A California jury on Thursday heard from the young woman at the center of a closely watched trial over whether social media is built to hook kids. Now 20, the plaintiff identified as Kaley G.M. testified that starting to use YouTube at 6 and Instagram at 9 fed years of obsessive use, isolation, and mental health struggles, including anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. "If I wasn't on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something," she said, recalling one day as a teen when she spent 16 hours on Instagram and describing panic when her phone was taken away. She said she repeatedly bypassed parental controls, snuck out at night to find her phone, and still checks social media during Walmart shifts: "It's too hard to be without it." The woman's former therapist testified before her, and blamed social media for contributing to her patient's mental health issues, Reuters reports.
The suit—filed against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube—is the first of more than 3,000 similar cases to reach trial and is seen as a test of whether platforms can be held liable not for user content, but for allegedly addictive design features like push notifications and "like" counts. TikTok and Snapchat settled before trial. Meta has pushed back, with Instagram head Adam Mosseri saying the app isn't "clinically" addictive and Mark Zuckerberg testifying the company seeks to help users, not trap them, and no longer rewards teams for maximizing time spent on the social networks. He was also questioned about how much of his $231 billion fortune he earmarks for helping those hurt by social media, a question the New York Post notes he did not answer. The case could set a precedent for how far the law shields social media companies going forward.
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