had alienated some voters. Party officials have advised lawmakers to refrain from discussing “mass deportations” ahead of the midterms. And at his confirmation hearing last week, Markwayne Mullin, the new homeland security secretary, committed to working with senators in both parties to address their concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policy.
But in Florida, immigration arrests have continued at an aggressive pace up to now. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Miami, which covers all of Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, has reported almost 10,000 arrests so far this year, more than any other ICE field office.
The state has not seen large militarized raids, in part because the DeSantis administration required state and county law enforcement agencies to sign formal cooperation agreements with federal authorities. That led to about 20,000 immigration arrests made by state and local agencies in 2025, Mr. DeSantis said in January. The Florida Highway Patrol had made just over half of those arrests.
The sheriffs who raised concerns at the recent meeting were quick to say they backed Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and the deportations of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes. But they also floated the idea of asking Congress to consider providing those who are not criminals with a path to legalize their immigration status — an idea that Mr. DeSantis promptly rejected.
“This idea that unless you’re an ax murderer you’re able to stay, that is not consistent with our laws, and it’s also not good policy,” Mr. DeSantis said last week.
Last year, Florida opened two state-run detention centers, one in the Everglades and another west of Jacksonville, to house federal immigration detainees. But many of the detainees were held in local jails until federal immigration agents could transport them to the centers, a process that slowed as the number of immigration arrests grew. Detainees with no criminal charges were sometimes held in cramped jails for more than a week, violating Immigration and Customs Enforcement guidelines that limit such stays to three days.
In Orange County, home to Orlando, the county mayor and immigration lawyers said that federal authorities had been picking up jailed detainees and driving them not to immigrant detention centers, but around town for a few hours. Federal authorities would then rebook the detainees into the jail the same day, in order to restart the three-day clock, the mayor and lawyers said.
So many immigration detainees were being held in the jail for extended periods last year that federal judges in Orlando started freeing some of them.
In one dramatic hearing last month, a federal prosecutor declined to argue the government’s position that the county jail should keep holding a Venezuelan detainee with a brain tumor. The detainee, Johnny Rondón Rodríguez, had been in the jail for 25 days.
His lawyer, Phillip Arroyo, said Mr. Rondón had been pulled over on Interstate 75 and detained despite having a pending asylum case and not being charged with any wrongdoing. Mr. Rondón said he was not receiving his medication to treat the tumor while in jail.
Yohance Pettis, an assistant U.S. attorney, said that if the court believed it should release Mr. Rondón, “then I am willing to do the right thing.” The judge, John Antoon II of the Federal District Court, called the prosecutor’s position “refreshing” and granted Mr. Rondón an immediate release.
Spending has been another sore point, with Republican state lawmakers pushing back against Mr. DeSantis’s immigration enforcement budget. This month, they renewed an emergency fund that the governor had used to build and operate the Everglades detention center — but only after creating new guardrails, including requiring regular reports to the Legislature on how the money is being spent. The Florida Tributary, an online news outlet, recently reported that the DeSantis administration was spending more than $1 million a day to run the center, known as Alligator Alcatraz.
When Florida opened the center last summer, Mr. DeSantis said the federal government would reimburse the state for its operating costs. But Florida has yet to receive the $608 million federal reimbursement it requested. The money has been held up, first pending the completion of an environmental review, and later by the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
In September, a federal appeals court reversed a judge’s order to shut down the Everglades detention center and allowed it to remain open. Environmentalists had challenged the legality of opening the center on protected land; oral arguments in the case are scheduled for next month.
The center held about 1,500 detainees as of Jan. 26, according to evidence presented in a federal court hearing that month in Fort Myers, Fla. It was the only time in months that the facility’s detainee population had been made public.
One Sunday last month, more than 100 activists gathered outside the detention center to demand its closure. The weekly vigils, organized by the Workers Center, a Jewish social justice organization, have been held for more than 30 consecutive weeks.
