Social media giants face trial over claims they harm kids : NPR

In this illustrative photo, a teenage girl uses her cell phone to access social media on January 31, 2024, in New York. A major trial that begins Tuesday will determine whether social media companies intentionally designed their products to be addictive in children.

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Social media apps have long been accused of being harmful to children. Now those allegations will be presented to a jury for the first time in a trial that begins Tuesday in a Los Angeles courtroom.

A key question will be whether tech companies have deliberately built their platforms to attract younger users, thereby contributing to a youth mental health crisis. The jury’s decision could have far-reaching consequences for the technology industry and the way children use social media.

The case in California state court is the first in a wave of lawsuits set to go to trial this year that have been filed against social media companies by more than 1,000 individual plaintiffs, hundreds of school districts and dozens of state attorneys general. That draws comparisons to the legal campaign against tobacco giants in the 1990s, which accused cigarette makers of hiding what they knew about the harms of their products.

The lawsuits accuse Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok of technical features that make their apps almost impossible for children to remove, such as infinite scrolling, auto-playing videos, frequent notifications and recommendation algorithms, in some cases leading to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide. (Snapchat is also named as a defendant in these suits, but has settled with the plaintiff in the case which goes to trial on Tuesday.)

The plaintiffs are seeking damages as well as changes to the way social media apps are designed.

The trial that begins Tuesday in Los Angeles will provide a rare insight into how the most popular and powerful social media platforms operate. Jurors will be presented with thousands of pages of internal documents, including research on children conducted by the companies; expert witnesses; and testimony from the teenage plaintiff, identified as KGM, who claims her excessive use of social media led to mental health issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram CEO and owner of Facebook Meta, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, are also expected to testify at the trial, which is expected to last several weeks.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seen here in 2025, is expected to testify at the upcoming trial on social media addiction.

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“The public will know for the first time what social media companies have done to prioritize their profits over the safety of our children,” said Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents KGM and other plaintiffs.

Tech companies say there is no clinical diagnosis of social media addiction and no direct link between social media use and mental health issues has been proven. They say they’ve rolled out child safety features in recent years, including parental controls, guardrails on who can contact teen accounts, and time limits.

They also cite the First Amendment, arguing that just as people’s speech is protected from government censorship, the decisions social media companies make about content also constitute a type of “protected speech” — an argument the Supreme Court has upheld.

Google, parent company of Meta and YouTube, said in statements that the allegations in the lawsuits were baseless.

“These lawsuits misrepresent our company and the work we do every day to provide young people with safe and valuable online experiences,” Meta said in a statement. “Despite the snippets of conversations or cherry-picked quotes that plaintiffs’ attorneys may use to paint an intentionally misleading picture of the company, we are proud of the progress we have made, we remain committed to putting teen safety first, and we will continue to make improvements.”

The YouTube logo is displayed on a sign outside the company’s headquarters in San Bruno, California in 2025.

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“The allegations in these complaints are simply false,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. He added that YouTube works with experts to provide “age-appropriate experiences” and “robust” parental controls.

YouTube will also argue that its video platform works differently from apps such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

TikTok declined to comment.

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School who studies Internet law, is skeptical of the plaintiffs’ argument that companies should be held responsible for features they designed.

“Essentially what the plaintiffs are trying to do is argue that social media is the virtual equivalent of a soda bottle, like a Coca-Cola bottle, exploding and sending shards of glass to anyone nearby,” he said. “And if that doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make sense to me either. The whole principle of treating posts like products is itself architecturally flawed.”

“A constraint to commit”

Cases proceed on two tracks: some in state court and others in federal court. In each of them, a handful of “indicator” cases are tried first. The outcome of these cases could affect the progress of other cases and could open the door to extensive settlement negotiations.

Jury selection in the first bellwether case begins Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Plaintiff KGM, now 19, claims her use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok led to depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia.

KGM began using social media when she was 10, despite her mother’s efforts to block her from the apps, according to the complaint. She “developed a compulsion to constantly interact with these products” due to their “addictive design” and “constant notifications.”

“The more KGM accessed Defendants’ products, the more his mental health deteriorated,” the complaint states.

“She’s going to be able to explain in a very concrete way what social media did to her over the course of her life and how, in many ways, it stole her childhood and her adolescence,” Bergman told reporters at a press briefing last week. “She is very typical of so many children in the United States, the harms they have suffered and how their lives have been altered by the deliberate decisions of social media companies.”

Last week, Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, reached a settlement with KGM, meaning it will not be involved in the first lawsuit. No details of the settlement have been made public. However, the company remains a defendant in the other cases under both state and federal consolidated proceedings.

“The parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter amicably,” Snap said in a statement. The company has already disputed the allegations in lawsuits. “Snapchat was designed differently than traditional social networks; it opens on camera, allowing Snapchatters to connect with family and friends in an environment that prioritizes their security and privacy,” its lawyers told Bloomberg News in November.

“The Internet is under test”

The plaintiffs have had to fight to assert their rights because online platforms are largely protected by a controversial legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The plaintiffs hope to circumvent the immunity usually afforded to tech companies by focusing on features they say are designed to keep kids coming back to social media apps rather than the specific posts or videos users encounter.

“We’re not talking about third-party content. We’re talking about the reckless design of these platforms that are designed not to show kids what they want to see, but what they can’t look away from,” Bergman said.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl of Los Angeles Superior Court, who oversees the state’s consolidated cases, including KGM’s, dismissed some plaintiffs’ claims on the grounds that they involved third-party content and were therefore covered by Section 230. But she said whether features like infinite scrolling could help harm users is a question a jury should decide.

Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said the potential damages if the plaintiffs win would pose “an existential threat” to social media companies and beyond — not only in terms of financial impact, but also if tech companies are forced to change the way their products work.

“The Internet is being tested in these cases,” he said. “If the plaintiffs win, the Internet will almost certainly be different than it is today. And it will probably be much less conversational than it is today.”

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