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Trillion-Dollar Tech Bandits Are Finally Facing Justice

An outdated law has allowed Big Tech to evade accountability for 30 years. Now landmark court rulings are giving consumers a chance to fight back.

On March 24, 2026, in the landmark case State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc., a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for violating the state’s consumer-protection laws by misleading consumers and harming children by enabling child exploitation. New Mexico became the first state in the country to prevail at trial against Big Tech for its role in enabling child exploitation on its platforms. But it wouldn’t be the last: The next day, in a bellwether verdict, a California jury awarded $6 million in damages to a young female plaintiff who was found to have been addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child, holding the respective owners of the platforms, Meta and Google, liable.

These verdicts should have widespread implications for the tech industry. The social-media-addiction verdict in California will be followed by thousands of lawsuits from similarly situated plaintiffs, including suits that have already been filed in federal court in other states. Both verdicts represent monumental progress in the decades-long struggle to hold Big Tech accountable for harming children and teenagers. These cases will open up debate about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, or CDA, which for decades has prevented Americans from seeking redress for the damages done by corporate tech behemoths.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the CDA, the most significant law of the digital age, which was signed into effect by President Bill Clinton on February 8, 1996. The CDA was intended to protect children from exposure to online harms, but the innovations of the past 30 years unleashed a technological revolution—one unimaginable when the CDA was passed—that, with the help of a series of legal decisions, have turned the law into a shield for tech companies rather than a sword for consumers. In 1996, the Internet was highly decentralized and dominated by no one. Today, a handful of trillion-dollar mega-corporations own the platforms that billions of us log on to every day, and everyone carries a supercomputer in their pocket, leaving most of us continuously connected and monitored.

Not surprisingly, Big Tech’s global hegemony has a dark side. Some of the most vulnerable members of society, primarily women and children, have become victims of online sexual abuse and exploitation. Tech created these hazards—not by accident, but by design—and we’re finally seeing these issues come to the fore in courtrooms with the recent verdicts holding social-media companies accountable. After spending decades operating with near impunity as they transformed social-media platforms into ruthless profit-making machines, the giant global tech companies are beginning to face consequences for their dangerous products.

The product-liability claims that are now being deployed against social-media platforms rely on legal arguments that are similar to those that consumer advocates have used to hold Big Tobacco, Big Auto, and Big Pharma to account; the ultimate goal is to rein in bad actors who put consumers at risk. Progressive attorneys general across the country, directly confronting legislative inaction, have taken the lead in going after Big Tech.........

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