A jury says Meta and Google hurt a kid. What now?

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neilai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're talking about the landmark social media addiction trials that just resulted in two major verdicts against Meta and Google. There's one case in New Mexico against Meta, and another in California against both companies, who both have said they plan to appeal.

These are complicated cases with some huge repercussions for how these platforms work. and the very nature of speech in America. So to help us work through it all, I've brought on two heavy hitters. My friend Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the excellent newsletter Platformer and co-host of the Hardfork podcast, as well as Verge senior policy reporter Lord and Finer, who was actually in that Los Angeles courtroom where executives like Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in the case of a 20-year-old woman named Cayley, who successfully argued that Meta and Google negligently designed their platforms. In ways that contributed to her mental health issues.

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