YouTube rejects addiction claims in landmark social media trial

YouTube's legal team argued the platform is not intentionally addictive or technically social media. Photo / Getty Images

YouTube’s legal team has insisted that the Google-owned video platform was not intentionally addictive or even technically social media, on the second day of a landmark US trial targeting tech giants.

YouTube and Meta – the parent company of Instagram and Facebook – are defendants in a blockbuster trial in Los Angeles that could set a legal precedent on whether social media juggernauts deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive to children.

“It’s not social media addiction when it’s not social media and it’s not addiction,” lawyer Luis Li told the 12 jurors on the second day of arguments.

The civil trial in California state court focuses on allegations that a 20-year-old woman, identified as Kaley GM, suffered severe mental harm because she became addicted to social media as a child.

Kaley GM started using YouTube at the age of 6 and joined Instagram at 11, before moving on to Snapchat and TikTok two or three years later.

The plaintiff “is not addicted to YouTube. You can listen to her own words ... she said so, her doctor said so, her father said so”, Li said, citing evidence that would be detailed at the trial.

Li’s opening arguments followed remarks from lawyers for the plaintiffs and co-defendant Meta.

The lawyer insisted to the six men and six women on the jury that he “just did not recognise” the description of YouTube put forth by plaintiffs’ lawyers.

This was in response to the lawyer for the plaintiff who accused YouTube and Meta of engineering addiction in young people’s brains in order to gain users and profits.

What YouTube is selling “is the ability to watch something essentially for free on your computer, on your phone, on your iPad”, Li insisted.

“More people watch YouTube on television than they do on their phones or their devices. More people watch YouTube than cable TV,” he said.

Li argued it was the quality of content that kept users coming back for more, citing internal company emails that allegedly showed a rejection of virality to the benefit of educational and more socially useful content.

The blockbuster case is being treated as a bellwether proceeding whose outcome could set the tone for a tidal wave of similar litigation across the United States.

Social media firms are accused in hundreds of lawsuits of leading young users to become addicted to content and suffer from depression, eating disorders, psychiatric hospitalisation and even suicide.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs are borrowing strategies used in the 1990s and 2000s against the tobacco industry, which faced a similar onslaught of lawsuits arguing that companies knowingly sold a harmful product.

-Agence France-Presse