Is Big Tech on the same trajectory as Big Tobacco? A landmark verdict in Los Angeles and last month’s rejection of a bid for a new trial suggest the answer may be yes.
As the first jury verdict to hold Meta and Google liable for harms caused by deliberately addictive platform design, there are structural parallels with tobacco litigation that could have implications for legal practitioners and technology businesses operating in the UK.
While a direct replication of a US-style verdict in British courts remains unlikely in the near term, the direction of travel is clear.
In March, a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury delivered a $6m verdict against Meta and Google in KGM v Meta Platforms, Inc. and Google LLC. This was the first verdict of its kind to hold social media companies liable for harm caused by platform design.
The plaintiff claimed that, as a minor, she had suffered anxiety and depression as a direct result of addictive features deliberately engineered into Facebook and YouTube. On 10 June, a state court judge rejected both companies’ bid for a new trial, bringing the litigation landscape into even sharper focus for legal practitioners.
For lawyers advising technology and media clients, this verdict signals that courts are beginning to hold algorithm-driven systems to account in the same way they once did with cigarette manufacturers. The question for the English legal profession is how far, and how quickly, that signal will travel.
The comparison with tobacco litigation is not rhetorical, but structural and real. Early claims against cigarette manufacturers, including Green v American Tobacco Co [1963], were undone by causation difficulties and the absence of compelling contemporaneous evidence. Then, the disclosure of internal documents revealed that manufacturers had long known of nicotine’s addictive properties but suppressed that knowledge. Once corporate knowledge could be proved, the litigation dynamic shifted, culminating in a $206bn settlement that reshaped an industry.
During the KGM trial, Meta employees testified that concerns about risks to children were raised internally over many years, yet the platforms were deliberately designed to maximise engagement among young users, driving advertising revenue, notwithstanding the long-term psychological harm that would result. That pattern of corporate knowledge, obfuscation and a product engineered to encourage dependency is precisely what drove tobacco litigation from isolated individual verdicts to industry-transforming group claims.
Practitioners should not be asking whether comparable claims will emerge from algorithm-related harms. They should be asking when, in what form, and what can be done about it now. English lawyers must apply a significant degree of caution. When it comes to class actions that seek to hold corporates responsible for social harms, British courts tend to move much more slowly than their US counterparts.
We have seen this in tobacco, where group claims have failed, and in gambling, where courts have refused to hold organisations responsible for customer addiction. Where claims succeed, awards are far lower – often tens of thousands rather than millions.
The jurisdictional gap matters in a specific way. The KGM claim rested not on the inherent harmfulness of the product itself, but on a targeted argument: that platforms are deliberately engineered to be addictive, with a focus on the adverse and potentially irreversible impact on children. These aspects, while probably insufficient for a successful claim under the law as it stands, are the kind of narrative that has driven legal change in this jurisdiction before.
Even so, the practical implications for British businesses and their advisers are real and immediate. News of large awards against companies seen as requiring challenge can encourage attempts to litigate here, often relating to tragic harm to young or vulnerable people and seeking to expose sensitive corporate information.
The public is increasingly accustomed to redress schemes following high-profile scandals such as the Post Office Horizon case, and there is a growing expectation that organisations account for harm whether or not they carry strict legal liability.
The EU dimension is also more developed than many British practitioners appreciate. Instruments such as the EU AI Act and the revised Product Liability Directive provide the procedural and substantive architecture for aggregated claims against platform operators. UK firms with European operations cannot treat this as a distant concern. With the new trial bid now rejected, the KGM verdict moves closer to finality, and its influence on litigation strategy, including in the UK, will only grow.
Social media firms are unlikely to change highly profitable business practices quickly, but for reputational and political reasons, we may begin to see more emphasis on warnings and routes to support. As things stand, it will take a change in the law for claims of this type to succeed in English courts.
Limits on damages claims in the English courts and the absence of a clear concept of punitive damages similar to the US create a serious hurdle even for worthwhile claimants. Similarly, the fact that developers of harmful algorithms are almost always out of jurisdiction creates further procedural obstacles. Furthermore, there are questions about the merit of developing a class-action culture similar to that of the US and whether such claims uphold justice for consumers and the rule of law, or whether they are in fact a drag on the economy.
The procedural and substantive components of tobacco litigation took decades to mature. The algorithmic equivalent may move faster, driven by public and political expectation, the availability of internal corporate data through disclosure, and the growing sophistication of claimants and their advisers.
UK practitioners would be wise to study KGM carefully – not as a curiosity from another jurisdiction, but as an early indicator of where corporate accountability for platform-driven harm is heading.
James Arrowsmith is a partner at Browne Jacobson and member of FOIL’s tech and cyber sector focus team. Bernhard Maier is a partner at Browne Jacobson and member of FOIL
No comments yet