LOS ANGELES (CNS) – Social media platforms Meta and Google-owned YouTube fostered addiction that harmed young users, a lawyer for a Northern California woman told a jury Monday as opening statements began in a landmark trial on the effects of social media on minors.
“This case is about two of the richest corporations in history who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier told the panel of 12 regular jurors and six alternates. “I’m going to show you evidence that these companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children, and they did it on purpose.”
Lanier argued the companies profited from the alleged addictions of their users.
The plaintiff, identified as K.G.M, alleges she suffered severe mental harm because she became hooked on the social media in her childhood.
The woman previously reached a settlement with Snapchat and TikTok. The case is taking place before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl .
Industry observers have said the trial is being closely watched as a test case for hundreds of similar pending lawsuits. The cases all generally allege various damages from what attorneys call addictive social media platforms powered by “complex algorithms designed to exploit human psychology.”
“In recent years, there has been growing concern about the impact of digital technologies, particularly social media, on the mental health and wellbeing of adolescents,” one of the hundreds of L.A. lawsuits contends.
“Many researchers argue that defendants’ social media products facilitate cyberbullying, contribute to obesity and eating disorders, instigate sleep deprivation to achieve around-the-clock platform engagement, encourage children to negatively compare themselves to others, and develop a broad discontentment for life. They have been connected to depression, anxiety, self- harm, and ultimately suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and completed suicide,” the suit continues.
According to her suit brought in July 2023, K.G.M. began using social media at age 10. Her mother did not want her using the social media and tried using third party software to prevent her daughter’s use, but the companies design their products in a manner that allow children to avoid parental consent and K.G.M. did just that, the suit stated.
Prompted by the addictive design of the Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok products, and the constant notifications that Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok began pushing to her 24 hours daily, K.G.M. developed a nonstop compulsion to engage with the products, the suit alleged.
She did not know that each company made programming decisions aimed at targeting K.G.M., the suit states. For example, Meta and Snap’s AI user recommendation and connection tools facilitated and created connections between minor plaintiff K.G.M. and complete strangers, including predatory adults and others she did not know in real life and would not have met but for the seemingly random connections these companies made, the suit further stated.
Meta’s and TikTok’s product designs also targeted K.G.M. with harmful and depressive content, urging K.G.M. to commit acts of self-harm, as well as harmful social comparison and body image, the suit stated.
“These are connections and content K.G.M. did not seek out or even want to see; instead, these are the types of harms defendants aimed at her in their efforts to prevent her from looking away at any cost,” the suit alleged.
At one point, K.G.M. suffered bullying and sextortion via the Instagram product, and she and her mother never could determine whether the abuser was someone who knew K.G.M. in real life or if it was a random stranger to whom Instagram connected her, the suit stated.
“In fact, it took K.G.M.’s friends and family spamming and asking other Instagram users to report the persons targeting minor K.G.M. for a two- week period before Meta did anything about the abuses, violation of terms and illegal conduct of which it, by then, had full knowledge,” the complaint stated.
The more K.G.M. accessed the companies’ products, the worse her mental health became, the suit alleged.
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