Among those present was Arianne Betancourt, 33, whose father, Justo Betancourt, a 54-year-old Cuban national, was detained in South Florida in October. He was ultimately transported to the Mexican border to present himself for deportation, according to a petition his lawyer filed in federal court. But the Mexican authorities rejected him, citing his health problems, which include diabetes. Mr. Betancourt was then returned to Alligator Alcatraz.
Holding a microphone, Ms. Betancourt described how her father had grown increasingly frail and dispirited as his detention dragged on.
“I need my dad,” she said. “I need him more than ever.”
Allison McCann contributed reporting
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico."
Thursday, March 26, 2026
UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’ | Slavery | The Guardian
UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’
(This vote against the resolution by the United States, Israel and Argentina confirm what a lot of us have always known. These three countries, along with the countries that abstained are all evil nations.)
"Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’
The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”
Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU.
The UK said it recognised the gravity of the issues addressed in the resolution and the untold harm and misery the transatlantic slave trade had inflicted on millions of people over many decades.
But James Kariuki, the UK chargé d’affaires to the UN, said Britain continued to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text and was “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities”.
“No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another,” he said.
As the resolution went ahead in New York, the British MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy presented a petition to the House of Commons, pushing for a state apology by the UK for its key role in slavery and colonialism of Africans.
“So many of the intersecting global challenges we now face are rooted in the legacies of enslavement and empire: from geopolitical instability to racism, inequality, underdevelopment and climate breakdown,” the petition read. “To truly confront these issues, we must acknowledge where they come from.”
For four centuries, seven European nations including the UK enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. The scale of the chattel slavery was such that 18th and 19th-century abolitionists coined the term “crime against humanity” to describe it. Historians have also linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.
“When it’s framed as a trade, it distorts the reality,” said Jasmine Mickens, a postgraduate student of history and government at Harvard University. “It was not a consensual joint business enterprise.”
Ghana, which has been at the forefront of an effort across Africa and the Caribbean for reparatory justice, pushed for the terminology to be updated to reflect the lingering impact of chattel slavery.
Experts involved in drafting the resolution say it is an attempt to get “political recognition at the highest level” for one of the darkest eras in history.
“The main point is not to introduce a hierarchy of crimes,” said Kyeretwie Osei, the head of programmes of the economic, social and cultural council at the AU. “It is rather an attempt to properly situate that particular chapter in history … how it was so world-breaking in its impact that it essentially created the platform for every atrocity and crime against humanity that then followed.”
“[This] was the chattelisation of human beings which essentially reduces them to property that can be sold or inherited [and] the status of enslavement could be passed on through birth,” he added.
The UN first acknowledged that slavery was a crime in a 2001 conference against racism, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa.
Panashe Chigumadzi, a historian and rapporteur for the AU’s committee of experts on reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, who drafted the framework, said that conference had had many limitations, including its framing of slavery as a “retroactive moral judgment rather than a continuous legal reality”.
“The AU framework … establishes that the inception of the trafficking in enslaved Africans during the so-called ‘age of discovery’ constituted the definitive break in world history, which inaugurated the break from localised feudal regimes to the modern world racial capitalist system,” she said. “This structurally transformed the fates of all peoples across the world through racialised regimes of labour, capital, property, territory and sovereignty that continue to determine relations of life and the land on which it is lived.”
While the resolution is not legally binding, it is now expected to pave the way for more progress in a fight that scholars and some politicians say has been hampered by the rise of rightwing movements in the west.
In recent years, the AU has been working to ensure the codifying of chattel slavery as a crime that requires not just apologies, but reparatory justice.
“Right now, the focus is on this particular moment [and] recognising that it is a culmination of many moments before this day,” Mickens said. “What people don’t seem to remember – due to all the efforts to erase history – is that black people, African people, have resisted the institution of chattel enslavement and the trafficking of Africans since the first hour the crime was committed on the shores of Africa.”
Before Wednesday’s vote, Mahama lamented the continuing erasure of Black history in the US through increasing censorship of teaching the “truth of slavery, segregation and racism” in schools.
