A Los Angeles jury will soon rule in a landmark case regarding social media’s impact on present society, and its future. The plaintiff, known only as K.G.M., is lodging a personal-injury case against Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, claiming their products caused a series of mental health problems during her teenage years, ranging from body dysmorphia to suicidal ideation, addiction, anxiety, and depression.
A case like this isn’t surprising, and the plaintiff wouldn’t be the first person to feel as though a new technology causes distress — one wonders if K.G.M. would have also sued the designers of the first glass mirrors in the 1st century CE.
Teenage insecurity was not engineered by a Silicon Valley team of app designers, which is the central claim of the case. It’s a defining feature of adolescence that crosses income brackets, ZIP codes, and borders. I have a 15-year-old daughter myself, and this is something any parent of a teenager must be looking out for during these sensitive years. What you say to them about their skin, their hair, pants size, or height can be enough to draw tears and days of consternation.
These kinds of issues manifest on their own in the real world. I once made my tall and athletic teenager cry because I remarked how tall and beautiful she is. I didn’t know that she desired to be shorter — and my teenager isn’t even allowed on social media, nor did she get a smartphone before high school.
This is growing up.
There is no doubt the plaintiff feels wronged as part of a generation that was raised on devices and allowed into social media networks as early as 12. It’s been a social experiment with less than desirable outcomes for a wide range of youth, whether it be reported anxiety levels or educational outcomes. But we also know that unchecked social media use by tweens and teenagers is not a great parenting strategy.
In the proceedings, we’ve learned that “KGM was just 9 when she got her first iPhone.” To her mother’s credit, social media apps were forbidden and she went so far as to put software on the phone to inhibit access, but her child went around them.
The legal framing of this case is quite shocking. It would set a precedent where any emerging technology can be blamed directly for mental distress, even in cases where the associated mental conditions predate the tech.
There is no time in human history where teenagers didn’t find ways around their parents’ guardrails, but what was happening in this household is not normal or consistent with the average experience of social media apps. The mother says of K.G.M.’s experience that her grades plummeted and she was in and out of the hospital “almost daily” and experienced hair loss, heart problems, and “out of control” violent behavior faced with losing access to the phone.
The troubling thing about people who descend into addictive and destructive behaviors is that over the ordeal looms the question: was this done to them by a certain product or substance, or was this kind of behavior pre-existing?
If the ruling favored K.G.M., a young fan of Netflix’s Stranger Things could blame their body issues on Millie Bobby Brown’s physical maturation in season 5. If a studio casts an actor who makes an audience member feel bad about themselves, what’s to stop them from suing for the same sort of damages?
A TV show is designed to be addictive. Its makers don’t want you to put it down or move on from it. And there is no way of knowing what kind of content, images, or people will trigger emotional problems in the consumer. Is California prepared to field injury lawsuits from young men over pornography and its effect on their mental and physical health?
The line of argument in K.G.M.’s case can be stretched without limit.
Social media is a “black mirror” of sorts, and tends toward showing us the things we want to see, even when it causes distress. It seems no one wants to argue that the individual is capable of not staring into the mirror in the first place. We have agency.
A jury can sympathize with K.G.M. and still reject the specious theory that Instagram “caused” her problems.
A mountain of lawsuits is waiting in the wings against social media platforms — roughly 3,000 filed in California and another 2,000 in federal court — all built on the premise that algorithms and endless scrolling features have overtaken free will.
Social media companies can be held accountable for violating privacy agreements and for ignoring their own child-protection policies, but we’d be deluding ourselves if the universal turbulence of adolescence can be twisted into a personal-injury claim, soon recruiting claimants on a billboard near you.
Parents are primarily responsible for guiding their children through the online world and setting up boundaries in the home that serve their best interests, even when enforcement is hard. Based on what we’ve learned so far in this landmark case, the plaintiff’s parents did everything except make a judgment call that devices weren’t a good fit for their home.
Stephen Kent is media director for the Consumer Choice Center. Follow him on X @stephenkentx
