A court in the US has found that Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Youtube) deliberately built addictive social media platforms. According to the BBC
A Los Angeles jury has handed down an unprecedented win for a young woman who sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.
Jurors found that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, owner of YouTube, intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed the 20-year old’s mental health. The woman, known as Kaley, was awarded $3m (£2.2m) in a result that is likely to have implications for hundreds of similar cases now winding their way through US courts.
Meta and Google said separately that they disagreed with the verdict and would both appeal. Meta said: “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”
A spokesperson for Google said: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”Jurors found Meta to be 70% responsible for the plaintiff’s harm and YouTube was responsible for 30% of the total, meaning Meta will pay the majority of Kaley’s award.
The damages could be substantial, with the report saying it could reach up to $30 million dollars.
The Guardian report on the issue goes into the background of the young woman (identified as KGM) who brought the case
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.”
Globally, the social media giants are running into increasing headwinds as more and more governments begin taking actions to curb their perceived excesses. Australia recently enacted a world first social media ban for children under the age of 16, and other governments are keenly observing how that ban is working in practice to see if a similar prohbition would work in their own countries. The UK is going to trial such restrictions on several hundred teenagers.
Meta and Youtube both plan to appeal the verdict as the Guardian article later states that…
Meta has said it will appeal the rulings in Los Angeles and in New Mexico. In response to the California case’s verdict, a spokesperson for Meta said the company is confident of its protection of teens online.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict … Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app,” the spokesperson said.
A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, said the video service also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” he said.
Both companies have consistently denied wrongdoing. YouTube has called the allegations that were brought “simply not true” and Meta has said that KGM’s mental health issues were brought on by a difficult home life and social media use was not to blame.
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