Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor for the Guardian. I’m hoping futilely for warm spring weather in New York City, but while it’s still cold, I’m sitting inside and reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Published in 2010 and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, the book is a fascinating record of our anxieties about technology at a time when the iPhone was just three years old and Facebook was just six. Google Chrome had debuted two years prior, and I think I was using Mozilla Firefox as my main browser. Stay tuned for a fuller analysis once I finish, but my early impression is that Carr’s observations have stood the test of time.
This week in tech, we’re discussing one major topic: two landmark cases against Meta and YouTube over social media addiction. Whether social media is clinically addictive or not, the liability for it has been determined.
Meta wanted a fight over ‘addiction’ – they missed the point
Last week, jurors in California and New Mexico gave back-to-back verdicts that for the first time ever found Meta liable for products that inflict harm on young people. My colleague Dara Kerr writes in her analysis of the landmark losses:
In the span of just two days, the most powerful social media company in the world faced a more severe public reckoning than it has in years.
For years, lawmakers, parents and advocates have raised red flags over how social media can hurt children, but now the tech firms are being held to account via court rulings that could set long-lasting precedents.
A jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375m in damages over claims that its products led to child sexual exploitation, among other harms. The following day, a jury in California ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6m over claims that both companies deliberately designed addictive products to hook young users.
These cases were the first to go to court, and soon will be followed by more trials from two coordinated groups of more than 2,000 plaintiffs, including families, school districts and state attorneys general, who have brought lawsuits against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.
Meta and YouTube both say they disagree with the verdicts and will appeal. A YouTube spokesperson said the California case “misunderstands” the company, which maintains it is a video streaming platform and “not a social media site”.
For its part, Meta has emphasized the specifics of the case rather than litigate its own public image. A company spokesperson 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.” The spokesperson also pointed to the California ruling not being unanimous.
In harping on the specifics of the case, Meta sought to convince jurors that social media addiction is not a real, widespread problem. The issue was an individual one, and the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman named KGM, was disturbed before she ever got online, the company’s lawyers argued.
Psychologists in the US currently do not recognize social media addiction as a clinical condition, a fact Meta’s lawyers and executives brought up repeatedly at trial. As much distress as obsessive and constant scrolling may cause, it is not described as clinically significant in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the authoritative handbook published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that guides psychological diagnostics and treatment. That is not to say psychologists and clinicians have failed to study social media: researchers have documented the harmful consequences of compulsive social media use among young people and described treatment, and lawmakers around the world are worried about social networks’ addictive potential.
Meta’s lawyer Kevin Huff said in his opening statement in New Mexico: “The American Psychiatric Association studied [social media] and decided that social media addiction is not a thing.” In response, the APA said in a statement to Engadget: “Social media addiction is not currently listed as a diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR – but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.”
Pornography addiction, a phrase that colloquially refers to compulsive use but does not denote a disorder clinically countenanced, resides in a similar gray area. “Internet gaming addiction” is likewise listed not as an official mental disorder but as a “condition for further study”. Both behaviors are often classified under the umbrella of impulse control disorders, sometimes symptomatic of underlying issues.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tried to highlight the discrepancy between the clinical and the colloquial while testifying in Los Angeles, telling the court, “I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and problematic use,” and arguing that Meta’s products were not “clinically addictive”.
Yet it was Meta’s own internal correspondence and research that provided the most thorough documentation of its products’ harms during the trial. A 2020 conversation between Meta researchers entered into evidence reads: “I know Adam doesn’t want to hear it … He freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals lead review, but it is undeniable. It is biological. It is psychological.”
Another email exchange between Meta employees in 2020 shows one person saying: “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug”. A colleague responds: “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
The dialog continues with the employees likening social media’s draw to being similar to gambling with “reward tolerance” getting so high that people “can’t feel reward any more”. The conversation concludes with an employee saying: “It’s kind of scary.” One email has an employee saying “targetting [sic] 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago”.
An internal document from YouTube: “[The] goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”
TikTok’s research into its own app came to similar conclusions about detrimental effects on teens – “in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform … compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects,” reads one internal document. TikTok settled with KGM before its case went to trial.
Meta’s attempt to put daylight between the design of its products and problematic use ultimately failed. A jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube liable for the behaviors that their products inspire. The jurors asserted that, even if the science of social media addiction is not settled, tech companies can be held liable for the design of their products and its effects. Mosseri can debate the division between clinical addiction and compulsive use until he’s blue in the face, but his company will still have to pay damages.
In an analysis published on Friday, the risk assessment firm Moody’s posited that the dual verdicts have established that users’ responses to tech companies’ design choices can expose the businesses to liability. The firm is advising its clients that litigating the legitimacy of social media addiction is of little use at this point; those clients would be better served reckoning with the real monetary risk that users’ addiction-esque use now poses.
The particular legal reasoning that plaintiffs’ lawyers used in showing the injuries to their clients at trial poses a business risk, as that theory could influence litigation over other digital products, according to Moody’s.
“The bigger signal for insurers is the underlying theory of harm, which centers on claims that certain selected engagement-driven design features can be associated with compulsive use and downstream effects,” wrote Adam Grossman and Taro Ramberg. “The verdicts themselves are only an early data point. The broader significance for insurers is what these outcomes suggest about where design-centered liability theories may go next.”
By demonstrating that the seductive, time-sucking design features of Meta and YouTube’s products like an infinitely scrollable feed and autoplaying videos were the definitive cause of harm, the plaintiffs have exposed a wide swath of software to litigation, according to the Moody’s analysts.
Those features are not the sole property of social media: video games, sports betting, chatbots, online retail, and streaming services deploy them, too. Some 1,168 cases against social media companies are pending in Los Angeles superior court alone, per a Moody’s tracker. More broadly, according to the firm, about 4,000 cases are targeting 166 US companies over addictive software design in products like sports betting sites, online games and AI-powered chatbots.
Read more:
‘Accountability has arrived’: dual US court losses show shifting tide against Meta and co
The Guardian view on social media in the dock: tech bros move fast – society is trying to catch up
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