Gavin Newsom: After court decisions, need to ‘renegotiate our contract with Big Tech’
A Southern California jury found YouTube and Meta liable for harming a young user’s mental health in a landmark social media addiction case that Gov. Gavin Newsom said should make the U.S. “renegotiate our contract with Big Tech.”
A jury for the California Superior Court in Los Angeles found on Wednesday that the two social media giants had been negligent in designing and operating their YouTube and Instagram platforms, allowing an anonymous plaintiff known as KGM to become addicted to them and cause her mental distress. On Tuesday, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had violated the state’s consumer protection law by enabling child sexual exploitation on its Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp platforms and misleading users.
The pitfalls of social media usage for children, such as exposure to harmful or radicalizing content, has become a galvanizing topic in the Legislature. Last month, Newsom said he would support curbing access to social media for children under 16.
Tech critics and child advocates broadly cheered the decision, which requires Meta to pay $2.1 million and YouTube to pay $900,000 in penalties. The New Mexico court decision requires Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users.
Spokespeople for Meta and Google, YouTube’s parent company, said both companies disagreed with the court decision. A Meta spokesperson said the company intended to appeal, saying “teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”
“This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” spokesperson José Castañeda said in an email.
“For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing the addictive and dangerous design features built into their platforms. Today, we finally have accountability,” said Mark Lanier, an attorney for KGM. “These companies made deliberate choices that prioritized engagement and profit over the well-being of the young people using their products. This verdict sends a clear message to an entire industry that the era of operating without consequence is over.”
“Maybe they’ll (Big Tech) reconsider their own participation in the world that they’ve created,” Newsom told reporters during a news conference in Sacramento about increasing youth civic participation. “It’s a moment of some deep accountability, and I hope, reflection on their part, and you know, the external realities of how people are feeling and how stressed and isolated...We go online to find answers and solutions, but you know, everything going online is finding you these algorithms, and how these algorithms are shaping opinions and beliefs and are aiding and advancing so much of our anxiety and stress, coloring things in.”
The governor has long been an ally of Silicon Valley dating back to his days as a supervisor and later mayor of San Francisco in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the dot-com boom. In his recent memoir, he wrote about his close friendships with “Steve and Sergey and Larry and Reed and Marc,” referring to the founders of Google, LinkedIn and Salesforce, and “a South African named Elon (Musk),” referring to the Tesla exec.
As lieutenant governor, he wrote a book, “Citizenville,” about harnessing the power of technology to work for government. It was published in 2013 when “we had a sense of optimism back then...and I think it was broadly universally shared,” Newsom said, pointing to the role that Twitter played in mobilizing support for the Arab Spring movement.
Last year, he signed into law a bill from Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, that regulates artificial intelligence, a burgeoning technology he likened to social media.
“It’s about steering things. And that’s why we can’t make that mistake with AI, and that’s why, again, this state’s leading,” Newsom said. He said the state would continue to “lean into” AI regulations, and said he had warned tech companies against fighting him on that front, calling out NetChoice, an industry lobbying organization.
“We’ve been there for years, but now the court of law, with the decision that was made in New Mexico and the decision here in Southern California, and it’s, as I say, a moment of reckoning for the social media companies, but it’s also a moment of responsibility for all of us as it relates to the future of AI, to not make the mistakes we’ve made with social media.”
