“Meta and YouTube have been found liable for deliberately designing addictive products that hooked a young user and led to her being harmed, a jury ruled on Wednesday. Jurors found the tech companies to be both negligent and having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their products.”
The case was filed by a 20yr old woman going by her initials KGM saying that she has been using Youtube and Instagram since she was a child and the addiction to these have harmed her well-being.
“KGM testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said had deleterious effects on her wellbeing. By age 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm as a result. Her social media use allegedly caused her to have strained relationships with her family and in school. When she was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, which KGM attributes to her use of Instagram and YouTube.
“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,” Mark Lanier, KGM’s lawyer said during closing arguments last week. “These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”
KGM’s lawyers say her experience is emblematic of what tens of thousands of young people have faced on social media and in their offline lives.
“Today’s verdict is a historic moment – for [KGM] and for the thousands of children and families who have been waiting for this day,” KGM’s lawyers said in a written statement on Wednesday. “A jury of [KGM’s] peers heard the evidence, heard what Meta and YouTube knew and when they knew it, and held them accountable for their conduct. Today’s verdict belongs to [KGM].”
The plaintiffs’ arguments mirrored those brought against big tobacco in the 1990s, which focused on cigarettes’ addictive qualities and companies’ public denials despite knowledge of their products’ harms. They alleged some of the features that social media companies built into their platforms, such as an infinitely scrollable feed and video autoplay, are designed to keep people on the apps and have made the products addictive.”
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