ALEX BRUMMER: The humiliation of the tech titans is here... and the financial consequences for us all could be unimaginable
Figure this out. On the very same day that Instagram and Facebook-owner Meta and YouTube parent Google were found guilty of damaging the mental health of young people through the addictive design of their social media sites, chieftains from the same Silicon Valley giants were being garlanded on both sides of the Atlantic.
Here, Google's former European boss Matt Brittin was unveiled as director general of the world's self-anointed most-trusted broadcaster, the BBC.
In Washington, Meta boss and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg was appointed to President Trump's new science and technology expert panel, which is packed with tech pioneers.
The bending of the knee by world governments, political leaders such as Trump and Keir Starmer, and now the BBC, to the grotesque power of the social media barons is nothing short of disgraceful.
Despite all the claims of innocence, the California courts have found social media giants guilty of manipulating their young customers into a state of addiction which is hugely harmful to their mental health and well-being.
Wednesday's ruling brings, at last, a glimmer of hope that the tech behemoths dominating so many minds, and so much global business, can finally be brought to heel.
No one should underestimate the importance of the moment.
Delivered by a jury in Los Angeles, the verdict was down to the enormous courage of a 20-year-old woman – known to the court as 'Kaley' – who said she'd been driven to depression and then to near suicide by social media.
Meta boss and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has been appointed to President Trump's new science and technology expert panel
Now, Silicon Valley faces a torrent of similar legal actions reminiscent of those which brought the tobacco industry to its knees last century. Kaley's case represents the merest tip of a legal iceberg.
Some 3,000 Californian litigants and their families who believe they too have been damaged by toxic material on social media platforms are taking action.
These challenges are set to spread beyond California to at least 20 American states, to the US federal courts and perhaps even to Britain.
Other social media firms are in the frame, too, including Snap, the parent of Snapchat, and ByteDance which owns TikTok. Thousands of US cases have been prepared against them, both state level and in the federal courts.
The claim against the tech firms is they deliberately designed their platforms to ensnare young people, harming them in the process. Only yesterday, Snapchat was hit with an EU probe over failure to prevent child grooming.
Campaigners hope this week's victory will take a meat cleaver to the tech titans' financial, political and even social hegemony over so many lives. Not that a lasting victory is in the bag.
Meta and Google say they will appeal the verdict.
America's complicated legal system – under which verdicts in state courts can be contested in federal courts, right up to the Supreme Court in Washington – means that super-rich companies can keep justice at bay for years.
Zuckerberg at the Los Angeles Superior Court at United States Court House last month, after a 20-year-old woman sued Meta and YouTube
The fines levied on Meta and Google, $6million (£4.5million) in total, are a mere pinprick for companies valued by Wall Street at $1.5trillion and $3.5trillion respectively.
It is striking that Apple was fined $14.4billion by the European Court of Justice for tax avoidance last year yet, undaunted, has seen its revenues continue to soar.
Apple's exponential growth, along with the rest of the Magnificent Seven (Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Google-owner Alphabet and Meta) have helped deliver huge prosperity to the United States and propped up a stuttering world economy beset by geopolitical strife.
Meta and Google are each spending $100 billion a year on new investments in, for example, data centres and artificial intelligence.
Yet, if the legal armour and political protection they have enjoyed really has been pierced, then it could be open season on Big Tech.
The new findings against Meta and Google have been hailed by critics of Big Tech as 'a Big Tobacco moment'.
Questions about the proven carcinogenic health effects of cigarettes were first raised back in 1954, but it was not until early this century that the full duplicity of the tobacco companies – dishonesty which led to millions of deaths around the world – was finally exposed.
They were found to have deliberately engineered cigarettes to be more addictive as the years progressed, increasing nicotine content and adding ammonia for faster brain absorption for example, changes which made it harder for smokers to quit.
Mark Lanier, lawyer for Kaley G.M., outside court after the jury found Meta and Google liable in a case accusing Meta and Google's YouTube of harming children's mental health through addictive social media platforms
There seem to be disturbing echoes now.
Evidence presented in the California case against Meta and Google demonstrated that the social media firms deployed attention-grabbing design features such as the 'infinite scroll', hooking young people into a doom loop of addiction.
Internal documents disclosed in the case showed that Meta had rolled back a temporary ban on so-called 'beauty filters', features which focus attention on the looks and body image of young women, despite the risk of harm to teenage girls.
Zuckerberg argued in court that he didn't want to limit their right to self-expression.
The stakes are not merely high but stratospheric.
That's why, fearful of losing their grip on the lives of young people – and the rest of us – the Magnificent Seven have been placing gargantuan bets on AI, arguing that all our futures depend upon it.
Four of the seven – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta – have outlined spending totalling $630billion on data centres and AI chips this year alone.
Yet the sheer difficulty in harnessing AI and its socially disruptive power have been demonstrated by the recent failure of OpenAI's experiment with the Sora app. This is the 'brainrot' or 'slop' of internet lore.
Shooting to the top of the popularity tables, Sora allowed users to generate bizarre short videos featuring dogs driving cars, for example, or animated figures from the past such as the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
Yet it soon veered out of control, allowing the creation of vile sexual content, terrorist propaganda, and material depicting self-harm. Policing the content turned out to be a nightmare and, after six months, the app was quietly shut down.
It's yet another indication that funnelling so much money into a technology still in its infancy is a huge financial gamble, particularly at a time when the morality of the industry is in question.
If this week's verdict is upheld on appeal, I am confident the floodgates will open – that the tech firms will have to devote vast resources in compensation to the victims.
Governments around the world will feel empowered to challenge the monopoly power of Silicon Valley and its control of the web, quite aside from the social harms.
Yet there is a bigger financial threat – created by our addiction to the future profits these companies promise.
Western investors made vast bets on AI which, if the tech firms start to founder, could be the trigger for a staggering loss of market value, power, and influence.
Anyone with savings or a pension is bound to suffer, so inextricably intertwined is tech with world financial markets.
Cutting the tech bros down to size is vital – but could come at quite a cost.
