Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to target “addictive features” on social media platforms, following a landmark US court ruling that held Meta and YouTube liable for harms caused by designing addictive technology. The prime minister said the verdict in a California court signalled growing public demand for stricter regulation, adding: “I’m absolutely clear that we need to go further.”
Starmer noted that the UK government is already consulting on measures such as banning social media for under-16s, and he is “very keen” to address addictive features. The US jury found the tech companies negligent for failing to warn users of potential dangers, awarding $6m (£4.5m) to a 20-year-old plaintiff who said she became hooked as a child. Meta was ordered to pay 70% of the damages, with YouTube covering the remainder.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex hailed the verdict as “a reckoning”, stating: “For too long, families have paid the price for platforms built with total disregard for the children they reach.” Google, which owns YouTube, said it would appeal, insisting that YouTube is “a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site”. Meta also expressed disagreement and said it was evaluating legal options.
In Brussels, Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s digital chief, said the case sent “a very clear message” that online platforms must take the risks they pose seriously. The Molly Rose Foundation, set up after the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, described the ruling as a potential watershed, urging the government to make safety and wellbeing “the price for tech firms to pay for doing business in the UK”.
Thomas Lancaster of Imperial College London warned that if companies cannot enforce their own policies, they are “putting the people at risk – the very people who the policies are designed to protect”. Sacha Haworth of the Tech Oversight Project declared: “The era of big tech invincibility is over.”
