On Wednesday, March 25, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google responsible for harming young users through their addictive design features, ultimately leading to mental health distress. The jury awarded $6 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages to a victim who accused the companies of creating features — such as Instagram and YouTube’s infinite scroll — purposely targeted toward children and designed to be addictive.
This is the second jury this month to recognize that Meta’s platforms have caused serious damage to children, days after a trial in New Mexico hit Meta with $375 million in damages for failing to protect young users from child predators on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. These landmark cases point to the fact that addiction was never a side effect of social media, but rather a feature of it.
For years, the burden was on users to peel themselves from their phones or parents to establish screen time limits — but this case makes one thing clear: It’s time to stop blaming individuals for getting hooked and start holding the companies that created the issues accountable. If addiction is a part of the design, then calling it a choice is a lie.
Generation Z is especially vulnerable to platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which constantly test and alter their designs to keep users engaged. Research has also demonstrated social media’s linkage to depression and dietary and psychological problems in adolescents, suggesting that these platforms may be responsible for an even wider range of issues beyond those cited in recent trials.
Features like the infinite scroll, created in 2006, are simply tools designed to maximize how long users stay. Other studies have found that receiving shares, likes and comments triggers reward centers in the brain similar to how gambling or drug use does, making social media harder to resist every time users log on. Younger users in particular, as both highly active and impressionable, have become prime lab rats for these large platforms — resulting in a generation raised as part of an ongoing experiment in attention deficiency and addiction-level dependency.
The March 25 ruling formally acknowledges that it’s the social media companies, not individual inadequacies in self-control, that have created widespread problems in mental health and addiction among users — but the recognition comes much too late. These systems and apps are not only embedded into Gen Z’s daily routines, but have been shown to rewire developing brains to constantly seek short-term gratification.
Blaming users for not getting off their phones isn’t just misguided — it’s a convenient narrative thrown around by companies to maximize profits without any accountability. Self-control was never meant to compete with systems designed for addiction. Although Meta and Google platforms defended their parent companies in the Los Angeles court case by citing the plaintiff’s difficult home life as reason for their mental health struggles, no individual experience can represent such widespread patterns.
Lawmakers and researchers have struggled to keep up with Big Tech’s rapid updates of the past few decades, essentially giving them free reign in an unexplored arena. But as harmful patterns between adolescent health and social media usage continue to emerge, it is imperative that legislators impose more stringent regulations on companies. This can start by eliminating the infinite scroll feature by imposing a time limit or cap on the number of posts users can view at a single time. Instead of giving users the option to receive a notification for every like and comment, elected officials could prohibit platforms from sending its underage users an overabundance of notifications at once. If legislation fails to catch up to corporations designing products for addiction, they are complicit in the damage on the health and development of young Americans.
The recent case hopefully marks the beginning of accountability for Big Tech — but for Gen Z, it’s already too late. Tens of millions of children have felt, and will continue to face, the effects of constantly using platforms designed for addiction without their well-being in mind. The real test is now whether the moment leads to meaningful change, or if the same systems will continue, targeting yet another generation in the same way.
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Leila Abarca at [email protected].