The first jury trial into the potential harms of social media concluded Thursday. Lawyers for Meta and YouTube have argued that their platforms are safe for the vast majority of young people, while lawyers for a young woman at the center of the case say that technology companies have designed their products to be addictive, causing mental health problems in children and teenagers.
The six-week trial has seen a parade of high-profile witnesses, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, and YouTube vice president of engineering Cristos Goodrow. Jurors also heard testimony from the lead plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who goes by KGM, her therapist and expert witnesses on social media and addiction.
If the jury rules in favor of KGM, social media companies could face harsh financial penalties, which plaintiffs’ attorneys hope will lead them to change fundamental aspects of how their platforms operate. In this case, the burden of proof falls on the plaintiffs. The jury would need to find negligence and causation on the part of YouTube and Meta before damages could be imposed, so the outcome of the trial could take several different forms. Deliberations will begin on Friday.
KGM said he got hooked on YouTube at six and Instagram at nine. By the time he was 10, he said, he had become depressed and was self-harming as a result. The cycle of social media use caused strained relationships with his family and at school, he testified. He said he had suicidal thoughts and started cutting as a “coping mechanism to deal with my depression.” When he was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed him with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, which KGM attributes to his use of Instagram and YouTube.
KGM lawyers say their experience is emblematic of what tens of thousands of young people have faced on social media and in their offline lives.
Meta and YouTube deny wrongdoing. A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, called the allegations in the lawsuits “simply false” and said that providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been fundamental to our work.”
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that KGM’s mental health problems were caused by a difficult family life, a key argument in the company’s case, saying she “has faced profound challenges and we continue to recognize all she has endured. However, the jury’s only task is to decide whether those struggles would have existed without Instagram.”
This lawsuit is the first in a consolidated group of cases filed against Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snap on behalf of more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including more than 350 families and 250 school districts. The KGM case was also the first of more than 20 “benchmark” trials, which are scheduled to come to court over the next two years and are used to gauge jurors’ reactions as well as set legal precedent. TikTok and Snap settled the KGM case just before the trial.
Online safety advocates, parents and plaintiff attorneys say no matter how the jury decides, they have already won.
“Four years ago, when we started suing social media companies, no one thought we would get to this point,” said Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and an attorney representing the plaintiffs. “Whether you win or lose the outcome of this trial, victims in America have won, because we now know that social media companies can and will be held accountable before a fair and impartial jury.”
What was revealed during the trial
KGM’s lawyers allege that some of the features social media companies have built into their platforms, such as an infinitely scrollable feed and auto-playing videos, are designed to keep people on the apps and create their addictive quality. Lawyers also allege that “Like” buttons feed teens’ desire for validation and that features like beauty filters can distort young people’s self-image.
During the KGM trial, a trove of previously sealed documents came to light showing that some Instagram and YouTube employees found the platforms addictive or ineffective in their efforts to protect the well-being of young people.
An internal YouTube document from 2021 asks the question: “How do we measure well-being?” and adds the answer: “We are not.” Another document details how children under 13 are the world’s fastest-growing Internet audience and presents the opportunity for YouTube to act as a digital babysitter for children as young as eight. One document says: “(The) goal is not the audience, it is the viewer’s addiction.”
Meta documents show that some employees questioned the company’s leadership in targeting young audiences. In a 2017 email, an employee writes to a colleague: “Oh, well, now we’re going after kids under 13?”
The colleague responds, “zuck’s been talking about that for a while,” prompting the first employee to say, “yeah, it was gross the last time he mentioned it.”
A separate email conversation between Meta employees in 2020 shows one person saying, “OMG, IG is dope.” A colleague responds: “Haha, I mean, all social media. We’re basically dealers.”
The dialogue continues, with employees comparing the appeal of social media to a game of chance in which “reward tolerance” increases so much that people “can no longer feel the reward.” The conversation concludes with an employee saying, “It’s a little scary.”
During the trial, lawyers for Meta and YouTube denied that their platforms were addictive. YouTube’s lawyer pointed to parental controls and internal statistics that showed that a person’s average use of the video streaming platform typically lasts less than 30 minutes a day.
Meta focused his arguments on KGM and his therapist’s testimony, saying his problems had little to do with social media. Lawyers said KGM’s mother became embarrassed and yelled at him, claiming the verbal abuse led to the young woman’s mental health problems. KGM still lives with his mother, who was present throughout the trial.
“His records show significant emotional and physical abuse, academic struggles and psychiatric conditions, apart from his social media use,” a Meta spokesperson said. “The evidence simply does not support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”
Meta also objected to the idea of addiction and said KGM never received that official diagnosis. When Mosseri took the stand, he went further by rejecting the science behind social media addiction, denying that users could be “clinically addicted.” Psychologists do not classify social media addiction as an official diagnosis, but researchers have documented the harmful consequences of compulsive use among young people.
KGM lawyers’ arguments mirror those made against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, which focused on the addictive qualities of cigarettes and the companies publicly denied it for decades, even knowing the harms of their products. Online safety advocates and parents say Meta has refused to analyze its effect on young people and has instead used a “blaming the victim” tactic.
“They’re really following the Big Tobacco playbook. Blame the victim, blame the parents, blame the child, blame anyone but the products they designed,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, which has been involved in the plaintiffs’ advocacy work.
“These are the most profitable corporations in the history of the world. And they could make these changes if they wanted to. But instead of doing so, they attack the victims.”
