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A courtroom in Los Angeles spent six weeks arguing over something most of us could describe in ten seconds: you open Instagram to check one thing and 40 minutes disappear. You meant to watch one YouTube video. You watched seven. You were going to scroll for five minutes before bed and now it’s 2am and your eyes hurt and you feel vaguely sick but you can’t stop.
This week, closing arguments wrapped in a landmark case against Meta and Google. The prosecution’s claim was simple: these companies designed features that addict children’s brains. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. Notifications that ping and chirp and light up your screen with the promise that someone, somewhere, is thinking about you. The defense’s response was equally simple: we’re just giving people what they want.
The case has been compared to the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, and the parallel is striking. Big Tobacco spent decades insisting cigarettes weren’t addictive while engineering them to be exactly that. Now Big Tech insists social media isn’t addictive while internal documents reveal employees calling Instagram “a drug” and joking that they’re “basically pushers.”
The Mechanics of the Pull
The mechanics are not subtle. Infinite scroll removes the natural stopping point. There used to be an end to your feed. You’d see everything new, hit a wall, and leave. Now the feed never stops. There is always one more post, one more video, one more thing that might be interesting or funny or outrageous or just novel enough to trip the same neural pathway that made our ancestors stop and look when something moved in their peripheral vision.
Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who worked in child safety at Meta until 2021, explained it clearly: “There is always something more that will give you another dopamine hit that you react to and there is an infinite supply of that. The promise of these things is that there is always going to be something interesting and rewarding and there is a never-ending supply.”
That promise is the engine. It’s not that every post is good. It’s that the next one might be. You are always one swipe away from something worth your attention. Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, described watching young people scroll: “They flip really, really fast. They make split-second decisions to swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, watch, swipe, swipe, watch. There is always a feeling that the next thing could be good and it’s only going to be another second or two.”
That “one more second” adds up. The scroll becomes automatic. You’re not deciding to keep going. You’re just not deciding to stop.
Autoplay works the same way. Videos start without your permission. You didn’t ask to watch, but now it’s playing, and the human brain has a reflex: watch long enough to understand what’s happening. By the time you know what you’re watching, you’re already watching it. Béjar said that when Facebook introduced autoplay, users hated it. They found it disruptive. But more people watched more videos, and advertisers were happy, so the feature stayed.
You can feel the tension in that sentence. Users were unhappy. Advertisers were happy. The feature stayed. That’s the design philosophy in one breath.
And then there are the notifications. The likes. The comments. The little red dot that sits on your screen like a splinter under your skin until you open the app and clear it. Mark Griffith, a professor emeritus of behavioral addiction at Nottingham Trent University, pointed out that winning the competition for likes is rewarding. It gives you a hit of enjoyment. Your body produces dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins. You’re not addicted to the app. You’re addicted to your own body’s chemicals.
Your Body Knows It’s Hooked.
Griffith was careful to distinguish between true addiction and what he called social media’s “moreish quality.” Most people aren’t clinically addicted. Most fall into “habitual use,” which can mess with your productivity and relationships without destroying your life, or “problematic use,” which has more serious consequences. The distinction matters legally. But experientially, the line is blurrier than it sounds.
The Architecture of Loneliness.
Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, testified this week that social media is not “clinically addictive.” You can be addicted to social media the way you can be addicted to a good TV show, he said, but that’s not the same thing. Technically, he’s right. Socially, the defense feels thin. Nobody designs a TV show to follow you around all day, interrupt you with alerts, and restart itself every time you try to turn it off.
The prosecution’s lawyer compared infinite scroll and autoplay to free tortilla chips at a restaurant. You didn’t order them. You weren’t hungry. But they’re in front of you, and they’re salty, and there’s no bottom to the basket, so you keep eating.
The metaphor is almost too tidy, but it works. The chips aren’t heroin. But the restaurant knows what it’s doing when it puts them in front of you. And if the restaurant’s internal emails said, “LOL we’re basically drug dealers,” you’d probably raise an eyebrow.
They Knew What They Were Building
The real question is not whether these features are addictive in the clinical sense. The real question is whether they were designed to be hard to resist, and whether the companies building them knew that, and whether they cared. The trial surfaced internal Meta documents from 2020 showing employees worried about “reward tolerance” among users. The term comes from addiction research. It describes what happens when your brain gets used to a stimulus and needs more of it to feel the same effect.
One email conversation included an employee saying, “Oh my gosh y’all IG is a drug.” A colleague replied, “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
They were joking. But the joke only works if everyone knows it’s true.
You can feel it when you use these platforms. The pull is not imaginary. The sense that you’re doing something you didn’t choose to do, that you’re somehow both in control and not in control, that you opened the app for a reason and now you can’t remember what it was. That’s not a character flaw. That’s the design working exactly as intended.
The trial will produce a verdict. Jurors began deliberating Friday. Whatever they decide will shape how tech companies are held responsible for the way they build their platforms. But the verdict that matters might already be in. You know what these apps do to you. You know the feeling of looking up from your phone and realizing you lost an hour. You know the difference between choosing to be on Instagram and not being able to get off it.
The courtroom is just naming what we already know. The question now is whether knowing changes anything.
Digital Alma explores technology, consciousness, and what it means to be human in a digital world.
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