The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube negligent in designing their platforms. The Globe's guest columnist Jamil Jivraj writes that they awarded $6 million (U.S.) to a young woman who testified that nearly continuous social-media use since childhood caused her depression, anxiety and a shattered sense of self-worth. A 2025 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association followed more than 4,000 children beginning at age 10 and found that what predicted harm from social media was not screen time alone. It was compulsive use: Feeling unable to stop, using platforms to escape and experiencing distress when away from them. Children with that pattern of use were two to three times as likely to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves by age 14. The study cannot prove cause and effect, but the association is significant. The risk is not in the hours. It is in the design. These platforms are built on intermittent reward. The unpredictability is the point. For adults, that is annoying. For adolescents, whose sense of self is still being built from the outside in, it is something closer to urgent. That is not a design flaw. It is a design choice.