By Mallory Mattingly
Should social media platforms be liable for causing young peoples’ social media addictions and mental health problems?
A recent “bellwether” trial could put the onus on platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube for children’s and teens’ inability to put their phones down.
Clare Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, reported that last week, “the first bellwether trial against social media companies began in Los Angeles, serving as the initial test case for many more pending lawsuits. Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube face more than 3,000 lawsuits in California alone, along with more than 2,000 additional cases in federal court.”
The dangerous impacts of social media use on teens are well documented. According to the HHS, using social media for more than three hours per day can increase symptoms of depression, anxiety and body image worries, among many others.
Morell, a “tech policy expert,” said, “Digital technologies are not like sugar. For the developing brains of children and teens, they are more like fentanyl.”
Related: ABC News Equates Social Media Use to Tobacco Addiction
She compared the tech industry to the tobacco industry, which faced a reckoning years ago for its intentionally addictive designs.
“As with the massive litigation against tobacco companies in the late 1990s and opioid manufacturers more recently, the key question for the jury to decide in this social media trial is straighforward: Did these companies negligently design and market a highly addictive product to children and did they know — and fail to warn users — that their products cause harms to minors?” Morell asked in an op-ed for Fox News.
“Critics of the social media lawsuits argue that these cases don’t belong in court — claiming that it is too difficult for victims to prove causation of their harms from social media, given the complex interplay of personal experience, personality and online exposure,” she continued.
However, Morell explained that new “unsealed documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens and that youth addiction was an intentional part of their business models.”
Documents unsealed last year quoted employees of some of these companies speaking directly about the apps’ addictive qualities.
“IG [Instagram] is a drug…we’re basically pushers,” Meta researchers wrote in an internal chat, per CNN.
Meanwhile, Snapchat executives admitted that users who “have the Snapchat addiction have no room for anything else. Snap dominates their life.”
“The documents include internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, and their own research studies,” Morell explained. “One exhibit of an internal report from Meta states that ‘the lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270 per teen.’ Another Meta report says, ‘the young ones are the best ones’ in explaining how young users have greater long-term retention for the company in using their products.”
Snap and TikTok already settled with plaintiff K.G.M., who accused the platforms of causing her social media addiction, before the case went to trial.
Meta, meanwhile, has refuted these claims, highlighting its “longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”
“For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most,” the statement continued.
Time will tell how the outcome of the trial changes the social media landscape.
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