In two landmark court decisions last week, tech giants Google and Meta were found liable for inflicting mental health harms on minors by making their social media platforms intentionally addictive, and Meta was found liable for failing to protect young users from child predators. The cases are likely to open up social media companies to further personal injury lawsuits and could force Big Tech to make their platforms more friendly to children, which family advocates have been demanding for decades.

On March 25, a California jury found that Google and Meta were responsible for causing a young girl to suffer from depression and anxiety, which lead to body dysmorphia, due to the addictive and harmful content that she was exposed to on Instagram. As noted by The New York Times, 20-year-old “K.G.M.” testified that beginning at age 9, 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.”

The jury ordered Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, to pay $4.2 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages, while YouTube, which is owned by Google, was ordered to pay $1.8 million. While the amounts totaled a small fraction of Meta and Google’s yearly revenue, experts say the case will prove to be a milestone that will likely lead to other plaintiffs filing suit against social media companies over claims of mental health damages. “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,” remarked Joseph VanZandt, an attorney representing K.G.M.

Just one day prior to the California ruling, a New Mexico jury also found Meta guilty of knowingly damaging the mental health of children by covering up what it knew about how child sexual predators used the social media giant’s platforms to exploit children. Jurors penalized the company $375 million as a result of thousands of violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, as well as prioritizing revenue over safety.

Experts like Donna Rice Hughes, who serves as president and CEO of the online safety advocacy group Enough Is Enough, say that the rulings represent a wake-up call for social media companies. “It [was] a stellar week for children and families and a really bad week for Big Tech,” she emphasized during “Washington Watch” on Friday. “Not just Meta and not just Google, because this sends a clarion call to all these Big Tech companies that they better start putting safety over profits, or there’s going to be a big price to pay.”

Hughes further highlighted the evidence that came out against Meta in the New Mexico case. “[O]ver 500,000 children per day were targeted with sexually explicit messages on Facebook. Just let that sink in a minute. 7.5 million images or reports of child sex abuse material — that’s child pornography that Zuckerberg and Meta hid. They didn’t report this because they wanted it to go into their end-to-end encryption. So these are most likely images of real children, real toddlers, real babies being sexually exploited, raped, and victimized that they sat on. … [In addition], the former head of Instagram said that the policy of Meta was that they would not do anything about a report on sex trafficking unless it was reported at least 17 times.”

Hughes went on to postulate that the two court losses for the Big Tech giants could result in a sea change in their policies, akin to what occurred in the 1990s after Big Tobacco lost billion-dollar settlements and was forced to accept strict regulations and stop advertising to minors. “I think that it will encourage others to bring lawsuits because they go, ‘We can win,’” she observed. “Just think back to Big Tobacco. If they think they can get a winning verdict, people will start to sue. … TikTok and Snapchat wisely settled out of court, and I’m sure they’re glad they did. I bet now Google and Meta wish that they had too because they got hit hard.”

Hughes concluded by pointing out that the court cases could motivate Congress to take action. “It also emboldens, in my opinion, Congress to say, ‘Okay, we have got to prevent this because … these [are] cases of real victims … kids are already being harmed.’ … There are multiple bills in the United States Senate. Everything that we work on in the Senate is bipartisan, which is a great thing in a divided country, that protecting kids online is a unifying issue.”