Meta and YouTube’s recent losses in youth social media addiction cases may put artists and …

An artist’s livelihood is increasingly absorbed by—even dependent upon—social media platform design. Knowing how to track trends, edit content and game the algorithms for visibility can be as necessary as it is exhausting. Unsurprisingly, many artists felt some schadenfreude when Meta and YouTube lost jury verdicts in California and New Mexico last March. But, like many things on the internet, the verdicts against the social media giants offered only an initial sense of satisfaction before more problematic realities emerged. Supporters of the verdicts see them as long-overdue corrections. Critics see them as the beginning of a legal shift that could weaken the protections underlying online speech, moderation, privacy and the diverse digital communities that artists have built and rely upon. The question is not simply whether Meta and YouTube (which is owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company) deserved to lose. It is whether the legal theories used against them can be separated from the systems that allow people to publish, discover and share creative work online. In California, a jury determined that YouTube and Meta were liable for platform designs that ultimately addicted and harmed a young woman. In New Mexico, Meta was found guilty of concealing what the company
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