A Los Angeles jury today held Meta and YouTube liable for what parents across this country have been saying for years: that these companies knowingly designed platforms to hook children, watched kids struggle, and chose to keep going because it was profitable. Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer led San Diego County’s push to sue the same companies last year — before today’s verdict, before it was settled law. Today’s ruling — in a separate bellwether case — supports the legal theory at the heart of ours.

Lawson-Remer issued the following statement:

“Every parent who ever watched their kid disappear into a phone and couldn’t pull them back — today’s verdict is for you.

Meta ran studies showing Instagram was making one in three teenage girls feel worse about their bodies. They buried it. TikTok’s own researchers wrote that kids don’t have the mental development to control their screen time. They used it as a roadmap. These are trillion-dollar corporations that looked at our children and saw a revenue opportunity.

San Diego filed suit because our kids deserve the same accountability this jury just delivered. And today, the Board voted to adopt a plan I authored to more than double San Diego County’s youth mental health crisis care capacity — the largest investment in youth behavioral health in our County’s history — because someone has to clean up the damage these companies caused while we hold them accountable in court.

They got rich doing this to our kids. They should pay for it.”