Yesterday, a California jury made history.

Meta and YouTube were found liable on all counts — negligent in the design of their platforms, aware of the dangers, and responsible for causing real harm to a young woman whose mental health was deliberately exploited for engagement.

I’ve been sitting with that word. Deliberately.

Because the internal documents showed it plainly: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” Eleven-year-olds were four times as likely to return to Instagram than to competing apps, and the company knew it.

They didn’t stumble into addiction. They engineered it.

I’m not writing about tech policy. I’m writing because this verdict points at something we don’t talk about enough in the world of work:

Humans will fill the need for connection however they can. And if we don’t build organizations that genuinely provide it — someone else will. Usually for profit. Usually at cost.

This is what I mean when I say organizations need to be fit for human life. Not ping-pong tables. Not Slack channels. Not surface “culture.”

Do people here actually belong to something real? Are they seen? Do they matter, not just for their output, but for who they are?

When the answer is no (when work is transactional, leadership is absent, and teams operate like loosely affiliated strangers) people don’t just tolerate the emptiness. They fill it.

The algorithm was designed to exploit that hunger. It didn’t create the hunger.

Kaley’s therapist testified that social media and her sense of self “were closely related” ... that activity on the platforms could “make or break her mood.”

That sentence breaks my heart. Not because it’s shocking. Because it isn’t.

We are wired for belonging. It is not a nice-to-have. It is a survival need. When people can’t find it in their families, schools, workplaces, or communities — they find something that simulates it. The scroll. The like. The dopamine tap on the shoulder.

It’s not connection. But it wears connection’s clothing.

The verdict against Meta and YouTube matters. I hope it’s just the beginning.

But accountability from a courtroom won’t fix the underlying hunger. That’s our work, yours and mine. Leaders, managers, founders, anyone who touches human systems. We have to build organizations where people experience something the algorithm can’t replicate:

The feeling of being actually known. Of mattering to other humans who see them, not a metric.

That’s not soft. That’s the whole thing.

Moe

P.S. If you’re wondering what it actually looks like to build a human system inside a real organization — one that creates belonging without engineering dependency — that’s exactly what we’re doing inside the Human Systems Guild. Founding cohort opens April 14. Come see.