Civil Liability For Social Media Addiction: Can Big Tech Be Held Liable Under Brazilian Law?

On March 25, in Los Angeles, California, a twelve-member jury delivered a verdict with the potential to reshape the civil liability framework applicable to digital platforms and social media companies.

The case, K.G.M. v Meta et al., was brought by a young woman, now 22 years old, who reportedly began using social media during adolescence, eventually developing a pattern of compulsive use that reached up to 16 hours of daily screen time. According to her account, this pattern of excessive use was a direct consequence of the design features and mechanisms embedded in the platforms by these companies, including infinite scrolling, video autoplay, constant notifications, and algorithmic systems allegedly engineered to create dependency, particularly in minors, without adequate warnings about the associated risks.

As a direct result of exposure to these mechanisms, the plaintiff developed a pattern of social media dependency with significant repercussions on her health, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and body dysmorphia, along with other substantial impairments to her mental well-being.

After more than 40 hours of deliberation over nine days, the jury reached its verdict: Meta and Google were held liable for the addictive effects associated with the use of their platforms. The jury found that both companies had designed and operated digital environments with structural features aimed at inducing compulsive use, despite being aware of the risks to the mental health of young users, without adopting adequate alert, containment, or mitigation mechanisms. In terms of damages, the jury awarded US$3 million in compensatory damages for the harm suffered by the plaintiff, with liability allocated at 70% to Meta (approximately US$2.1 million) and 30% to Google/YouTube (approximately US$900,000). Additionally, the jury imposed US$3 million in punitive damages, divided in the same proportion, as a sanction for the companies' conduct.

Notwithstanding the particularities of the American legal system, the central legal issue in this case is substantially different from the traditional controversy surrounding Big Tech civil liability, which, for years, revolved around the existence, or absence, of platform liability for content posted by users. In K.G.M. v. Meta et al., the axis of the dispute shifted away from user conduct and focused squarely on the conduct of the platforms themselves, specifically on an alleged "design defect" within their operational architecture.

This shift represents a significant inflection in the applicable legal framework. The analysis of potential liability departs from the fault-based logic typically seen in defamation, libel, and misinformation cases, and moves toward an objective analysis centered on the existence of a service defect. In practical terms, the discussion shifts from content to code: from what circulates on the platform to how the platform itself is designed to operate.

An interesting argument for the ongoing debate about the correctness of the still-provisional outcome in K.G.M. v. Meta et al. was presented by the plaintiff's attorneys, who drew a parallel between Big Tech's commercial strategy and the approach employed for years by the tobacco and opioid industries. Those industries possessed internal research and studies proving the addictive nature of the substances in their products yet failed to alert their consumers. The suggestion, therefore, is that digital platforms were similarly aware of the harmful effects of their algorithms on the self-image and mental health of adolescents, yet failed to take a proactive stance toward halting, or at least mitigating, the deleterious effects of their products and services on their consumer base.

With that necessary context established, the purpose of this article is to examine, on a preliminary basis, whether this line of reasoning would find, within the Brazilian legal system, a regulatory environment particularly favorable to its reception, especially in light of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Code.

As a starting point, it should be noted that digital platforms qualify, from a legal standpoint, as suppliers of products and services, and the relationship they establish with their users is unequivocally consumerist in nature. The once-debated question of the apparent economic gratuity of these services has long been settled: the absence of a fee for social media use does not preclude this classification, given the existence of a clear indirect consideration in the form of personal data collection, exploitation, and monetization through targeted advertising. This understanding is already well established in Brazilian case law, which has nearly unanimously recognized the applicability of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Code to the relationships between users and digital platforms.

Along these lines, under Article 14 of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Code, a service provider is liable, regardless of fault, for damages caused to consumers by defects in the provision of services. The concept of "defect" under the Code is intrinsically tied to the safety that a consumer may legitimately expect. When a social media platform is designed with mechanisms that induce addiction, it fails to provide the expected level of safety, especially when the target audience includes children and adolescents, who enjoy full protection and absolute priority under both the Federal Constitution and the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA).

In this context, the enterprise risk doctrine, already consolidated in Brazilian law, becomes particularly relevant. According to this doctrine, whoever derives economic benefit from a given activity must bear the resulting burdens. Transposed to the digital environment, this entails recognizing that business models based on engagement maximization, even though potentially harmful mechanisms, may, in principle, trigger strict liability of platforms for the resulting damages.

Accordingly, if Big Tech's business model is premised on the attention economy, pursued through extreme engagement and extended usage time, then the harms arising from such engagement, which may manifest as pathological anxiety and depression, can be characterized as inherent business risks and, therefore, give rise to platform liability for the damages caused to consumers.

In addition to the potential violation of Article 14 of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Code, the algorithmic opacity demonstrated in the American case may also be characterized as a direct breach of the duty to inform, as set forth in Article 6(III) of the Code. Under Brazilian law, consumers have the right to clear, adequate, and conspicuous information about the risks inherent to a service. In the context of social media, there is an evident informational deficit in this regard, resulting from the platforms' trade secrets. If there is no transparency about how recommendation algorithms operate, what criteria guide content curation, or what the potential psychological impacts of prolonged use of certain features may be, there is, arguably, a violation of the duty of transparency and information.

From these two perspectives, and in comparing the American Product Liability system with the Brazilian consumer protection framework, there are significant convergences in the pursuit of structural damage mitigation when assessing potential civil liability for consumer harm. Both systems have the capacity to treat algorithms, software, and their deleterious effects such as manufacturing, design, or warning defects, thereby establishing civil liability.

Nevertheless, while the Brazilian legal system tends to be more protective, given the mandatory and social nature of the Consumer Protection Code, which allows for the reversal of the burden of proof and establishes joint liability throughout the supply chain, it still reveals a conservative posture regarding the quantification of damages of this nature. To date, there are no relevant precedents in which Brazilian courts have awarded damages based directly on patterns of compulsive use associated with platform architecture, despite the normative foundation that would, in theory, support such a claim. Moreover, the directive set forth in Article 944 of the Civil Code, according to which compensation must be measured by the extent of the harm, contributes to an environment of dispersed litigation, marked by multiple individual claims of low economic value and modest damage awards. This landscape reduces the aggregate impact of judicial rulings and, consequently, weakens the deterrent potential of civil liability vis-a-vis Big Tech, in contrast with the American scenario.

The fact remains, therefore, that the potential "importation" of the reasoning outlined in K.G.M. v. Meta et al. to Brazil is unlikely to materialize in the short term. The consolidation of this thesis requires a process of doctrinal and institutional maturation, necessarily informed by interdisciplinary dialogue among law, psychology, psychiatry, and software engineering, lest it produce legally fragile or technically detached solutions. The very nature of the harm at issue constitutes a significant obstacle. It is a digital harm and, to a large extent, an immaterial one, characterized by its invisibility, cumulativeness, and diffuse manifestation over time. This profile challenges the traditional parameters for establishing causation and measuring the extent of harm, which, under the classical model, presuppose more clearly delineated, immediate, and empirically verifiable events.

In conclusion, notwithstanding the specificities of the Brazilian procedural system and its civil liability regime, which is oriented exclusively toward reparation of harm, it is possible to sustain that the national legal system, and particularly the Consumer Protection Code, has sufficient instruments to enable the reception, with the necessary adaptations, of the reasoning adopted by the Californian jurors. This is not, ultimately, a matter of normative innovation, but of the functional reinterpretation of established legal categories, now directed toward the analysis of structural risks inherent to the architecture of digital platforms, in a clear enhancement of the precautionary function of civil liability.

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