April 3 (UPI) — For years, the digital world has largely been governed by self-regulation and corporate promises. That may now be changing.

A jury verdict delivered in Los Angeles on March 25 could matter far beyond the United States because it points toward a new approach to digital accountability.

Rather than focusing only on harmful content posted by users, the case centered on platform design and on whether those design choices contributed to serious psychological harm.

For more than a decade, I have argued in public forums and in print that digital society has been moving through two troubling processes. One is the erosion of ethical limits in environments marked by opacity and weak accountability. The other is the growing power of digital systems to influence behavior and attention without meaningful public oversight.

The California verdict gives those concerns a more concrete legal form.

Design, not content

According to reporting on the case, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable after a young woman known as Kaley argued that she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube at an early age and later suffered depression and suicidal thoughts.

The jury assigned 70% of the responsibility to Meta and 30% to Google. It then awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages. That second finding is especially important. It suggests the jury saw the harm not simply as an oversight, but as a foreseeable result of deliberate choices.

The legal importance of the ruling lies in where responsibility was placed. For years, major technology companies have argued that they should not be held liable for content created or uploaded by third parties, a position reinforced by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This case took a different path. It focused on product design, including the platform’s structure and the incentives built into it. Because the challenge targeted design rather than content, it moved around the liability shield that has long protected these companies.

If a platform is built to keep users online longer and take advantage of behavioral vulnerabilities, courts may increasingly ask whether the system itself should be treated as a source of harm.

Features such as endless scrolling, constant notifications, algorithmic amplification and behavior-based targeting are often presented as neutral tools meant to improve the user experience. In practice, they also serve commercial goals by keeping users engaged longer and generating more data.

The deeper legal question is whether design choices meant to increase dependency can remain shielded from accountability when the damage is foreseeable.

Beyond one lawsuit

The implications extend beyond one case. A day before the Los Angeles verdict, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding that the company had misled users about the safety of its platforms and enabled child sexual exploitation through its apps, in violation of that state’s consumer protection law.

That case arose from different facts, but together the two verdicts point in the same direction. Legal scrutiny of the technology sector is moving toward concrete questions of legal duty and design responsibility.

This does not mean that every digital platform should be viewed through an alarmist lens. Nor does it mean the legal outcomes are settled.

Meta and Google have said they will appeal the Los Angeles verdict, and the New Mexico judgment faces similar challenges. The legal boundaries will continue to evolve. Still, the old assumption of near-total immunity is beginning to weaken, and that shift matters even before the appeals are resolved.

Data, privacy and human freedom

The verdict should also matter in the wider debate over privacy and personal data. The business model of many digital platforms depends not only on attention but also on extensive data extraction.

The longer users remain engaged, the more information can be gathered and turned into profit. A legal finding that platform design intentionally increases dependency may therefore sharpen questions about how personal information is harvested and used.

That debate reaches well beyond advertising. It touches intimate areas of life, including health and behavior. In that sense, digital ethics is not simply about technology. It is also about human freedom and the boundary between persuasion and manipulation.

A wider regulatory shift

Governments already have begun to respond from different angles. The European Union’s AI Act entered into force in August 2024 and is being applied in stages, signaling that democratic societies are increasingly willing to create binding rules for high-risk technological systems.

In November, UNESCO member states adopted a global normative framework on the ethics of neurotechnology. Though nonbinding, it reflects growing international concern about mental privacy and informed consent in the face of intrusive technological intervention.

Chile has also been part of that broader conversation through its early emphasis on neuro-rights and legal protections tied to brain data and mental integrity. That does not make Chile the center of this global shift. It does, however, place the country within one of the most consequential emerging debates of our time.

The larger lesson is clear. Digital governance can no longer rest on the hope that companies will regulate themselves when the incentives to maximize engagement remain so strong.

Courts, lawmakers and international institutions are all moving toward a more serious framework of accountability.

The California verdict will not settle that debate on its own. But it may prove to be an early sign of a broader change, a world in which digital systems are judged not only by efficiency or profit, but also by their consequences for the human person.

That is a debate worth having now, before technology moves still further ahead of ethics and law.

Carlos Cantero is a Chilean academic at the International University of La Rioja in Spain and the author of Digital Society: Reason and Emotion. An international lecturer, adviser, and consultant, he focuses on adaptability in the digital society, ethics, social innovation, and human development. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.