Posted March 27, 2026
Earlier this week, a court in California ruled that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google’s YouTube were liable for damages of $4.2 million and $1.8 million respectively after the companies were sued by a 20-year-old woman—known as KGM during the trial—for creating products that she claims led to anxiety, depression, and a host of other problems in her life. Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the original suit but settled before it went to trial.
When I first read the headlines about the California case, it sounded like the latest in the long line of frivolous lawsuits that make the news from time to time. And to be honest, that’s still where I land to an extent. However, the details of the case are interesting, and the verdict could provide a framework for the thousands of similar lawsuits currently pending.
To this point, social media companies have largely claimed immunity from any damage their products have caused by citing their First Amendment rights. Courts have regularly held that they are, for the most part, not liable for the content posted by other users on their sites, and the Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of a similar defense for major internet providers.
As a result, while Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and other social media moguls have spent an inordinate amount of time before Congress over recent years, relatively little has changed regarding their liability. What sets the latest suit apart, though, is that these companies were not sued for their content. They were sued for their algorithm.
And that, apparently, makes a big difference.
During the trial, KGM’s attorney showed the jury internal company documents that demonstrated that executives were not only aware of the negative effects and addictive tendencies that their products had on children, but designed them to hook young users as quickly as they could.
As Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block describe, “These companies hired the best engineers in the country to make their products as addictive as possible—to the point that some of these engineers began to regret what they had created.” They go on to note that Aza Raskin, who came up with the technology behind the infinite scroll mechanic, said in a court deposition that watching young people get trapped by his invention created “a deep, hard, sick place in the pit of my stomach.”
By keeping the focus of the case on the design of the sites rather than their content, lawyers were able to make a similar personal injury complaint to the charges leveled at Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Time will tell whether Meta and others will eventually face the same kind of multi-billion-dollar settlements that the Tobacco industry did. The fact that Meta’s stock remained relatively unchanged in the wake of the verdict suggests the markets don’t see such an outcome as likely, but it’s too early to know for sure.
Still, it wouldn’t necessarily take billions of dollars in settlements to bring about meaningful change in the industry. The most lasting impact of the Tobacco suits was the introduction of warning labels and regulatory changes to marketing, which eventually led to a dramatic decline in smoking rates. Could something similar be possible with Facebook, TikTok, and others?
Australia has already instituted a tobacco-like age restriction for social media, and other countries are starting to follow suit. To get to that point in the United States, though, would likely require a series of similar verdicts.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, since change often happens slowly until enough momentum gathers to bring real transformation. And the same is often true in our lives as well.
Most of us have some sin in our lives that always seems to be lurking around the corner, waiting to trip us up. In those moments where we have fallen victim to temptation once again, it can be easy to think that we should be past these mistakes; that the change we want to see should have already occurred. But that’s often not how it works, and few people understood that truth better than the apostle Peter.
Throughout the Gospels, Peter is known most for his speak now, ask questions later approach to following Jesus. Over the course of three-plus years of walking with the messiah, hearing the Lord teach, and seeing how Christ lived each day, he still struggled to get out of his own way and show much—if any—spiritual maturation.
That past is what makes his transformation in the book of Acts and beyond so powerful, though.
He goes from denying to a servant girl that he even knows Jesus to preaching the gospel in front of the same courts that had Christ killed while openly defying their commands to stop telling people about the Lord (Luke 22:56, Acts 4:19). But even though that change seems like it happened as soon as Peter received the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth is that he’d been building toward that moment since the start.
For example, while he quickly began to sink, he was the only disciple to have the faith and courage to join Jesus on the water (Matthew 14:22–33). Similarly, even though he denied Christ three times, he was still one of only two to have the courage to follow him back to Jerusalem (Luke 22:54–62). And while he got bored and went fishing instead of waiting after Jesus appeared to them following the resurrection, he was also the first in the water to greet him on the shore (John 21:7–8).
So, by the time the Holy Spirit came, Peter was already growing in ways that prepared the soil for the Spirit to take root. That was possible, though, because he was committed to living out a life of devotion to the Lord despite knowing that he would still fall short of God’s standards in the process.
And, as he would go on to describe in his first epistle, a strong relationship with Christ has to start with a commitment to follow his lead, even if we’re never going to do so perfectly on this side of heaven.
In 1 Peter chapters 1 and 2, the apostle describes how it’s only after we’ve committed to pursuing the kind of perfection we see in Jesus that we are able to grow into the life God has for us. That idea is important because it can be easy, at times, to want the growth before we’re willing to commit to the changes. But that’s not how it works with the Lord.
God is clear that the commitment is meant to be a response to what he has already done for us through Christ rather than what he might do for us in other parts of our lives. If salvation isn’t enough to inspire devotion, then further blessings won’t either.
In fact, they’re more likely to do the opposite and teach us to pursue the kind of transactional relationship we’re naturally prone to desire, but that God calls us to reject. And he wants more for us than that.
As Peter wrote earlier in the letter, “You call out to God for help, and he helps—he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s also a responsible Father, and won’t let you get by with sloppy living” (1 Peter 1:17, MSG).
So, the next time the Holy Spirit convicts you of a sin that you should have outgrown long ago, remember that it’s alright to be a work in progress so long as you’re still committed to making progress. It’s when we give up or reach the point that we feel like we’re good enough that our responsible Father is most likely to bring real discipline into our lives.
Scripture never promises that change will be easy or that growth will come quickly. But God’s word does guarantee that it’s worth pursuing anyway.
Let’s renew that commitment today.
“Our Lord told his disciples that love and obedience were organically united. The final test of love is obedience.” —A. W. Tozer
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