CALIFORNIA: Facebook, Google and other tech giants for more than a decade have rejected allegations that they build products deliberately to get kids addicted to social media.
For the first time, company executives, including Meta Platforms Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, will answer to these accusations in front of a jury as part of a trial that kicked off Monday and which is drawing comparisons to Big Tobacco’s reckoning with consumer addiction three decades ago.
Facebook and Instagram parent Meta and Google’s YouTube are at the centre of the trial, with Zuckerberg expected to testify in Los Angeles as early as next week.
The trial will serve as a critical test for thousands of similar pending lawsuits that also target TikTok Inc and Snap Inc – and which allege that the world’s most popular products were designed by the four companies to profit at the expense of young people’s safety and mental health.
The companies vehemently deny wrongdoing and say they have rolled out tools and resources to support parents with teens.
But if they lose, they will face pressure to change the way minors interact with social media and to reach settlements with other plaintiffs that could total billions – a scenario that could be akin to the deals that tarnished the tobacco and opioid industries.
This case, a personal injury suit brought by the Social Media Victims Law Center in Seattle, centres on a 20-year-old woman from Chico, California, identified in filings by the initials K.G.M., who claims she has been addicted to social media for more than a decade.
Her nonstop use of the platforms has caused anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia, she alleges.
A lawyer for the woman told jurors Monday that in a quest to make “trillions of dollars,” the companies intentionally engineered the platforms to “trap” children by stimulating their young brains to become hooked on pleasurable rewards similar to how casinos function.
“They use the science of the human brain, and my experts will liken it to building a Trojan horse,” attorney Mark Lanier said as he showed the jury slides displaying the companies’ internal documents.
“YouTube and Google will tell you they are just a streaming service, a digital library.
“Harmless. But that’s not what the evidence shows.” Lanier briefly introduced his client to the court as Kaley but told the jury she wouldn’t be sitting through the trial for her own good.
“Kaley is now easily overwhelmed, and the part of her mind that filters out noise and stress was devastated by the defendants’ machine,” he said.
“To ask her to sit here for weeks and listen to people talk about her descent would be like asking someone with a broken leg to run a marathon.”
K.G.M. recently reached confidential settlements with Snap and TikTok, but they are part of two other so-called bellwether cases set for trials in April and June.
Meanwhile, Meta is facing a jury trial in New Mexico that also started this month, focused on its safety record with children.
Previous legal challenges to social media firms have mainly taken aim at content alleged to be harmful or disturbing to users. Most have been unsuccessful because social networks, like other Internet businesses, are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that broadly shields online platforms from liability for third-party content posted on their websites.
That protection was designed to keep platforms from unnecessarily censoring posts to ensure freedom of speech but has been criticised by some US lawmakers as overly broad, outdated and inadequate to deal with the realities of modern internet use.
In the addiction cases, the companies have been able to knock out some allegations by citing Section 230.
But the lawyers behind the cases have gained traction in court by arguing that the products themselves – through their design and functionality – have created harms.
They contend the primary cause of psychological suffering for young users stems not from content posted by others but from the algorithms programmed by the companies to prioritise engagement.
That includes the web design technique known as infinite scrolling, where new content automatically loads at the bottom of the screen as a user scrolls.
K.G.M. “is very typical of so many children in the United States, the harms that they’ve sustained and the way their lives have been altered by the deliberate design decisions of the social media companies,” said Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of the lawyers representing the woman. — Bloomberg
