Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is set to testify Wednesday in a high-profile federal trial in Los Angeles, where lawyers will attempt to prove that social media is engineered for compulsive use by young minds.
The defendants in this high-stakes trial stated that the case could establish a binding legal precedent regarding whether social media platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive to children. The civil trial in California state court centers on allegations that a 20-year-old woman identified as Kalet G.M. underwent severe mental harm after becoming addicted to social media as a child.
On Monday, the plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier told the jury that YouTube and Meta engineered addiction in young people to gain users and profits.
The first witness called by the plaintiffs, Stanford University School of Medicine professor Anna Lembke, declared that she views social media broadly speaking as a drug.
The case is being treated as a bellwether whose outcome could set the tone for a similar wave of litigation across the United States. Social media firms currently face hundreds of lawsuits accusing them of leading young users to become addicted to content and suffer from depression, suicide and other serious mental health conditions.
Furthermore, plaintiffs attorneys are leveraging techniques used against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, arguing that much like a big tobacco, social media companies knew they were selling a harmful and addictive product.