The Rip Current

Yesterday a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the design choices that addicted a young user and damaged her mental health. It is the first verdict of its kind. Hours earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Two verdicts in two days.I spent the day going from network to network talking about what this means, and the short version is: this is the end of social media as we know it, and the end of childhood as we’ve accepted it.The long version is in the reel above, which pulls from my appearances on CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, PBS NewsHour, ABC Australia, and the BBC. Here’s what I kept coming back to across all of them:The legal theory is new and enormous. This verdict isn’t about what people post. It isn’t even about the algorithm. It’s about the design of the platform itself — like buttons, interest bucketing, the architecture of compulsive use. A jury of 12 people understood that, and held two of the largest companies on Earth responsible for it.We’ve always blamed the addict. Not anymore. We live in a country that blames people for their own addiction, their own obesity, their own bad choices. This jury looked at the design circumstances instead and said: no more. That is a fundamental shift in how America thinks about behavioral harm.The money is about to get very real. $6 million for one plaintiff sounds small for a trillion-dollar company. But there are 350 family cases in the pipeline. 250 school districts. I did the math on air — if you use even the modest $1800-per-teenager judgment from New Mexico across all pending cases, you’re looking at $40 billion. Make it $6 million per, and you’re in a whole new world. And Meta’s insurers just won the right to stop covering them.The internal documents are devastating. Discovery gave us the kind of material a reporter works her whole life to access. The jury saw how these companies talk about kids when they think no one’s listening. It is extraordinary.I’ve been reporting on this subject for more than a decade — through The Loop, through the PBS documentary series Hacking Your Mind, through years of covering these companies up close. Yesterday felt like the moment the rest of the country caught up to what a lot of us have been seeing for a long time.Watch the full reel above. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, this is the kind of coverage The Rip Current exists to deliver.I've spent more than a decade reporting on how platforms shape behavior for profit. The Rip Current is where that reporting lives — investigations, analysis, and the stuff I can't say on TV. Subscribe now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comWhen the Los Angeles jury came back with its landmark verdict Wednesday, I had just finished a 30-minute interview with Nita Farahany about the New Mexico verdict a day earlier. Then the news dropped and we had to do the whole thing again. Because for the two of us — two members of a relatively small group of folks who’ve argued for years that choices can be powerfully guided by technology, and that the law has to adapt to that reality — this was a very, very big deal.A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the harm done to a teenager whose compulsive social media use — driven, the plaintiffs argued, by deliberately addictive design — was a substantial factor in her mental health crisis. Meta took 70% of the liability. YouTube, which has largely flown under the radar, and has long insisted it’s not even a social media platform, took 30%. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages. But as Nita points out, the damages can be much, much larger, for an obscure reason that’s been under-reported.

My work is typically reserved for paying subscribers, but this verdict, like the one in New Mexico yesterday, is such an important story, and such a historic moment, that I’m making The Rip Current free this week. If you find it compelling, please consider becoming a paid subscriber:A Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable Wednesday for designing platforms that addicted a young woman starting in childhood and contributed to her depression and suicidal thoughts. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages — 70% from Meta, 30% from YouTube — and found that both companies acted with malice, meaning punitive damages are still to come. It’s the first time a jury has held social media companies responsible for addictive design — and it came just one day after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect children from sexual predators on its platforms. Two verdicts, two states, two legal theories, and the same company found liable in both. More than 1,600 lawsuits are in the pipeline behind this one.I consider this the equivalent of the moment we determined that cigarettes cause cancer, or that cars need seat belts. The whole thesis of The Loop — that we don’t make our own choices most of the time, and that the companies who’ve figured that out are using it to shape behavior at scale — just played out in a courtroom. The jury looked at a plaintiff with a difficult home life and real vulnerabilities, and instead of deciding those vulnerabilities were her problem, decided they shouldn’t be an open playground for a corporation. That’s a fundamental shift. The architecture of choice I’ve been writing about — in this case and in the New Mexico trial — is no longer a faultless landscape of opportunity. It’s something American law can now put a price on. I break it all down in this video. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

