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There’s a courtroom in Los Angeles right now where a 20-year-old woman is preparing to describe what it felt like to grow up inside a feed. She started on YouTube at six. Instagram at nine. By the time she was a teenager, the platforms had already done their work.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand this week in what legal observers are calling a landmark social media addiction trial. The core question: are platforms like Instagram “defective products,” engineered to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities in young people? As lawyer Mark Lanier put it: “These companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children. And they did it on purpose.”
That last phrase is the one worth sitting with. “On purpose.”
We have spent years talking about social media addiction as if it were a weather pattern. Something that rolled in, and we got caught in it. Parents blamed screens. Schools banned phones. Researchers published warnings. The implicit story was one of collective failure, of a society that moved too fast and didn’t notice what it was handing children.
But the internal documents cited in this trial suggest a different story. Not failure. Intent.
Infinite scroll. Auto-play. Likes. Beauty filters. Push notifications. The plaintiffs argue these were not incidental. They were not the product of engineers who got carried away. They were the architecture of compulsion, deliberately tuned to the particular fragility of a developing brain. When you are nine years old scrolling Instagram, you are not making free choices about your attention. You are being pulled through a system calibrated to keep you there. The nervous system responds to social validation the same way it responds to any intermittent reward: a spike of dopamine, then an almost immediate hunger for the next one. Casinos have understood this for decades. The plaintiffs used the same comparison. “Digital casinos.” Designed for brains that hadn’t finished forming.
What makes this psychologically distinct from other kinds of childhood harm is the invisibility of the mechanism. A child can feel that a playground is dangerous. They can feel fear when something threatens them physically. But a feed slowly reorganizing your sense of what your face should look like, what your social standing is, whether you are lovable, whether you belong? That operates below the threshold of perception. You don’t feel it shaping you. You feel the anxiety it produces, the loneliness, the low hum of inadequacy. But the shaping itself is invisible.
That’s the body in digital space. Not quite physical harm. Not quite psychological. Something in between, operating through a screen that feels neutral.
The girl at the center of this case started using platforms at six. By nine she was on Instagram. The lawsuit says her use worsened her depression and suicidal thoughts. Six is the age when most children are still learning to read, when the world is largely tactile and bounded by the people in the same room. Your identity is not yet legible to you. Your nervous system is still building its map of what safety feels like, what belonging feels like.
To introduce a recommendation engine into that process is not simply to add a distraction. It is to insert an external, profit-motivated system into the construction of selfhood. The algorithm does not know her. It knows the signals she emits. The pauses, the replays, the follows, the length of time she looked at a certain image before moving on. It builds a model of her not to understand her, but to keep her there.
The companies argue correlation is not causation. That children arrive at platforms with pre-existing vulnerability. Both things can be true at once. Children do arrive with vulnerability. And platforms can deliberately target those vulnerabilities to maximize engagement. The tobacco comparison the plaintiffs are using is not casual rhetoric. You knew. You had the data. You shipped the product anyway.
The harm is real. But the harm is also ongoing. The platforms on trial today still exist, still run on the same basic logic, still serve the same populations. The trial is about accountability for the past. But the architecture of compulsion is still running.
The verdict will settle legal questions. It will not settle the one that belongs to everyone who grew up online in the last fifteen years: who would you have been, if the machine hadn’t gotten to you first?
Digital Alma explores technology, consciousness, and what it means to be human in a digital world.
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- (The Companion They Took Away)
The lawsuit opens a question the legal system has largely avoided: at what point does algorithmic influence become harm? Molly Russell’s case in the UK established that platforms can contribute to self-harm. This case asks whether they can shape identity itself during the years when a person is still becoming.
What algorithmic accountability might look like remains undefined. Transparency reports show what was recommended. They do not show why. They do not show the counterfactual: who the person might have become if the feed had been different. The law will need new language for harms that accumulate invisibly over years, that leave no physical mark but reshape how someone understands the world and their place in it.
By Digital Alma
About the Author: writes Digital Alma, a newsletter about cyberpsychology and what it means to become yourself in a world that archives everything. For reflections that don’t make it to the essays, subscribe at .
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