Be honest. You weren’t forced to type in their username. Nobody made you scroll. You did it yourself, at midnight, fully aware of what it might cost you.
You knew there was a chance you’d see something that stings, yet you looked anyway. Why? Because it was there. Because it was accessible. It was almost harder not to look.
Turns out, that’s precisely what the social media apps on our six-inch phone screens are designed to do. And for the first time in history, a jury agreed.
On March 25, a 20-year-old woman by the pseudonym K.G.M. sued Meta and YouTube, alleging that the social media companies contributed to giving her anxiety and depression as a result of their products that she claimed were “as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos.”
K.G.M. cited features including the infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and addictive design properties as the causes of her poor mental health as a young child.
During the California Superior Court trial, Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, was ordered to pay $4.2 million in both compensatory and punitive damages, with YouTube paying $1.8 million.
While six million dollars is hardly a financial burden for these trillion-dollar Silicon Valley companies, it’s beside the point. Against all odds, K.G.M.’s successful lawsuit was rightfully earned.
Most notably, this trial represents the first time a jury has ever ruled that “social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers.”
Thousands of teenagers and school districts alike have filed lawsuits against Meta and other social media platforms for similar reasons. So what made K.G.M.’s case different from the rest?
The verdict was able to validate a key aspect lawyers have long struggled to successfully prove: The problem isn’t just the content children consume on social media, but how these platforms were designed in the first place. Meta and YouTube, the jury concluded, intentionally engineered their apps to be addictive, and their executives knew it.
Yet, they deliberately chose not to interfere, failing to protect their youngest users by allowing exposure to harmful content during a crucial period of development.
It’s important to note that the human brain isn’t built or created for social media. According to a Stanford Medicine article, our brains are not anatomically “equipped to process the millions of comparisons the virtual world demands.” The brain is the main part of the central nervous system that keeps a person’s body alive and functioning. If adults struggle to manage this exposure, the burden on adolescent minds is far greater.
The brain’s frontal lobes, which govern executive functions including planning and impulse control, may not be fully developed until a person reaches their thirties. Imagine consuming detrimental content with a brain that is nowhere near developed.
One addictive tactic Facebook employed, according to their own internal research, is engineering their algorithm to prioritize rage-inducing posts since it drives higher user engagement. An adult can perhaps recognize this pattern, but children are more vulnerable to this gambit.
Kids don’t know when to stop, and they certainly wouldn’t when they are being taken advantage of. And that is exactly what makes them prime targets of the harm social media is manufactured to cause.
We need to protect our children and future generations. Technology is only going to skyrocket from here, starting with artificial intelligence. It is critical that the effects of these platforms are taken seriously, and that children’s behaviors online are monitored. Platforms such as Meta need to be held accountable when they have gone too far, which they undoubtedly have.
In the end, K.G.M.’s lawsuit is not about the money she received, nor about Meta and YouTube paying out. It’s about raising awareness and increasing the severity of an ongoing issue that has been affecting so many with barely any legal accountability until now.
What makes this verdict historic is that K.G.M. actually won. She proved, in court, that social media caused measurable psychological harm.
It was a breakthrough. Her win now opens the door for thousands of those consolidated cases to follow. More cases means bans, regulations and at the very least an end to the predatory design features that got us here in the first place.
Governments around the world are reaching the same conclusion. In Dec. 2025, Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16. Greece has announced it will follow suit, with a ban on social media for children under 15 set to begin in January 2027.
So the next time you voluntarily click on a post you know would trigger you, remember it was Meta who built that trap. If governments, juries and people around the world are finally waking up to what that damn phone is doing to us, maybe it’s time you did too.
