New Delhi, April 6 -- A Los Angeles jury recently found that Meta and YouTube deliberately created addictive products to harm children. The trial, which was watched closely by Jeffrey Stephen Wigand, a biochemist who acted as a whistleblower in the tobacco industry's landmark trials in the 1990s. To him, the social media trial seemed eerily familiar, sharing parallels with the trials faced by the tobacco companies who targeted children in the 1990s to use their products.

In an interview with The Guardian, Wigand said his first thought when he learned about the trial in California was that social media companies were using their advertisements were trying to get children addicted, much like the big tobacco companies he exposed.

"I looked...