The trial of Meta and Google opened Monday in a Los Angeles civil court on a charge by the plaintiff’s lawyer, who accused them of having “manufactured addiction in the brains of children”, who had become addicted to their platforms.
The mechanism observed on Instagram (Meta) and YouTube (Google) did not occur “by accident but on purpose”, insisted Mark Lanier in his introductory remarks, “because addiction is profitable”.
The outcome of the debates could establish a major legal precedent in matters of civil liability for social network operators, who have until now been exempt.
Dozens of files must, in fact, follow in the coming months.
The CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg will be called to testify in this small windowless room on February 18, and the boss of Instagram (Meta subsidiary) Adam Mosseri on Wednesday.
In the absence of TikTok and Snapchat, who preferred to settle for a confidential amount, only YouTube, a Google subsidiary, and Meta, the tech giant behind Instagram, are defending this trial scheduled to last more than a month.
The 12 jurors, approved Friday after more than a week of meticulous voting, must decide the complaint of a 20-year-old Californian, Kaley GM
His file was deemed representative enough to constitute a test procedure whose outcome will set a benchmark for hundreds of similar complaints grouped together in California.
The young woman, a YouTube user from the age of six then the owner of an Instagram account at age 11, before Snapchat and TikTok two to three years later, claims to have developed a strong addiction to social networks which led her into a spiral of depression, anxiety and self-image problems.
The child produces
In his opening remarks, Mark Lanier produced several internal documents at Google and Meta in support of his thesis, that of intentionality.
One of them, from a presentation at Google, mentions “the addiction of Internet users” as a stated objective, the lawyer underlined. “That’s their doctrine.”
He also presented an internal email sent by Mark Zuckerberg, which he said urged his teams to reverse the disengagement of younger people on Instagram.
Mark Lanier recalled the economic model of Meta and Google, very largely based on advertising, whose prices depend on attendance, i.e. the time spent on the platforms.
“What they are selling to advertisers is not a product,” he explained, “it’s access to Kaley,” who will only be present at the hearing to testify but will not attend the rest of the proceedings.
Meta’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, replied that the deterioration of Kaley’s psychological state was above all linked to her family situation.
While still young, she witnessed a scene of domestic violence between her father and mother, which led her to consult a therapist at the age of three, even before her first contact with the platforms.
The young girl was then the victim of abuse at the hands of her mother, who she wrote made her “want to kill myself,” the lawyer said.
Paul Schmidt also argued that Kaley only mentioned social media in 20 of her 260 therapy sessions and that Instagram only represented a tiny portion of her uses.
During an interview noted by the lawyer, she even felt that Instagram had a positive effect on her.
Faced with operators protected by American law with regard to the content of their platforms, the plaintiffs attack the very design of social networks, that is to say the algorithm and the personalization functions encouraging compulsive viewing of videos.
The plaintiffs accuse this design of being negligent and harmful, repeating a strategy successfully carried out against the tobacco industry in the 1990s and 2000s.
In New Mexico, a separate trial accusing Meta of prioritizing profit over protecting minors from sexual predators is also scheduled to begin this week.
In parallel with the Los Angeles trial, social media addiction is the subject of a national mass proceeding, currently being heard before a federal judge in Oakland, near San Francisco.