“These policies are becoming a template for other governments and some private institutions,” he said at an event at the UN headquarters. “At the very least, they are slowly normalising the erasure.”
It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price.
It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price.
“A Belgian court ordered Étienne Davignon, a former diplomat, to stand trial for war crimes related to the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected leader. While the trial is a step towards accountability, it is seen as insufficient, as the true responsibility lies with the Belgian and American governments. Atonement would require a full apology, acknowledgment of institutional responsibility, and investment in Congo’s governance and people.
By Stuart A. Reid
Mr. Reid is the author of “The Lumumba Plot.”
A Brussels court this month ordered Étienne Davignon, a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat, to stand trial for war crimes related to the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of Congo. Human rights groups cheered. The Lumumba family called it “the beginning of a reckoning that history has long demanded.” After decades of equivocation, Belgium finally seemed willing to confront its colonial past.
If only it were so simple.
The desire for accountability is entirely legitimate. Mr. Lumumba’s overthrow and assassination was one of the Cold War’s great crimes — a conspiracy involving White House officials, C.I.A. spooks, U.N. diplomats, Congolese separatists, and, yes, Belgian envoys. It cut short the life of a young and charismatic leader, installed a kleptocratic dictator in his place and set what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo on a ruinous path from which it has never entirely recovered.
No one apart from the Congolese people has ever paid a price. Neither the United States nor the United Nations has formally apologized. In 2002, Belgium’s foreign minister expressed “profound and sincere regrets” for Mr. Lumumba’s death, but hedged by pinning blame on “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time.” A 2020 letter from Belgium’s king to Congo’s president about the early colonial period, when his great-great-granduncle King Leopold II ran an ivory- and rubber-producing slave state, merely observed that “acts of violence and cruelty were committed.”
The Belgian court’s decision is a poor substitute for a true reckoning. The accused nonagenarian, Mr. Davignon, was a bit player in the events. He is the sole survivor among a list of a dozen or so Belgian officials whom the Lumumba family alleges bore responsibility for Mr. Lumumba’s death.
The legacy of Mr. Lumumba’s assassination is weighty and enduring. Early meddling distorted Congo’s politics, and in the 65 years since Mr. Lumumba’s killing, his country has been ruled by corrupt, unresponsive leaders of various stripes, often with the backing of foreign patrons. The vast majority of Congo’s population lives on less than $3 a day. Outside powers still treat it as little more than a source of violence and misery — and minerals, in which Congo is extraordinarily wealthy.
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Mr. Lumumba’s death was the culmination of a coordinated, largely foreign effort to remove him from power. An uncompromising nationalist whose party won Congo’s first free democratic elections, he became prime minister of the newly independent country in June 1960. Within weeks, an army mutiny and the Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga plunged Congo into crisis.
The Eisenhower administration, worried that Mr. Lumumba was aligning with the Soviet Union, authorized a C.I.A. scheme to assassinate the prime minister. A C.I.A. chemist flew to Congo with poison, but the plot was never carried out — in part because by then, a different scheme was in motion.
On Sept. 5, 1960, President Joseph Kasavubu, Mr. Lumumba’s chief rival, announced that he had dismissed Mr. Lumumba. Nine days later, Col. Joseph Mobutu, the country’s 29-year-old army chief, seized power in a C.I.A.-backed coup, marking the beginning of decades of misrule.
Mr. Lumumba was eventually detained at a military camp outside the capital, Léopoldville. But by the end of 1960, his supporters in the country’s east were amassing power, and the incoming Kennedy administration seemed poised to shift toward a less hard-line U.S. policy that might involve a deal restoring his government. Among Mr. Lumumba’s opponents, a search was underway for a more permanent solution that could offer some plausible deniability.
