At the age of 6, she was already watching YouTube videos.

Then she had an Instagram account – years before she was actually allowed. Snapchat and TikTok followed.

Now at 20 years old, the young woman, known publicly by the initials KGM, is taking social media networks to court in the United States.

KGM’s accusation?

The platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive – for example, by offering the option of “endless scrolling,” where a single swipe of the finger takes you to the next post and the feed never ends. The result for her was depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with her own body. She claims the companies design the apps as “traps” for young users.

KGM’s excessive and problematic use of social media changed the course of her childhood, her lawyer Joseph VanZandt emphasizes in a hearing. During questioning, she herself points out, among other things, that so-called filters on Instagram, which alter the appearance of people in pictures, led her to become dissatisfied with her own body.

When someone once posted an unedited picture of her face, she became extremely upset. The algorithms also gave her advice such as eating only one cucumber a day to lose weight.

Snapchat and TikTok wanted to settle

KGM sued Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. A few weeks before the trial began in Los Angeles, the companies behind Snapchat and TikTok reached a settlement with the plaintiff.

But Instagram and YouTube want to fight the allegations in court. Since Instagram is part of the Facebook group Meta, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is also scheduled to testify on Wednesday.

There is a lot at stake for the online giants. Hundreds of similar lawsuits are in the legal pipeline in the US. The trial in Los Angeles is the first test case to see whether such allegations can be successful in US courts, where comparisons are being made to earlier lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

In those cases, tobacco companies were accused of deliberately concealing from their customers that cigarettes are addictive. In the end, the companies paid billions in healthcare costs and restricted advertising.

Judge: No exemption from liability for functions

Social media platforms are largely protected from lawsuits in the US due to a regulation known as Section 230. Essentially, it states that platforms cannot be prosecuted for content published by their users. This exemption from liability made the rise of services such as YouTube and Facebook possible in the first place.

In the Los Angeles case, the companies initially tried to prevent the case from going to trial at all by referring to Section 230 and asked that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Their argument was that even if KGM had suffered damage, it was videos and posts by other users that had caused it. However, Judge Carolyn Kuhl saw this differently. She said this Section 230 does not mean that there can be no liability for the damage caused by the design of the feature.

And in this case, there was evidence that Instagram features had led KGM to compulsive video consumption.

High hurdle for plaintiff

Still, KGM is facing a fairly high hurdle at trial. She and her lawyers must convince the jury that the features of Instagram and YouTube were a significant factor in her mental health problems.

Meta and its lawyers plan to show that KGM faced many extensive mental health challenges long before she used social media.

At the start of the trial, Meta’s lawyers argued that the plaintiff’s mental health issues were due to abuse and a dysfunctional family environment. They also point out that KGM has not been diagnosed with social media addiction.

Platforms deny addictive potential

Instagram chief executive Adam Mosseri, who has already been called to testify before Zuckerberg, denied that social media platforms are addictive. Users may become addicted to them in the same way they might become addicted to a TV series, but they are not “clinically addicted,” he told the New York Times.

Meta also points to measures introduced over the years to protect young users, such as special accounts for teenagers and parental control features.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for Google’s video platform YouTube said that it does not belong to the social media category at all, but is rather a streaming service like Disney+ or Netflix.

Brussels sees addictive mechanisms in TikTok

In Europe, TikTok is currently under scrutiny for similar allegations. According to preliminary results of an EU investigation, the video app violates European law.

The EU’s focus is on what it says are TikTok’s addictive mechanisms, for example, highly personalized recommendations and the uninterrupted automatic playback of videos. In its preliminary investigation, the EU Commission found that TikTok’s design constantly “rewards” users with new content, thereby encouraging them to keep scrolling. Meanwhile, in Australia, a strict social media ban for everyone under the age of 16 has been in place since mid-December.