In what could be the beginning of social media’s Big Tobacco moment, Instagram’s owner just failed to beat the “you’re-harming-your-users” allegations, twice: Yesterday, Meta and Google’s YouTube lost a landmark social media addiction trial in California, one day after Meta lost a separate child safety case in New Mexico.

In California, Meta and YouTube were accused of designing their apps to be addictive through features like infinite scroll:

• The jury found them negligent for running platforms that harmed adolescents and failing to warn the public about this danger.
• Meta and YouTube are ordered to pay $4.2 million and $1.8 million, respectively, to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child, which intensified her depression and other mental health struggles.

Meta said it “respectfully” disagreed with the decision and would appeal, a move YouTube also plans to make.

This was a bellwether case, meaning it tested the waters for thousands of similar lawsuits in the pipeline. Social media giants may now feel less confident about their chances in court, especially because Section 230—a legal rule that says platforms aren’t responsible for harmful content users post on their sites—didn’t protect them from liability this time. Plaintiffs (and prosecutors) are loopholing the loophole by focusing on platform design rather than content.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico…

On Tuesday, a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect its young users from sexually explicit content, trafficking, and other online dangers.

The case followed a Chris-Hansen-like operation in which state investigators set up decoy accounts of minors, which they said were overwhelmed with solicitations from predators.

Meta plans to appeal that decision, too.

More state and federal trials are coming this year, including one from school districts and parents nationwide who accuse Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of harming youth mental health.—ML

Iran rejects US proposal to end the war. Iran dismissed the Trump administration’s 15-point ceasefire plan, which Pakistani officials told the Associated Press involved the rollback of US sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, Iran countered with its own five-point proposal, CNBC reported, citing state media. Its demands reportedly include reparations and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz—a condition that would likely be unacceptable to the US.

SCOTUS says internet provider not liable for music piracy. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that Cox Communications could not be held liable for its users’ music piracy in a case that at one point involved a $1 billion judgment against the internet provider. “A company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s decision. A ruling against Cox might have upended the internet as we know it, but instead, providers got new protections as long as they aren’t encouraging illegal activity.

Stephen Colbert to co-write Lord of the Rings movie. To mark the anniversary of the destruction of the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, a new piece of LOTR lore dropped. A noted Tolkien fan, Colbert, along with his son and a writer from previous films in the series, will pen The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, which is currently in development with Warner Bros. The comedian hasn’t developed a major film before, but he should have some time to spend in Middle-earth after The Late Show, which has been canceled, ends in May.—AR

Get ready to learn coffee and desert air, buddies. The NBA’s board of governors voted unanimously yesterday to begin the vetting process to add a 31st and 32nd franchise in Las Vegas and Seattle, respectively, for the 2028-29 season.

The franchise entrance fee is just a bit more than what you paid to join your rec league: ESPN reports that the new clubs will be expected to pay the NBA $7 billion to $10 billion for the privilege of having Charles Barkley make fun of them. However, the announcement comes at an inopportune time:

• While next year’s salary cap will reportedly rise by $10 million, that’s still about $1 million lower than projections, due to a decline in local media revenue.
• The tanking problem, aka intentionally losing or fielding bad teams in order to get better draft picks, is worse than usual (see: whatever the Brooklyn Nets did here). And expansion teams historically struggle at first, which could make tanking an even bigger issue.

But that depends on the NBA’s expansion draft rules. The NHL tweaked its system to benefit its recent Vegas and Seattle expansion teams: Vegas went to the Stanley Cup Final in year one, while Seattle made the playoffs in year two.

Zoom out: Despite rampant tanking and a $1 million shortfall, the NBA will survive. Overall viewership was up through last month’s All-Star break.—DL

A TikTok account churning out AI parodies of Love Island starring fruit (creatively named Fruit Love Island) to 3.3 million followers has been removed from the platform. Just when Kiwilo and Mangella were starting to crack on…

The TikTok channel ai.cinema021 started earlier this month and skyrocketed to viral success:

• It snagged millions of views with sub-two-minute episodes in which budget-Pixar anthropomorphized fruits flirted in poorly synced audio and traversed through nonsensical storylines.
• Fans then started making parody videos (of the parodies) with real fruit, and celebrities like Zara Larson posted about watching the chaotic mini-sodes. (Larson took her posts down after fans criticized her.)

As of yesterday, the channel no longer exists, but copycats and compilations have popped up on TikTok and YouTube.

Fine-tuning the slop machines. Fruit Love Island wasn’t the first time a strawberry started talking. AI-animated food videos have been flooding social platforms lately. (And they seemingly tell similar stories about fruit wives cheating on their fruit husbands?) They can largely be traced back to Object Talk, a customized permutation of ChatGPT, according to Intelligencer. The company behind the program offers tutorials on how to make what it refers to on its own website as “AI Slop.”—MM

You know who’s not mad about the airport security lines being so long you’d think there’s a viral hybrid pastry at the front? The company that makes money off people paying to avoid the lines. The Wall Street Journal reports:

• The Clear app has been downloaded 289,000 times since the beginning of the month, when TSA agents began calling in sick while not getting paid due to the partial government shutdown over funding for ICE. It has resulted in longer airport queues—and more than 3x the downloads from a year ago, per Sensor Tower data.
• Clear’s stock has risen about 60% over the past month.

If Clear is the winner of the shutdown, who’s the loser? Likely anyone trying to get on a plane at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport, where security lines have stretched up to four hours. On Tuesday, ~40% of its security staff didn’t come to work, representing the highest absence rate in the country. The culprit is likely the fact that most TSA workers there have long commutes, making it expensive for them to come with rising gas prices and no paychecks, according to the New York Times. The Senate is working on a potential deal to restore TSA funding, but it lacks President Trump’s support.—AR