A New Mexico jury just found Meta liable for endangering children on its platforms — $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated for less than a day.This is the first social media case to reach a verdict. Behind it sit more than 1,600 lawsuits waiting for exactly this signal.A separate jury in Los Angeles is still deliberating over whether Meta and YouTube designed addictive platforms that harmed a young woman’s mental health. That verdict could come any day.I’ve been covering both cases — including an on-the-record interview with New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez, who brought the suit. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comTwo juries are deliberating right now over something that could reshape how American justice works.In Los Angeles, jurors have been at it for over a week, deciding whether Meta and YouTube are liable for designing platforms that addicted a young woman starting at age six. In Santa Fe, closing arguments just wrapped in a case accusing Meta of enabling se…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comThe White House handed Congress its long-awaited AI legislative framework today, and I’ll be honest with you: I went surfing this morning because I felt confident I knew what was going to be in it. Everything we’ve watched David Sacks and the administration signal since December’s executive order pointed here — to a document that promises a “national st…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comVal Kilmer died in 2025 — but he’s appearing in a new film anyway, resurrected by AI with his family’s blessing. The story of how it happened is surprisingly moving. The story of what it means for everyone who isn’t already famous is a lot darker.Matthew McConaughey told a room full of desperate drama students to “trademark themselves.” Ben Affleck just…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comThe overwhelming smell of gasoline hit me from the parking lot. It’s a horrific smell anyway — volatile organic compounds like propane, butane, pentane, hexane, ethane, and benzene vaporize as soon as they hit open air, which is part of what makes oil an efficient fuel — but it was the dissonance between my nose and the rest of my senses that made it doubly nightmarish. My eyes saw palm trees waving in the breeze. My skin felt the sharp wind coming off the cold Pacific water. My ears heard waves breaking against the shore. It was Memorial Day weekend, and I’d just pulled up to the beach in a rental car. My brain was softened and primed by the sights and sounds of a day on the beach. But this beautiful place, Refugio State Beach, near Santa Barbara, reeked of poison. I had a headache before I reached the sand.On May 19, 2015, a corroded underground pipeline — Line 901, owned by Plains All American Pipeline — ruptured along the Gaviota Coast in Santa Barbara County, releasing an estimated 142,800 gallons of crude oil onto one of the most ecologically sensitive stretches of the West Coast. The oil saturated the soil, flowed into a culvert crossing under Highway 101 and railroad tracks, and discharged directly into the Pacific Ocean at Refugio State Beach, injuring seagrasses, kelp, invertebrates, fish, birds, and marine mammals. I filed the above for Al Jazeera.Federal investigators later determined the rupture was caused by external corrosion that thinned the pipe wall, and that in-line inspections conducted in 2007, 2012, and early 2015 had underestimated corrosion depths by up to 40 percent at the failure site. At trial, testimony revealed that more than 100,000 gallons of crude oil were never recovered. The spill closed beaches, shut down fisheries, and drove tar balls as far south as Los Angeles County beaches. In September 2018, a Santa Barbara County jury found Plains guilty of a felony for failing to properly maintain its pipeline, along with eight misdemeanor charges including failing to timely notify emergency responders and killing marine mammals and protected seabirds. The judge imposed the maximum fine the law allowed — $3.3 million — but expressed doubt it was large enough to deter the company in the future. A $22.3 million federal settlement followed in 2020, funding a decade-long restoration effort that is still underway today.And yet, yesterday, March 16th, that same infrastructure started pumping oil again. According to The New York Times:The new owner of the pipeline, Sable Offshore, announced on Monday that it had resumed oil production on Saturday at the direction of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and after Mr. Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, which the Trump administration said superseded state laws…Sable Offshore, which is based in Texas, had been trying to restart the pipeline for more than a year but hadn’t been able to secure the required permits. State and local officials have said that Sable had not sufficiently repaired damage on the pipeline that led to the 2015 spill, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation had required the company to undergo an environmental review process.With its project stalled, Sable last year asked the Trump administration for help bypassing state regulations.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comA group of hackers has released a massive database from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Industry Partnership, and it reveals the full scope of the AI surveillance apparatus being assembled on American soil. Published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, the data exposes contracts for AI that predicts crime from 911 calls, airport systems th…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comAs I write this, closing arguments are underway in the California case against Meta and YouTube, one of two bellwether trials that could determine whether thousands of families can hold social media companies legally responsible for harms to children. New Mexico AG Raúl Torres’s case went to trial first, and his has a different and potentially sharper e…