US plaintiff says she was hooked on social media in landmark addiction trial

Summary

• Kaley GM, 20, testified she was addicted to YouTube and Instagram as a child, impacting her mental health despite bullying.
• The landmark trial will decide if Meta and Google are responsible for knowingly designing addictive apps that affected Kaley GM's mental health.
• This trial's outcome is expected to establish a standard for thousands of lawsuits blaming social media for youth mental health issues.

LOS ANGELES - The young woman at the center of a landmark social media addiction lawsuit
testified on Feb 27 that YouTube and Instagram fueled her depression and suicidal thoughts as a child, a decline in her mental health that the defense attributed to a dysfunctional family and offline troubles.

Visibly nervous in her pink floral dress, Ms Kaley G.M. told jurors that she became hooked on social media, starting with YouTube videos at the age of six.

“I was at a young age and I would spend all my time on it,” Ms Kaley testified when asked to explain why she thought she was addicted to YouTube. “Anytime I tried to separate myself from it, it just didn’t work.”

Even when she was bullied on Instagram, she still stayed on the app. “If I was off, I would just feel like I was missing out.”

Under cross examination, however, Ms Kaley talked about feeling neglected, berated and picked on by family members, causing depression and anxiety that had nothing to do with social media.

In the highly anticipated testimony, Ms Kaley’s lawyer sought to portray her as an emotionally fragile user who was ensnared as a child by YouTube and Instagram and whose use of those apps caused her lasting harm.

Ms Kaley described scenes from her childhood in which her mother would have her leave her phone in the living room, but she would retrieve it once her mom went to bed, only to return it before morning.

“I would be really upset,” she said, when denied access to the apps.

Her lawyer Mark Lanier said court records indicate that on one day, she was on Instagram for 16 hours.

She said her mother pushed her into therapy at around age 12, and that during the first session she said she could not engage with her family at home because of “excessive worrying because of social media.”

“I stopped engaging with them as much because I was spending all my time on social media,” she recalled.

She also described her heavy use of filters on Instagram at a very young age to make her eyes bigger and her ears smaller.

The jury was shown a video in which she complained about being fat.

Shown a banner of some of the dozens of Instagram pictures she had posted, Ms Kaley said “almost all of them have a filter on”.

When asked if her life, health, sleep and grades would have been better without social media, Ms Kaley answered: “Yes.”

But Ms Kaley was also shown messages from her younger days in which she contended she did not feel safe in her home and was relentlessly yelled at by her mother.

Seeking job in social media

In a surprising twist, Ms Kaley said she would like to become a social media manager and capitalise on the skills she has built since a young age.

Ms Kaley’s case is the first of three trials expected in the same court that will help determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process.

The landmark trial is expected to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, which owns Instagram, and Google-owned YouTube knowingly designed addictive apps that harmed her mental health.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week and pushed back against accusations that his social media company had done too little to keep underage users off his platform and had profited from their presence.

The outcome of the Los Angeles trials is expected to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fuelling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people.

Similar lawsuits, including some brought by school districts, are making their way through federal court in Northern California and state courts across the country. AFP