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By Kayla DeKraker
Many know the dangers of social media addiction, and one woman is seeking justice for the harms she experienced at the hands platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
Kaley G.M., 20, is suing Meta and Google as part of a landmark trial taking place in Los Angeles. She recently took the witness stand to testify about the profound impact years of social media use had on her mental health.
“I can’t, it’s too hard to be without it,” she told the Los Angeles County Superior Court of trying to give up social media. Reuters noted that “Her mental health became so impaired, she told jurors, that she harbored suicidal thoughts and at age 10 began cutting herself as a ‘coping mechanism to deal with my depression,’ though she said she never acted on an impulse to take her own life.”
Kaley added that even as an adult, she continues to struggle with her mental health and cannot go without social media even if she wants to.
Related: How This 23-Year-Old Plans to Save Her Generation from Social Media Addiction
“I wanted to be on it all the time,” she admitted. “If I wasn’t on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something.”
The lawsuit, filed against Meta Platforms’ Instagram and Google’s YouTube, marks one of the first major cases in the United States seeking to hold tech giants legally responsible for addictive design features in their apps. The case is part of over 1,600 similar consolidated claims from plaintiffs who allege that features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, notifications, beauty filters and “like” buttons were engineered to keep young users engaged and ultimately cause or worsened mental health struggles.
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2023, is one of over 3,000 similar cases in California alone.
Despite there being laws that protect social media companies from lawsuits, this one may have found a loophole.
“Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields social-media companies from being held liable for most content posted on their platforms by third parties. The lawsuit being heard in Los Angeles, and other cases recently filed, aim to circumvent Section 230 by arguing that the design of the platforms—rather than the content published there—is what harmed children,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
In a Instagram post from BBC covering the trial, people in the comment section acknowledged the harms of social media.
“Ask yourself: do you feel better or worse after using social media?” one person said. “Just know that they don’t allow their kids to use it,” another person said, referring to several tech leaders who have admitted to forbidding their own children from using the apps.
Last December, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said of his own children, “We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch.”
Stories such as these should be a massive wake-up to parents everywhere that there are major dangers to social media use, and we need to do what we can to protect our children from these dangers.
Read Next: Are ‘Dumb Phones’ a Practical Way to Break Technology Addiction?
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