LOS ANGELES — In closing arguments for the first social media addiction trial to make tech giants face a jury, the plaintiff's lawyer lambasted social platforms for profiting from users' attention, likening their features to a Trojan horse.
The plaintiff, identified in Los Angeles County Superior Court as Kaley and in documents by her initials, K.G.M., is at the center of a bellwether case that could set a legal precedent for whether social media platforms are responsible for causing mental health issues in children.
Her lawsuit accuses social media companies of deliberately designing their platforms to be more addictive to children for profit. K.G.M., who was a minor at the time of the incidents outlined in her lawsuit, testified last month that her nearly nonstop use of social media “really affected [her] self-worth.”
“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That's called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones," K.G.M.'s lawyer Mark Lanier said in court Thursday. "These are Trojan horses: They look wonderful and great ... but you invite them in and they take over."
Lanier compared Instagram's endless scroll and YouTube's autoplay to free tortilla chips at a restaurant that patrons can mindlessly snack on. He said engagement metrics and notifications keep users hooked, adding that teenagers especially struggle to regulate their use because they crave social approval and lack the resolve an adult might have.
He said vulnerable users are especially susceptible to problematic use, including people who come from difficult home lives, such as K.G.M. He pointed to the “eggshell plaintiff" doctrine, which holds defendants liable for harm caused to plaintiffs even if their pre-existing conditions aggravated the injuries.
"How did they become such behemoths?" he said of the biggest platforms. "It’s the attention economy. They’re making money off capturing your attention. ... Every second [K.G.M.] spends on YouTube or Instagram is a second they can sell to an advertiser."
A landmark trial
K.G.M.’s trial is the first in a consolidated group of cases brought against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap by more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and over 250 school districts. The plaintiffs accuse the tech companies of knowingly designing addictive products harmful to young users’ mental health.
Social media platforms have historically been shielded by Section 230, a provision added to the Communications Act of 1934 that says internet companies aren’t liable for the content users post. TikTok and Snap reached settlements with K.G.M. before the trial, but they remain defendants in a series of similar lawsuits expected to go to trial this year.
If the jury’s verdict favors K.G.M., the companies could face damages to be determined by the jury. That could set the tone for whether they choose to fight or settle the oncoming cases.
In Thursday’s closing statements, lawyers for Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube denied that their apps are purposefully harmful and addictive for young users.
Meta pushes back
Meta, in particular, has pushed back against claims that K.G.M.’s mental health challenges as a child were a result of social media platforms' designs.
Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt pointed to her history of conflict with her mother. He showed jurors a video recording, which was also shared during K.G.M.’s testimony, that appeared to play audio of her mother yelling and cursing at her.
“When she was a child, teenager, young adult, she secretly made recordings of her mum yelling at her ... so she would be able to prove one day that's what she went through,” Schmidt said. “I don't think it’s possible to hear those recordings and think: ‘Gosh, this is normal tension. Gosh, she’s dramatizing this.’”
He added that K.G.M. today is “enjoying college, getting As and Bs, putting boundaries around her family relationships,” and that she has “addressed these things that are causing her such distress.”
A spokesperson for Meta said the plaintiff "faced profound challenges" for which "not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause."
"Her records show significant emotional and physical abuse, academic struggles and psychiatric conditions, separate from her social media usage. The witnesses hired by her lawyer admitted that social media has benefitted Kaley, and she used it as an outlet to cope with the difficult circumstances at home," the spokesperson said. "The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”
But during her testimony last month, K.G.M. disputed complaints she made about her mother when she was younger, telling jurors that her mother "wasn't perfect, but she was trying her best."
"Everyone makes mistakes," she said. "I don't think I would call it abuse or neglect or anything like that."
K.G.M. had also said in her testimony that she frequently used Instagram’s beauty filters in a way that negatively affected her self-confidence. (When she was pressed about the filters during his testimony last month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform had decided to prohibit “effects promoting plastic surgery.”)
YouTube's closing statements
In YouTube's closing argument Thursday, lawyer Luis Li said there "isn't a single mention of an addiction to YouTube" in K.G.M.'s medical records, except one in which her former therapist Alison Pratt shared that she had used YouTube videos to help her sleep at night.
He disputed parallels comparing YouTube's addictiveness to that of drugs, noting that K.G.M. said in her testimony that she lost interest in YouTube as she grew older.
"Ask whether anybody suffering from addiction could just say, 'Yeah, I kinda lost interest,'" Li told jurors. "What’s your common sense tell you about that?"
Lanier, K.G.M.'s lawyer, said in his final rebuttal that he's accusing social platforms not of being motivated to hurt teens, but rather of being motivated to make money off of them.
"It wasn't 'Lets go out and hurt [K.G.M.],'" he said. "It was 'We’re going to be hurting kids, and we’re going to be making money.'"
As K.G.M.'s case nears its conclusion, Matt Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center — which is representing about 750 plaintiffs in the California proceeding and about 500 in the federal proceeding — told reporters Wednesday that simply taking the case to trial was a win in itself.
"Win or lose the outcome of this trial, victims in the United States have won because now we know that social media companies can and will be held accountable before a fair and impartial jury," Bergman said. "And in some cases plaintiffs will prevail, and in some they may not, but we are just gratified for the opportunity to get this far, and there will be many more trials in the future."
