Tech giants Meta and YouTube face a high-stakes trial over claims they hooked a generation of kids on social media, a case that could spark a digital reckoning.
The landmark trial, which kicked off Monday in Los Angeles, centers on claims the leaders at Instagram and YouTube didn’t just build apps — they built high-tech slot machines designed to hook the developing brains of children for profit.
At the heart of the case is a 19-year-old identified as “K.G.M.,” a young woman who claims the platforms fueled a downward spiral into depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts. In his two-hour-long opening statement, her lawyer, Mark Lanier, said the case he is making is as “easy as ABC,” according to the AP.
In this case, ABC stands for “addicting the brains of children.”
Lanier painted a picture of “two of the richest corporations in history” who “engineered addiction” in kids. In his opening, Lanier cited a plethora of internal memo’s, in particular one from Google in the early 2010’s that stated, “[the] goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction,” according to the LA Times.
“If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” echoed a memo from Meta in 2018.
To lock children into endless engagement, the defendants “engineered a feature that caters to a minor’s craving for social validation,” Lanier said, in regards to things like constant notifications and “like” buttons. These features prey on young victims, for whom “social validation is survival,” Lanier argued.
Before the defendant’s lawyers got up to speak, Lainer underscored one point for the jury: they will “try to blame the little girl and her parents for the trap they built.”
Both Meta and Google have blasted the allegations, painting them as over-reach rooted in personal trauma rather than platform culpability.
In statements ahead of the trial, Meta described its internal research as responsibly part of safety work and said critics singled-out memos to manufacture a villain narrative.
YouTube’s defense team told the court that it functions fundamentally differently from traditional social platforms and argued that any harms stem from user interactions–not from product design decisions. The defense also went further, stating the fate of Meta is “not tied together” with YouTube, according to the LA Times.
The trial is expected to run six to eight weeks, with testimony from tech execs still to come. Jurors will ultimately decide whether Instagram and YouTube are liable — not just for what users post on them — but for how the platforms themselves are engineered.
“All of our kids are on our shoulders,” Lori Schott, whose daughter took her life after struggling with social media addiction, told the LA Times. She said the companies “knew that their design tactics were harming young girls’ mental health, and they didn’t back off.”
This is Big Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment. If K.G.M. wins, the damages could ripple across the industry, setting a legal precedent for thousands of similar pending claims that argue these platforms fuel a mental health crisis by addicting youths for more advertising revenue.
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