On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that harmed a young user through addictive features, awarding $6 million in damages. Just one day earlier, a New Mexico jury had ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading consumers about platform safety and enabling child exploitation.
These verdicts, the first of their kind, signal that public perception of social media giants is shifting. For years, these companies operated with little oversight and were shielded by a cultural narrative that saw them as neutral utilities and as important actors for democratic communication.
However, that narrative is unraveling. As one of the plaintiff’s legal counsels said after the Los Angeles verdict, “accountability has arrived.”
Yet the legal verdicts shed light on something more fundamental than corporate negligence in individual cases. They expose the structural logic of an industry whose profits depend on capturing and monetizing human attention.
Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff described the situation a few years ago as “surveillance capitalism,” which can be understood as a dominant business model in which platforms collect behavioral data, develop predictions, and optimize systems to influence behavior in ways that generate profit for advertisers. The longer users remain engaged, the more advertisements they see, and the more valuable they become to advertisers.
Internal documents revealed during the trial showed that Meta executives knew that children with “adverse effects” were most likely to become addicted to content on their platforms, yet the company pursued strategies to attract young users because it is a valuable demographic from a revenue generation perspective.
In other words, the problem is not merely that harmful content reaches children. It is that the entire architecture of these platforms, which include features such infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications, is engineered to maximize time on site because attention is the commodity being sold.
Now, if we know that the business model behind these platforms is not only ethically questionable because of their effort to capture our attention at all costs but also harmful to vulnerable members of society, can we think of different financial models that allow for a different type of digital ecosystem?
For example, the Club of Rome’s Earth for All report proposes treating data and knowledge as commons, much like minerals or the atmosphere, and establishing “citizen funds” that charge corporations for extracting these shared resources and redistribute the revenue to citizens.
Other proposals, from global governance entities like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, include digital solidarity contributions modeled on climate finance mechanisms, debt-for-digital-rights swaps for low-income countries to help bridge the digital divide, and ethical investment models grounded in human rights framework.
These models would fundamentally reorder the relationship between platforms and the public, transforming users from raw material into stakeholders with claims on the value their participation in the digital ecosystem generates. And while none of these approaches are sufficient alone, and it’s unclear if there is enough political will to transform them into policy, they show that alternatives to the current extractive model are possible and urgent.
In this context, civil society currently has a rare opportunity to shape the logic of future financial models for digital technology. The 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20) and the implementation of the 2024 UN’s Global Digital Compact resulted in mandates for states and UN bodies like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) to assess global financing gaps.
This is a technical process that, as climate governance has shown, can decisively shape later political negotiations. These processes, while appearing abstract and bureaucratic, are key spaces where some of the rules of the digital future will be written.
WACC and its allies and partners around the world continue to engage strategically in these forums, contributing evidence, proposing alternative models, and inviting grassroots and voices from the global South to the table.
The Meta and Google verdicts have demonstrated that the attention economy can be challenged. The question now is whether we can build something better in its place: a digital future based not in extraction and addiction but in participation, equity, and the common good.
Photo: Phatsuke/Shutterstock