MANILA, Philippines – In the US, social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube are in the middle of what experts have called a “landmark trial” over their alleged addictive design features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, image-altering filters, and algorithmic recommendations. 

The trial centers on an unnamed complainant only known as “K.G.M.” who alleges that deliberate design aspects of social media apps got her addicted, leading to physical and emotional harm.

The now 19-year-old complainant — whose case is representative of a consolidated group of thousands of similar cases — started watching YouTube at the age of 6, obtained an Instagram account at 11 by circumventing age checks, got a Snapchat account at 13, and TikTok at 14, as reported by Courthouse News Service. 

Such use, the complainant claims, were key to her developing depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and body dysmorphia. 

Why is it being considered a landmark trial? According to Clay Calvert, senior fellow at thinktank Technology Policy Studies, “The bellwether trial marks the first time in the United States that a case alleging social media addiction will reach a jury, with plaintiffs’ attorneys and those for defendants ByteDance (TikTok), Google (YouTube), and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) finally getting to test their arguments before a group of citizens.” 

Snap and TikTok have settled, and are no longer defendants. 

The trial sees the plaintiff looking to attach harm causation to an app’s design features allegedly leading to addiction, rather than the actual content posted on the platform. 

The difference is important because social media platforms are websites that are protected from being tried over user-generated content thanks to Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. (READ: Beyond Section 230: Experts on how to bring transparency, accountability to social media)

It states that websites do not have accountability over content posted by users. The K.G.M. trial takes aim not at the content but at the very design delivering content to users, among other features allegedly contributing to personal damage. 

The trial began on Monday, February 9, US time, and comes amid a growing number of countries banning social media for minors starting with Australia on December 16, 2025. 

In the trial held in Los Angeles, California, the plaintiff’s lawyer Mark Lanier said, “These companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children, and they did it on purpose,” BBC reported. Meanwhile, Meta and YouTube lawyers argued that K.G.M.’s issues arose from other issues in her life and not because of the platform. 

“This case is about two of the richest corporations in history who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” Lanier said, calling them an “addiction machine.” 

The trial is expected to last 6 weeks, and is expected to have Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. 

Unsealed documents 

As part of the trial, documents — primarily internal communications at the social media companies — have been unsealed, and made available to the public.

The Tech Oversight Project reviewed the documents, which it said “provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models.” 

Here we will discuss Facebook specifically, and tackle Google, TikTok, and Snap separately in a future article. 

In 2016, for example, an email sent to Meta’s vice president for product management and chief information officer Guy Rosen, shown below, said “Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens.” 

It highlights that there is documented proof that the audience segment is one that, as early as 2016, was seen as a key driver of growth for the company. 

Below are further findings from Facebook’s efforts to keep teens on their platforms:

1) A series of emails prior to the launch of a Snapchat-like “Lifestage” social video app for 21-and-under discussed a number of schools the company was taking aim at.
Security concerns arose but the team allegedly said it “doesn’t think” that the app had to undergo a security review.

2) An experiment called “Everyone on Facebook HS edition”, shown below, had a goal of knowing whether notifications or “school blasts can tip schools from inactive to active via network effects.”
An active network means that users are engaged on the platform. A “school blast” was looked at as a way to make a student user active. 
A bullet point shows a link to school data that would enable Facebook to find “engaged schools.”

3) Facebook appears it is able to geographically track teen users in an area (“We can track and experiment on a local network level to figure out if pushing features within Instagram might be a more effective strategy to engage teens in Instagram-saturated areas.”)
It added: “Engaging the vast majority of teens in an area / school with our products is crucial to driving overall time spent in the same area, especially for Messaging features.”
The message shows that there is a desire from the company for teens to use their products more.

4) Instagram created an “ambassador” program for “well-connected” teens 13 to 17 years old, paid up to $599 a year, among other incentives.
The teens were tasked with testing, being early adopters of, and to “build buzz” to promote new features. A separate document details a “high school directory” feature that ambassadors can assimilate in.
Marketed as a “private” space for teens, the feature would require students to provide the following details to the platform: a valid school email address, and information on what grade level they are at.

5) A 2018 document, shown below, discusses building social media products for kids as young as 6 years old, with the justification that having a smartphone and being on social media is a “coming of age” moment now for kids much like getting a driver’s license at 16 was in the past.
There is a clear delineation for tactics between age groups: “Winning with under-13 will require different solutions for the 6-10 and 11-13 age groups,” the document said.
While it discussed making features that were deemed to be safe by parents, what is seen here again is a concerted effort to really attract very young kids.

6) Another 2018 document appears to show a 2018 interview with teen users to discuss conflicts within the app. It revealed that Instagram conflicts are “common and painful” and teens learn to “weaponize IG features to torment each other.”
It added: “Current classifiers and policies do not address many of these conflicts.”
It shows that the platform has knowledge that teens have negative experiences due to conflicts “between real-world connections.”
It suggested how they would be able to “encourage kind interactions” and other solutions. Whether these solutions were enough is for the case to determine.
Similarly, another document points to the experience of black users aged 13 to 14 on the platform: “Young Black users of Instagram report experiences of cultural appropriation and race-based negativity of the platform.” (READ: Is a social media ban for minors the correct move?)

‘IG is a drug’

Prior to the latest tranche of documents, the Tech Oversight Project also reported that previous files have stated that the “lifetime value of 13 y/o teen is roughly $270 per teen” and that those who join Facebook at a younger age have “greater long term retention.” The younger you join Facebook, the higher the chances that you will become a user in the long run.  

A message exchange between employees supposedly went: “Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug… Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.” 

A slide in the document shows that “The Young Ones are the Best Ones” for long-term retention.

What do these documents show us? At the very least, that Facebook and Instagram had specifically and aggressively targeted minors to capture in their social media ecosystem.

The various programs mentioned speak to granularity in targeting, In one case, they carefully differentiated between those who are 6 to 10 years old, and those 11 to 13 years old. 

They sought to verify that these were indeed teenagers by attempting to have them provide their school emails along with their grade levels. 

Ideas of sending out phone notifications to students during class to tilt them towards being active on social media indicate something: that they are willing to go beyond ethical ways of farming engagement. 

Certainly, it will be up to the courts to decide the value of these documents, but they give us a glimpse into the inner workings of Facebook. 

Looking at it from the lens of surveillance capitalism, and that they assigned a numerical value to a teen (“roughly $270 per teen”), point to possible exploitation.

Expert opinions

Is there harm? Two expert reports produced for the case point towards yes. 

Seth Noar, professor of Health Communication in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that “Social media defendants should have but did not provide to adolescent users and their parents effective warnings that their platforms pose a risk of the following harms to adolescent users” including addiction, body dysmorphia, and depression.

Noar advised, the platforms “should have followed well-established principles and standards for providing effective warnings on these harms, which include large, prominently placed warnings; rotating messages communicating specific harms of social media use; and imagery to most effectively communicate these harms.” 

Tim Estes, a developer who has created digital platforms for the US intelligence community to identify and locate terrorists, tier-1 banks, and healthcare systems, concluded that the platforms were not safe. 

He said that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube “were and are not reasonably safe for children as they are designed… [with] a host of features that encourage compulsive and addictive use, create harmful social pressure on children, and unnecessarily expose children to dangers like child predators.”

“Many of these features make use of a design technique known as ‘dark patterns’ to keep children engaged on the platform far longer than is healthy. As noted above, dark patterns are deceptive user interface designs that trick or manipulate users into taking actions they would not otherwise have taken.” – Rappler.com