The social media addiction verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico aren’t just legal milestones — they’re the first time a jury has been allowed to see what these companies knew and when they knew it. The internal documents revealed in discovery are doing something no regulator, economist, or congressional hearing has managed to do: they’re letting us read the company’s own definition of harm, written in the company’s own words, before anyone forced them to write it. And in my view, whatever First Amendment complications and cultural battles we have to sort through, we are much better for seeing the world as these companies see it. That’s the whole game.

More cases are coming, more documents will surface, and each one is going to chip away at the industry’s core public defense — that addiction is a user problem, not a design problem. When it becomes clear just how thoroughly companies understand the line between healthy and unhealthy use of their products, regulators can simply demand access to the dashboard companies already have. The fight ahead isn’t about whether companies knew where the line was. It’s about how we’ll use that knowledge to protect autonomy and agency when it’s under threat.