Kaley, from Chico, California, was presented by her lawyers at the start of the trial against Google and Meta Platforms Inc. as the face of a scourge that has allegedly poisoned millions of Americans
By Madlin Mekelburg
The 20-year-old woman at the center of a landmark trial over social media addiction used YouTube for an average of just 29 minutes per day over the last five years, a lawyer for Google told jurors.
Moreover, the woman identified in court filings as KGM and in the courtroom as Kaley said in pretrial testimony last year she didn’t consider herself at the time to be an addict, and neither her mental health therapist nor her father saw her as one, attorney Luis Li said Tuesday in his opening statement.
“She says she’s not addicted, her dad said she’s not addicted, her doctor says she’s not addicted,” Li said. “Her medical records in 10,000 pages don’t say she’s addicted. Her behavior doesn’t seem like she is addicted. So why are we here?”
Kaley, from Chico, California, was presented by her lawyers at the start of the trial against Google and Meta Platforms Inc. as the face of a scourge that has allegedly poisoned millions of American youths — overconsumption of social media.
The trial set to play out in Los Angeles Superior Court until the end of March will serve as a critical test for thousands of similar lawsuits that target not only Meta and Google, but also TikTok Inc. and Snap Inc. The latter two companies aren’t participating in the current case because they reached confidential settlements with the woman’s lawyers at the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center shortly before trial.
The first witness called by Kaley’s lawyers voiced doubt about whether she would have even recognized if she was addicted.
Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University, provided jurors with details about the nature of addiction and about her clinical experience treating patients hooked on social media. She said it is “very uncommon” for a child to be able to self-identify that they are struggling with any kind of addiction, including social media.
“There is a saying about why middle-aged folks come in for treatment. It’s a phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous: ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’,” Lembke said. “Teenagers are not often sick or tired, not yet. They have poor insight generally on their addiction and are typically reluctant to get treatment.”
Earlier, lawyers for Meta and Google took turns pushing back aggressively on the allegations that their companies designed their products to foster addiction at the expense of the well-being of young users.
Li denied claims that YouTube employed tools like “infinite scroll” and “autoplay” to hook young people. He said the video platform has numerous features that allow users to customize their experience, including turning off functions that automatically suggest new content at the conclusion of a video.
“All of those sorts of things – they can be disabled,” Li said. “If you don’t like it, turn it off. It’s that simple. The only tool that works is the one you use.”
In his opening statement, Kaley’s lawyer Mark Lanier accused the platforms of “building machines designed to addict the brains of children” by introducing features that keep them constantly engaged.
“Imagine a slot machine that fits into your pocket,” he told the jury of six women and six men. “It doesn’t require you to read or type, it only requires one physical motion. For a child like Kaley, this motion is the handle of a slot machine. Every time she swipes, she’s gambling. Not for money, but for mental stimulation.”
Both companies deny wrongdoing and emphasize that they have rolled out tools and resources to support parents with teens. But if they lose early trials, they will face pressure to change the way minors interact with social media and reach settlements with other plaintiffs that could total billions of dollars — a scenario that could be akin to the deals that tarnished the tobacco and opioid industries.
Lanier said that in a quest to make “trillions of dollars,” the companies intentionally engineered the platforms to “trap” children by stimulating their developing brains to crave rewards.
“They use the science of the human brain and my experts will liken it to building a Trojan horse,” Lanier said as he showed the jury slides displaying the companies’ internal documents. “YouTube and Google will tell you they are just a streaming service, a digital library. Harmless. But that’s not what the evidence shows.”
Li countered by pointing out that going back to 2020, Kaley’s average viewing on YouTube was 29 minutes per day. She watched an average of 4 minutes and 9 seconds of videos suggested by autoplay on a daily basis. During the same time period, she also averaged 1 minute and 14 seconds per day spent watching YouTube Shorts, or vertically oriented videos.
“Folks, when you strip away all of the rhetoric and the blocks and the pounding, when you strip that away, what you are left with is a simple truth: Infinite scroll is not infinite,” he said. “In some cases, in this case before this court and before you the jury, it is as little as a minute and 14 seconds. It is not social media addiction when it is not social media and it is not an addiction.”
Li noted that data was not available on Kaley’s YouTube usage prior to when she was about 15 because she had deleted the history.
Kaley’s time spent on platforms was a data point cited by all the attorneys in opening statements.
Her own lawyer, Lanier, said data from Instagram showed that she spent hours scrolling on the platform every day, with her highest usage recorded as 16.2 hours on a single day in March 2022.
“Kaley will tell you: she was trapped,” Lanier said. “She told her sister that she can’t get off and she wished she never downloaded it.”
Meta attorney Paul Schmidt said Monday that data compiled by an expert witness showed how frequently Kaley interacted on each social media platform — interacting being clicking “like” on a post, making a comment or sending a post as a message to another person.
He said the data revealed that 71 per cent of Kaley’s interactions online were on TikTok, 15 per cent were on Snapchat, 12 per cent were on Instagram and 2 per cent were on YouTube.
Schmidt said there’s no dispute that Kaley suffered psychological distress and sought treatment to recover. But he argued that the sources of her trauma came from family turmoil, physical and verbal abuse and bullying at school.
“If you took Instagram away, and everything else was the same in Kaley’s life, would her life be completely different or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?” Schmidt said.
Kaley hasn’t been identified by her full name because she was a minor throughout much of the period described in her lawsuit, which alleges that her nonstop use of social media caused her anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.
Lanier said he plans to call Kaley as a witness, along with her sister and mother, but won’t make her listen to other testimony. She made a brief appearance in court on Monday to greet jurors, but Lanier said that in her fragile state, she needs to be spared from hearing advocates and experts dissect and debate her mental health struggles over the next several weeks.
Schmidt said that social media is often beneficial to young people — and has been so for Kaley. When lawyers asked about her social media habits, she said spending time on her phone was a coping mechanism, one that allowed her to “avoid everything.”
She also described social media as a creative outlet, and acknowledged that it provided her with a way to communicate about her feelings, according to Schmidt.
He said Kaley told company lawyers she was still actively using Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and that she hoped to find a job that would allow her to pursue her passion for editing videos.
Schmidt said medical records show Kaley had been through more than 260 mental health treatment sessions and that she didn’t spend that time talking about social media addiction.
“You’ll not see more than twenty of those records that even reference social media, good or bad,” Schmidt told the jury. “You’ll see ones that reference other things going on.”
Similarly, Li noted that in the thousands of pages of medical records about Kaley’s treatment, YouTube is mentioned only once, when a therapist notes that she “shared that she has been using a YouTube video to assist with sleep at night when feeling anxious.”
Instagram head Adam Mosseri is set to testify on Wednesday. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube boss Neal Mohan are expected later in the proceedings. Jurors also will hear from dueling expert witnesses in child psychology and related research fields.
