The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday, Oct. 23, edition that lawsuits against Meta and Microsoft's YouTube are increasing as courts hold these tech giants accountable for their addictive designs. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe reports that for years, Congress struggled to regulate their rapid growth, but now, a new regulatory landscape is pushing back on their product designs and advertising models. A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a record $25-billion (U.S.) for consumer privacy abuses, criticizing the company for deceiving users and allowing their data to be harvested by Cambridge Analytica. "Facebook's misrepresentations about users' control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model," wrote Judge Francis J. Mathew. The decision reflects a reckoning for tech giants whose success has relied on capturing user attention and data. Recent trials and court rulings have revealed many allegations of deceptive and harmful business practices that fueled the companies' growth. Stanford University's Nora Engstrom notes that courts, not Congress, are driving accountability and change in social media regulation.