A 20-year-old woman who claims she’s been addicted to social media for more than a decade made a brief appearance Monday before the jury that will decide whether Instagram and YouTube exploited her for profit.
She was introduced simply as Kaley, and within 30 seconds she was gone from the courtroom. Her lawyer, Mark Lanier, told jurors that in her fragile state, she needs to be spared from hearing advocates and experts dissect and debate her mental health struggles over the next several weeks.
This week is the kickoff of a landmark trial in Los Angeles at which Instagram owner Meta Platforms Inc. and YouTube parent Google will answer to Kaley’s allegations that they designed their products to hook kids and turn them into lucrative customers.
The trial will serve as a critical test for thousands of similar lawsuits that target not only Meta and Google, but also TikTok Inc. and Snap Inc. The latter two companies aren’t participating in the first trial because they reached confidential settlements with Kaley’s lawyers at the Social Media Victims Law Center in Seattle.
Lanier accused the platforms of “building machines designed to addict the brains of children” by introducing features that keep them constantly engaged, including one that allows users to swipe endlessly on their screens and never run out of new content.
“Imagine a slot machine that fits into your pocket,” he said during his two-hour opening statement. “It doesn’t require you to read or type, it only requires one physical motion. For a child like Kaley, this motion is the handle of a slot machine. Every time she swipes, she’s gambling. Not for money, but for mental stimulation.”
Paul Schmidt, an attorney representing Meta, said there’s no dispute that Kaley suffered psychological distress and sought treatment to recover. But he argued that the sources of her trauma came from family turmoil, physical and verbal abuse and bullying at school.
“If you took Instagram away, and everything else was the same in Kaley’s life, would her life be completely different or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?” Schmidt said.
Google’s lawyer is scheduled to give an opening statement early Tuesday to the jury of six women and six men.
The companies vehemently deny wrongdoing and say they have rolled out tools and resources to support parents with teens. But if they lose early trials, they will face pressure to change the way minors interact with social media and reach settlements with other plaintiffs that could total billions of dollars — a scenario that could be akin to the deals that tarnished the tobacco and opioid industries.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri is expected to testify in the days ahead, as is Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube boss Neal Mohan. Jurors also will hear from dueling expert witnesses in child psychology and related research fields.
Kaley is identified in court filings as K.G.M. rather than her full name because she was a minor throughout much of the period described in her lawsuit, which alleges that her nonstop use of social media caused her anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.
Lanier told jurors that in a quest to make “trillions of dollars,” the companies intentionally engineered the platforms to “trap” children by stimulating their developing brains to crave rewards.
“They use the science of the human brain and my experts will liken it to building a Trojan horse,” Lanier said as he showed the jury slides displaying the companies’ internal documents. “YouTube and Google will tell you they are just a streaming service, a digital library. Harmless. But that’s not what the evidence shows.”
Lanier said he plans to call Kaley as a witness, along with her sister and mother, but won’t make her listen to other testimony.
“Kaley is now easily overwhelmed, and the part of her mind that filters out noise and stress — it was devastated by the defendants’ machine,” he said. “To ask her to sit here for weeks and listen to people talk about her descent would be like asking someone with a broken leg to run a marathon.”
Schmidt countered that social media is often beneficial to young people — and has been so for Kaley. When lawyers asked about her social media habits, she said spending time on her phone was a coping mechanism, one that allowed her to “avoid everything.”
She also described social media as a creative outlet, and acknowledged that it provided her with a way to communicate about her feelings, according to Schmidt.
He said K.G.M. told company lawyers she was still actively using Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and that she hoped to find a job that would allow her to pursue her passion for editing videos.
Schmidt said medical records show K.G.M. had been through more than 260 mental health treatment sessions and that she didn’t spend that time talking about social media addiction.
“You’ll not see more than twenty of those records that even reference social media, good or bad,” Schmidt told the jury. “You’ll see ones that reference other things going on.”
Critics of social media have long held that it can have a negative impact on mental health, especially among young people. Australia late last year banned social media for kids under 16 years old, and several other European countries are considering similar restrictions.
Some of Meta’s own research, which was made public by an employee-turned-whistleblower in 2021, found that the company struggled to rein in misinformation, and that its Instagram platform could have negative effects on teens, especially girls.
Meta has since made several changes to how young people can access its services, most notably creating so-called teen accounts that include some content limitations and parental oversight.
Schmidt highlighted some of those efforts during his arguments, walking the jury through features that limit user time on apps and respond to problematic usage.
YouTube spokesman José Castañeda said before the trial that the allegations in the litigation are “simply not true.”
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said in a statement. “In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”
Top photo: Social media networking apps. Bloomberg.
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