As Colonel Mobutu’s cabal developed plans to send Mr. Lumumba somewhere it was certain he would be killed, the C.I.A. station chief effectively gave a green light. Belgian officials lobbied Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway province of Katanga and a sworn enemy of Mr. Lumumba, to accept the prisoner. On Jan. 17, 1961, Colonel Mobutu’s security chief arranged for Mr. Lumumba to be transferred from military detention and flown to Katanga. That evening, after hours of torture, he was executed by a firing squad of Congolese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers. His body was later dissolved in a barrel of sulfuric acid.
Mr. Davignon’s role in this atrocity was, by all accounts, limited, and he has denied the charges against him. In the summer of 1960, he was a 27-year-old trainee diplomat at the Belgian Embassy in Léopoldville, junior in rank but with direct access to Congolese political leaders.
Like his superiors, Mr. Davignon apparently considered Mr. Lumumba an erratic, hostile leader and worked to remove him from power. He and a Foreign Ministry colleague were tasked with providing the legal pretexts the president would use to dismiss Mr. Lumumba. In a cable to Brussels, they explicitly referred to their goal as the “overthrow of the government according to our wishes.” After that had been accomplished, Mr. Davignon lamented that Mr. Lumumba had “not yet been neutralized.”
As Mr. Lumumba languished in prison, Mr. Davignon was back in Brussels. By then, he was a valued member of “the Congo cell” at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, helping to draft the foreign minister’s correspondence on the crisis. The record shows that Mr. Davignon knew that Mr. Lumumba was being transferred somewhere he would surely be killed. If there is evidence that Mr. Davignon’s role went beyond this, it has not appeared in the extensive public records now available.
That’s not to say that Mr. Davignon bears no responsibility. He was, at the very least, a cog in a machine that helped topple an elected prime minister and send him to his death — or, as Mr. Lumumba’s family put it, “one of the links in the chain.”
But an ordinary criminal court in Brussels is an awkward vehicle for delivering restorative justice of this scale. The Congolese people will gain little from prosecuting a man who drafted cables.
What would actual atonement look like? For Belgium, it would entail a forthright apology and an admission of institutional responsibility. For the United States, it could mean the same, as well as investing in Congo’s governance, its institutions and its people, instead of merely racing to secure its cobalt. In other words, Washington could treat Congo as a nation with aspirations of its own rather than a mine to be managed.
The U.S. government could also open up the Congo files. Sixty-five years on, C.I.A. documents about the agency’s role in Mr. Lumumba’s demise are still studded with redactions related to bribes, collaborators and other important information.
Mr. Lumumba’s daughter Juliana once told me that she is often asked, after Belgium’s various quasi-apologies, what more she wants. Her answer: “We want the truth.”
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case
Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case
A jury found the companies harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress.
By Cecilia KangRyan Mac and Eli Tan
Cecilia Kang reported from Washington, Ryan Mac from the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County and Eli Tan from San Francisco.
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The social media company Meta and the video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress, a jury found on Wednesday, a landmark decision that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.
Meta and YouTube must pay $3 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering and other financial burdens. Meta is responsible for 70 percent of that cost and YouTube for the remainder.
The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.
The jury of seven women and five men are deliberating further to decide what punitive damages the companies should pay for malice or fraud.
The verdict in K.G.M.’s case — one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat — was a major win for the plaintiffs. The finding validates a novel legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury. It is likely to factor into similar cases expected to go to trial this year, which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products.
The personal liability argument draws inspiration from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco last century, in which lawyers argued that the companies created addictive products that harmed users. The companies have largely dodged legal threats by citing a federal shield, called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects them from liability for what their users post.
TikTok and Snap both settled with the plaintiff for undisclosed terms before the trial started.
Wednesday’s verdict follows a ruling this week by a New Mexico jury in another case brought by the state attorney general there, which found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users of its apps from child predators. That jury decided on Tuesday that Meta should pay $375 million in that case.
The trial in the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County began last month, with the jury taking more than a week of deliberation to reach its verdict. The $3 million in financial damages are a drop in the bucket for Meta and YouTube’s parent company Google, which bring in billions in revenue every quarter.
But the lawyers, parents and consumer interest groups supporting plaintiffs in other suits hailed the jury’s decision as a major step to rein in social media giants.
