A jury in the United States has determined that Instagram and YouTube are intentionally designed to capture the attention of young users, adversely affecting their mental well-being. Consequently, Meta and Google have been ordered to compensate 20-year-old Kaley with $6 million. Kaley reported that she began using YouTube at the age of six and joined Instagram at nine. As her social media usage increased, she began to withdraw from family interactions, spending excessive hours online, which led to anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphic disorder. A significant piece of evidence presented during the trial was a 2015 internal email from Mark Zuckerberg, where he expressed a desire to boost user engagement in the apps by 12%. Zuckerberg referred to this as a "hope for achievement," rather than a direct mandate, stating, "If you make your product better, people are going to use it more." Attorneys representing the tech giants contended that Kaley's mental health issues were primarily due to a challenging family situation, rather than the effects of the social media platforms themselves. She has been in therapy since she was three years old. Both Meta and Google plan to contest the verdict. Media analysts are drawing parallels between this wave of lawsuits and the tobacco industry scandals of the 1990s, during which companies were held accountable and forced to pay billions for misleading the public about the health risks of smoking.
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