Halfway through the first bellwether trial over whether Meta and YouTube deliberately designed their services to hook children, Meta appears particularly vulnerable to a jury finding that Instagram contributed to the mental-health struggles of a 20-year-old woman who says she became addicted to the platform as a child.
Halfway through the first bellwether trial over whether Meta Platforms and YouTube were deliberately designed their services to hook children, Meta Platforms appears vulnerable to a jury finding that Instagram contributed to the mental-health problems of a 20-year-old woman who says she became addicted to the social media platform as a child.The outcome will hinge on how a Los Angeles jury answers the question of whether the defendant was negligent in operating its platform, whether the plaintiff known as Kaley or K.G.M. was harmed, and whether the defendant’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing that harm.
Jurors were told they may hold the defendants liable if they conclude the companies knew or should have known their platforms posed dangers that users would not realize and failed to adequately warn about those risks, and that the failure was a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff’s harm. The defendant’s conduct does not have to be the only cause of the harm. “A defendant cannot avoid responsibility because some other condition or event was also a substantial factor in causing K.G.M.’s harm,” Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl told the jury.
Punitive damages require a further finding that defendants acted with conscious disregard and engaged in conduct so malicious or despicable that it subjected the plaintiff to unjust hardship.
In navigating this tricky territory, Meta has focused its defense on Kaley, emphasizing that the case is ultimately about a single user with a host of other family, school and mental health stressors.
The company has suggested that Kaley’s life would have unfolded much the same, even without Instagram. She still would have been “abandoned” by her father at age 3, still would have experienced the trauma of her sister’s eating disorder and hospitalization at age 12, and still would have clashed repeatedly with her mother over her own eating habits, bad grades and unfinished chores (see here).
Meta has tried to show that the cumulative weight of these pressures led to her severe social phobia, anxiety and body dysmorphia.
They’ve also painted Instagram as a refuge for Kaley. Under questioning from Meta lawyer Phyllis Jones, Kaley acknowledged that at times she has found Instagram to be a “positive outlet” to share her feelings and connect with other people.
When she felt sad, she would post on Instagram and it would make her feel temporarily better, especially when the likes and comments poured in. She would vent about her mother; in one post she wrote, “sorry a lot of my edits have been sad lately, I’ve been going through hell and that's my small way of coping.”
Kaley also said she plans to study marketing and work as a social media manager.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the case turns on whether Kaley’s struggles would have existed without Instagram.
"Kaley has faced profound challenges, and we continue to recognize all she has endured. The jury’s only task, however, is to decide if those struggles would have existed without Instagram," the spokesperson said. "Not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause. Her records show significant emotional and physical abuse, academic struggles and psychiatric conditions, entirely separate from her social media usage. The witnesses hired by her lawyer admitted that social media has benefited Kaley, and she used it as an outlet to cope with the difficult circumstances at home. The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality."
— The document trail —
Kaley’s lawyers have hammered on the idea that Meta pursued a business strategy to capture young users at all costs while downplaying potential risks, drawing comparison to the marketing tactics once used by tobacco companies.
The Big Tobacco trials turned in large part on what the companies knew about the health risks of smoking and whether they deliberately concealed or disregarded those risks.
Mark Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney, showed the jury internal Meta research acknowledging that some adolescents are more likely to develop mental health challenges from unhealthy social media use. The research cited risks such as “poor self-esteem,” “negative body image,” “negative social comparison” and exposure to online bullying — all of which Kaley suffered.
Several of the most damaging internal communications about teen engagement were introduced during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony, directing the Meta CEO to respond to emails and research documents discussing the company’s efforts to attract young users.
Lanier showed the jury an email from a Meta employee about the company’s “strategic focus for 2017.” It opened with: “Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in 2017 is teens and has asked the Teens Team to coordinate planning and execution of a strategic focus on teens.”
An attached slide deck noted that “time spent” was a “top line goal” and listed “under 13s” as a “big bet for 2017.” Another slide stated that a goal was to “Grow monthly active people, daily active people, and time spent among U13 [under 13] kids.”
Another presentation from 2018 entitled “M&A and market landscape review” said Meta “definitively established tweens as the highest retention age group in the United States,” noting that people who join Facebook at 11 years old have four times the retention rate as those who join at age 20.
Zuckerberg said that early on, the company had prioritized time spent as a goal, but later shifted its focus to “utility and value instead.” The idea was that people would naturally spend more time on Instagram and Facebook if they found it valuable and had “good experiences” on the platforms.
"There's this mischaracterization that if we maximize the amount of time people spend, that that's good for us,” he said. “But if people feel like they're not having a good experience why would they keep using our product over a long period of time?”
Meta has also argued that teens are not central to its advertising business because minors see fewer ads and lack the purchasing power of adults.
Lanier countered with testimony from marketing expert John Chandler, who cited research that estimated Instagram earned nearly $5 billion and YouTube more than $2 billion from ads shown to users under 17 in a single year.
Meta sought to discredit the research by noting that none of the five listed authors had experience modeling ad revenue, even as Chandler had called it the “gold standard” estimation of the company’s revenue from ads and relied on it for his expert report on how social media platforms make money.
He further testified about an internal document that reinforced Meta’s focus on attracting young users. The document, entitled “Meta market landscape review teen opportunity cost and lifetime value,” said Meta stood to lose $150 million in 2019 from not having teens on Facebook, a figure it projected would balloon to $1.8 billion by 2030.
“The total present value loss is $12 billion,” it said, adding, “By 2030, Facebook will have 30 million fewer users than we could have otherwise if we do not solve the teen problem.”
The document, put together by a Meta employee, estimated that the company should be willing to spend $100-$200 to acquire a new teen user. It noted that while older users have a much higher revenue per user, "younger users have a much higher long term retention than older users."
— Meta begins its case —
Meta opened its case last Friday with deposition testimony from administrators at the Inspire School of Art and Science in Chico, California, where Kaley went to high school. Testimony Monday was centered on Alison Pratt, a therapist who has treated Kaley since 2020. Pratt said she never diagnosed Kaley with an addiction to Instagram or social media more generally, but she believed that social media contributed to her anxiety, depression and other mental health problems (see here).
Closing arguments are expected this week.
This case has presented jurors with two sharply different, competing narratives about whether Instagram was designed to be addictive. But the central question is not whether social media is harmful to teens in general. It’s a much narrower one of whether Instagram’s design was a substantial factor in harming Kaley in particular. Meta contends that Instagram was a positive outlet amid a turbulent adolescence. Kaley says it played a substantial part in damaging her mental health. The verdict will depend on which account jurors find more convincing.
— Xu Yuan contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
Please email editors@mlex.com to contact the editorial staff regarding this story, or to submit the names of lawyers and advisers.