“This is the first time in history a jury has heard testimony by executives and seen internal documents that we believe prove these companies chose profits over children,” said Joseph VanZandt, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokeswoman said.
Google also said it disagreed with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesman.
The cases have been compared to those against Big Tobacco last century, when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were accused of hiding information about the harms of cigarettes. The companies reached a $206 billion master settlement with more than 40 states in 1998 that led to an agreement to stop marketing to minors. Strict tobacco regulations and a decline in smoking followed.
Though the California Superior Court of Los Angeles County verdict is an initial victory against tech giants, legal experts said it was unclear if the decision would represent a similar turning point. Eight other cases brought by individual plaintiffs are slated to go to trial there. A set of federal cases brought by states and school districts in Oakland, Calif., at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, are scheduled for jury trials this summer.
“There is a long road ahead, but this decision is quite significant,” said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and expert on media law. “If there are a series of verdicts for plaintiffs, it will force the defendants to reconsider how they design social media platforms and how they deliver content to minors.”
Concern about social media use has mounted globally. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called for adding warning labels to social media explaining that the platforms were associated with mental health harms for adolescents. In December, Australia barred children under 16 from using social media. Malaysia, Spain and Denmark are considering similar rules.
But most efforts to regulate social media in the United States have failed. K.G.M., whose first name is Kaley, filed her lawsuit in 2023 against Meta, Snap, YouTube and TikTok. Kaley, who lives in Chico, Calif., said she had begun using social media at age 6 and claimed the sites caused personal injury, including body dysmorphia and thoughts of self harm.
Her case, which was presided over by Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, represented one of the strongest personal injury cases among the thousands of suits filed.
Ahead of the trial, lawyers for the companies argued to the judge that the cases should be dropped, evoking speech protections. Lawyers for the plaintiff countered that the case was about product design, not speech.
While Snap and TikTok settled, lawyers for Meta and YouTube proceeded, saying they had a strong legal defense. It was too hard to prove social media was addictive and caused personal harms, the companies said.
During opening arguments, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers, Mark Lanier, presented the jury internal company documents from Meta and YouTube that showed tech executives knew of and discussed the negative effects of their products on children. Mr. Lanier argued that features like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and auto-play videos were designed to entice and hook young users to compulsively engage with the platforms.
Meta countered that K.G.M.’s mental health issues were caused by familial abuse and turmoil. YouTube argued that it was not a social media company and that its features were not designed to be addictive.
During the five-week trial, K.G.M.’s lawyers grilled Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. The executives rejected claims that Instagram, which K.G.M. began to use at age 9, could be described as “clinically” addictive.
K.G.M. testified about her childhood and using social media as both a creative outlet and an escape from bullying at school. She spent hours a day on Instagram and posted hundreds of photos using beauty filters to mask her insecurities, which she said led to her body dysmorphia.
On Wednesday, all but two of the jurors found both companies liable, determining that Meta and YouTube were negligent in designing their platforms, and that their products harmed K.G.M. The plaintiff, dressed in a tan sweater and long pink dress, sat in the first row of the public benches and listened intently to the verdict, but showed little emotion.
The jury next heard arguments from Mr. Lanier and representatives for Meta and YouTube on punitive damages.
Mr. Lanier held a jar of M&M’s, saying each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the companies’ value.
“You can take out a handful and not make a difference,” he said, scooping out a few with his hand. “You can take out two handfuls and not make a difference.”
Meta’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, suggested that the jury could avoid punitive damages completely. Meta is already on the path toward making changes toward protecting young users, he added.
Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, apologized to K.G.M.
“We are sorry for the things you have suffered,” he said. “We at YouTube truly hope there have been things at YouTube that have enriched your life and allowed you to express yourself.”
Mr. Lanier responded by saying “a lawyer apology is not the same as accountability.” He used his teeth to crack off the shell of a single blue M&M.
“This is like $200 million,” he said. “They do not want to feel the pain for what they did.”
Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.
Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco."
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