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A 20-year-old woman sits in a Los Angeles courtroom and testifies that Instagram got her at nine. By ten, she was cutting herself. By thirteen, her therapist had diagnosed body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia. She goes by the initials KGM in court documents, but her story is legible to anyone who has watched a child disappear into a screen, or felt their own hand reach for their phone before their brain catches up.
Your Body as a Search Term.
This week, the first-ever jury trial over social media addiction wrapped up. Meta and YouTube are the defendants. KGM is the plaintiff. The case is a bellwether for more than 1,600 lawsuits brought by families and school districts against Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap. The question before the jury: did these platforms cause measurable harm to a generation of children, or did they simply reflect problems that were already there?
Mark Lanier, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, put it plainly during closing arguments, as reported by The Guardian: “How did they become such behemoths? It’s the attention economy. They’re making money off capturing your attention.”
Meta and YouTube deny wrongdoing. A Meta spokesperson said KGM’s struggles stem from a difficult home life, not Instagram. A YouTube spokesperson called the allegations “simply not true.” But the trial itself has already done something unusual. It forced the platforms to explain, under oath, how they work.
Mark Zuckerberg testified. So did Instagram head Adam Mosseri and YouTube’s vice president of engineering. Internal documents, previously sealed, came to light. Employees inside Instagram and YouTube had flagged concerns about whether the platforms were addictive. Features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and “like” buttons were built to keep people on the apps. Beauty filters were designed to be fun, but also to distort self-image. The companies knew. They built it anyway.
The legal question is whether these features caused harm. The psychological question is harder: what does it mean to grow up inside a system designed to hold your attention at all costs?
A Brain Still Under Construction
When KGM started using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine, her brain was still forming the circuitry that regulates impulse control, emotional regulation, and reward processing. The prefrontal cortex, which handles those functions, doesn’t fully develop until the mid-twenties. A child’s brain is wired to seek novelty and social validation. It’s also wired to repeat behaviors that trigger dopamine release.
Infinite scroll gives you novelty on demand. Autoplay removes the friction of choosing what comes next. The “like” button quantifies social approval in real time. Beauty filters let you see a version of yourself that doesn’t exist, then ask you to chase it. These are not neutral design choices. They are engineered to exploit the reward pathways in a developing brain.
When Your AI Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself: The Psychology of AI Attachment.
KGM described her social media use as a cycle. She would scroll, feel worse, self-harm as a coping mechanism, then scroll again. Her relationships with family and school deteriorated. She had suicidal thoughts. By the time she was ten, she was depressed. By thirteen, her therapist gave her diagnoses that would follow her into adulthood.
This is what the attention economy looks like from the inside. It’s not abstract. It’s a ten-year-old cutting herself because the gap between who she is and who she sees on Instagram feels unbearable. It’s a nervous system stuck in a loop it can’t break.
The defense argues that correlation is not causation. KGM had a difficult home life. Maybe she would have struggled anyway. Maybe Instagram and YouTube were just the medium, not the cause. But this argument misses something fundamental about how technology shapes experience. A difficult home life and a platform designed to maximize engagement are not separate variables. They compound each other.
A child who feels unsafe or unseen at home will turn to social media for connection and validation. The platform will give them exactly what they’re looking for, in the form that keeps them scrolling longest. The algorithm learns what makes them stay. It serves them more of it. The child’s sense of self starts to form around what the platform rewards. Their identity becomes entangled with the feedback loop.
This is not the same as watching TV or reading a magazine. Those media don’t adapt to you in real time. They don’t track your every interaction and adjust what you see next. They don’t quantify your social worth in likes and comments. They don’t follow you into your bedroom at 2 a.m.
What the Paper Trail Reveals
The plaintiffs’ lawyers call this addiction. The defense says the platforms are safe for the vast majority of users. Both can be true, in the sense that most people who drink alcohol don’t become alcoholics, but the product is still designed to be habit-forming. The question is whether the companies have a responsibility to the minority who spiral.
KGM’s lawyers argue that features like infinite scroll and autoplay are inherently addictive. They point to internal documents showing that employees flagged these concerns. They argue that the companies prioritized growth and engagement over the well-being of their youngest users.
The companies argue that they have built safety features, parental controls, and time limits. They say they take youth mental health seriously. But the features they built to keep people on the platform are baked into the core product. The safety features are optional. One is a door. The other is a suggestion box.
What makes this trial feel different from past moral panics about new media is the paper trail. The internal documents. The whistleblowers. The testimony from people who built these systems and watched them scale beyond what they anticipated. This is not a case of adults misunderstanding youth culture. It’s a case of adults designing a product to capture attention and succeeding beyond what the human nervous system was built to handle.
The jury will deliberate starting Friday. If they rule in favor of KGM, the financial penalties could force Meta and YouTube to change how their platforms function. If they rule against her, the next bellwether trial is scheduled for July. There are more than 20 of these cases lined up over the next few years.
Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, said they’ve already won, regardless of the verdict. “Four years ago, when we started suing social media companies, nobody thought that we would ever get to this point,” he told The Guardian. “Win or lose the outcome of this trial, victims in the United States have won, because now we know that social media companies can and will be held accountable before a fair and impartial jury.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe the act of bringing these companies into court, of forcing them to explain their design choices under oath, is its own form of accountability. Or maybe the real win is something quieter: the recognition that what happened to KGM was not inevitable. That her body knew it was hooked before anyone else did. That the cycle she described, scrolling and self-harm and scrolling again, is not a personal failure. It’s a predictable outcome of a system designed to hold attention at all costs.
You can regulate dopamine, or you can regulate the platforms that trigger it. The jury will decide which one we hold responsible.
Digital Alma explores technology, consciousness, and what it means to be human in a digital world.
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